Elizabeth Sandifer

I cannot possibly review Seeming’s new album Sol. It’s fucking amazing. It’s astonishing to me that Madness and Extinction is an album it’s possible to double down on and outdo. But Alex did it, with a second album that’s frightening, ambitious, and unlike anything else that’s been done, ever, by anyone. I care about it like I care about Kill the Moon and Promethea. Go buy it. Honestly, buy it, listen to it a few times. You can stream and buy it here. All Bandcamp’s profits today are going to the Transgender Law Center, so it’s a great day to splash out some cash for it. Then come back here.

I’m one of the people Alex regularly sends demos to, and so Sol has been the single biggest soundtrack of my last three years. Alex is one of my closest friends, but I’m also an unabashed and unreserved fan of his stuff, and I tended to play each new demo to death and beyond before just as eagerly devouring the next, listening in rapt wonder as song after song mutated from idea (sometimes even an obviously good one) through to demos that sketched its potential and finally to finished mixes, each one of which evolved and developed further in a frenzy of final tweaks and flourishes. Most notably, Sol was the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk, with multiple passages in the book being directly influenced by songs on it. Which we’ll talk about,

Beyond that, Sol as it exists for me is a tangle of songs well beyond the thirteen that actually made the album. I can’t even fully map the album’s creative influence on me without talking about songs like “Yes Artemis” and “Angel in the Jungle,” which you can at least check out on the Faceless EP, and others like “Party Anthem 2000” and “You Rang” that might show up somewhere some day, but might just as easily be things that wither away having been heard by a couple dozen people at most, ever.

So this isn’t a review. Instead it’s a commentary that is utterly rooted in my own idiosyncratic perspective. A “now the whole story can be told” documentation of the last few years of my life by way of one of the most titanic creative achievements I’ve ever seen, little yet had front row seats to. And, along the road, my own external sense of how the songs developed.

Doomsayer

I’ve mentioned more than once that I “accidentally” wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is a funny line that did its marketing purpose, but beneath the joke there’s a kind of grim-faced reality. Accidentally writing a book is more accurately described as compulsion and obsession. Whatever I may have wanted to be doing with my evenings, what happened instead was that I opened my laptop and continued to extend the strange and twisting block of text that insisted, again and again, that I come back to it. I too know what it’s like when only one thing is real.…

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The new Seeming album, Sol, is out Friday. So I sat down with Alex Reed to talk about it and play clips from a bunch of songs, including three that are getting their world premieres. It’s a fantastic conversation in proper Eruditorum Press fashion, which is to say that it jumps freely from the Situationists to the X-Files in order to talk about things with no obvious relationship to either one of those. We also talk about important things like “what is a self-banishment ritual” and “so Alex, you recorded a gothic funk album, tell me about that.” Seriously, this is a great conversation. You can listen to it here.

Sol, meanwhile, is out on Friday and available for pre-order here. I’ll be back on Friday (where I’ll be replacing Jack this week) for more talk about it. It’s amazing – literally every song on it is brilliant. I cannot wait for you all to be able to hear it and to finally talk about the ways it’s been influencing me for three years now. …

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Regular blog post on Tuesday again this week, due to another round of shilling for friends. In my defense, I try to only befriend cool talented people.

Anyway, you may remember David Gerard, with whom I cut the first of the podcast series promotiong Neoreaction a Basilisk. He was my beta reader on the book, and a longtime Internet friend and coconspirator. Among the many things David does is help run RationalWiki, where he righteously and snarkily skewers all sorts of bullshit artists. And one of the more interesting things I’d seen him skewer was Bitcoin. So a while back I suggested to him that he should write a short book explaining why Bitcoin was not, in fact, the money of the future. I was imagining something 30k tops that just laid out the case for why Bitcoin is bullshit. Instead he wrote a full-length book that releases today: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.

Instead he went off and wrote a beautifully thorough overview of Bitcoin that not only establishes the sheer number of scam artists and crooks surrounding Bitcoin and the larger notion of blockchains, but also establishes how utterly and hilariously stupid almost everything around it is. David provides one of the most layman-friendly explanations of what Bitcoin is, then explains in cogent detail why this involves breathtaking and fundamental design flaws such as consuming as much electricity to maintain as the entirety of Ireland. He’s got jaw-dropping accounts of people like Ross Ulbricht (aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of the Silk Road website) and Craig Wright (who almost certainly did not invent Bitcoin). And a host of other amazing tales.

It’s a great book for anyone who’s interested in learning more about Bitcoin and the hype around it; one that takes the desire behind it seriously without buying into it, and that illustrates in ways both moving and hilarious just how big the gap between futurist dreams and the messy, material present can be. I highly recommend checking it out. Currently it’s on Amazon in Kindle edition, but there’s a print edition coming imminently, and it should be up on Smashwords today.

See you Tuesday.

(Oh, and keep an eye on the Seeming Twitter account: they’ve got another track from Sol dropping today.)…

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Looper is a flawed film in ways that neither Brick nor The Brothers Bloom were. This is not to say that it’s a bad film; it’s not at all. But after two films that were notable in part for their impressively taut discipline the fundamental sloppiness of Looper stands out. There’s not a lot that follows from this – everybody who’s made more than one film has a worst film, after all, and most directors have one that’s far worse than this. There’s still a number of things it does well, and well in ways that confirm where Johnson’s talents lie. There’s just also whacking big problems, most of which have a reasonably obvious source.

The biggest and most fundamental problem is that the join between two halves of a script completed at very different times. The first hour – basically everything up through the diner scene – was written in 2008 during the shooting of The Brothers Bloom. The second half, starting with Sara’s introduction, came in 2009. And it shows. The first half is a well constructed film about a man in gripping contact with his older self. The second half, on the other hand, is a well constructed film about a creepy psychic kid. Both are good, but on a very basic level they’re not the same film, and the second half feels as though Johnson realized he didn’t have quite enough ideas to get over the finish line and so arbitrarily decided to raid Akira.

That Johnson should have this problem is admittedly a bit strange. Cid (the psychic kid) is little more than a MacGuffin – the thing over which the two iterations of Joe, the main character, must fight. It doesn’t seem like it should have been that difficult to find one that extended out of the existing time travel concept instead of adding a whole second set of big sci-fi ideas. Instead, the premise around Old Joe seems to abruptly shift as he’s suddenly revealed to have been planning a campaign against futuristic crime boss “the Rainmaker” since before he was sent back in time, a plot point that doesn’t really fit with how his being sent back in time is initially shown. More frustrating is the fact that Sara, the female lead, who ends up being the viewpoint character for the final scene, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. It’s not that any of this is easy to fix per se, but it’s at least pretty straightforward what you need to do.

But it’s still a problem that only really means that the film never quite manages to hit a point where everything clicks and it starts really getting impressive. Instead, Looper simmers along on the brink of greatness without ever crossing the line. But in many regards it’s less productive to look at what holds it back than what almost gets it there. First and foremost is the most elegant premise of Johnson’s career to date. The basic jist of Looper is that there are hiit men who kill people sent back in time from the future.…

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Those who listened to our Doctor Who podcast series will have noticed that I had new theme music this year. Some also noticed that I never actually said what it was. My stock answer was that it was a secret transmission from the future.

The future is here. 

Seeming’s new album, Sol, is out on August 4th. You can pre-order it here. It’s absolutely incredible, and like nothing else you’ve ever heard. I’ll be talking more about it and how it’s the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk closer to when it’s out, but for now let’s all just enthusiastically watch that video again and again.

(Oh, and if you don’t know Sammus, the guest vocalist on “Stranger,” she’s absolutely phenomenal as well and you should check her music out. Her new one, Pieces in Space, is brilliant, but her older more nerdcore stuff is solid as well.)…

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OK. First off, announcements. The Patreon very did not hit $320, so no Game of Thrones reviews. It’s currently at $295; if it gets back to $300, I’ll do a season wrap-up post. You can contribute here.

This week’s post will be on Tuesday, as there’s a small but very fun thing to announce tomorrow. I’m going with the teaser “the future arrives” for that one.

Which brings us to the news of the day, which is that Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor and the Chibnall era might be worth getting excited for after all. Discuss amongst yourselves in comments. I’ll be moderating the fuck out of sexist trolls, including deleting all replies to them. So go ahead and enjoy a comment section free of that shit. …

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At first glance, there are relatively few similarities between Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Brick is a self-consciously dour noir film about ruined masculinity. The Brothers Bloom is an ostentatiously colorful heist film about the power of stories. There seems very little that one can conclude about things like Rian Johnson’s style based on them. This is, of course, pretty much all a director can hope for after their second film. Make two similar films or, worse, more or less the same film twice and you’re pigeonholed. Make a surprisingly dark high school noir and then turn around and make a quasi-Wes Anderson heist film, on the other hand, and you’re well on your way towards seriousness.

Brick was a good film. The Brothers Bloom, on the other hand, is a great one – one I instantly fell in love with when it finally came through Gainesville on its meandering limited release tour. Looking back at it, I realize it must have been a small and quiet influence on TARDIS Eruditorum, with “there’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one” getting to the point a solid year before “we’re all stories in the end; just make it a good one.” And it is with this closing moral that the connections with Brick also become clear. Brick, after all, is also about storytelling – a fact most explicit in its closing scene, where Brendan’s revelation that Laura was behind Emily’s downfall is framed explicitly as a story, with Brendan’s accusation called a “tale.”

But in Brick this was more or less a silent thematic element. It’s present in the mix, and entirely sensible – a detective’s job is, in many ways, to uncover the story of events. But it’s fundamentally subdued. But, unsurprisingly given that the heist film is already an inverse of the detective film, The Brothers Bloom takes the latent metaphor and expands it wildly. Stephen’s cons are written “the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit.” His explicit goal and vision of the perfect con is to “tell a story so well it becomes real.” This is entirely straightforward and true: a con is a story, and all stories are cons.

Obviously this gets very meta very quickly. The Brothers Bloom demands that we understand it as a con, and Johnson as a con man. But this is not in and of itself significant without some understanding of what a con is meant to be. Once again the film is happy to go for text instead of subtext as Stephen says that “the perfect con is where each one involved gets just the thing they wanted,” a line that’s repeated over the ending because this is not a film that’s shy about making its aesthetic points. So obviously Stephen’s central con around which the plot revolves is judged a success. Stephen gets to die on a job (Bloom had earlier suggested he’d like just this), and Bloom and Penelope get each other.…

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It’s the sort of week where the Waffling’s a day late, basically. The extra work of Doctor Who S10 has me typically behind on everything, and I’m scrambling to get back going on things. (I’m working on long-term fixes for my workload, but they’re necessarily long term.) Anyway, in light of the fact that I’m awful and behind on everything I can’t really complain too loudly that we’re $17 a week shy of me doing Game of Thrones reviews, but I figure I should be clear that those look like they’re not happening and like I’ll get to actually watch the show with Jill consistently.

But I did want to mention some other Patreons. For instance, Sam Keeper’s Patreon, from which you can get her fabulous new book on Star Wars. Or Jack Graham’s, which is $14 away from dragging him kicking and screaming back to watching Doctor Who. If you don’t decide to throw money at the likely doomed Game of Thrones goal, well, those are great places to throw it instead. (Of course, you could also just fund all of us. But I know that’s not an option for everyone.)

Back tomorrow with a post I only just got around to sending to my Patrons. Until then, I usually wrap these up with some sort of question for the comments section, so let’s go with this: for you personally, what’s the most awful aspect of the Trump era (whether you’re American or not).…

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