The Bullet List #13: Pop Culture Recommendations for The Week Ahead

Capital

Based on John Lanchester's  eponymous novel, this three-part BBC mini-series from the makers of Broadchurch is a masterful look at early 21st century London. The story — ostensibly about a series of mysterious postcards the residents of Pepys Road start receiving — takes on a lot: from gentrification and rising property prices, to the state of contemporary art, to issues around Islamaphobia, to upper middle class performance anxiety, to the expansion of the working classes with arrivals from Zimbabwe, Poland and Hungary. It's a lot of narrative to shove into one street in South London suburbia, but it works somehow. Toby Jones is masterful as a vile banker falling apart at the seams, as is Gemma Jones as Petunia Howe, one of the streets sole surviving residents from the financially modest 60s. 

Billions

Staying with themes of financial excess, Showtime's Billions is a treat.  In an age of prestige television where every show is positioning itself as worthy of some sort of deeper analysis, this show is gloriously soapy and revels in that soapiness. My friend Karim Safieddine (founder of video on demand platform Cinemoz) was the first to bring this to my attention, pointing out rightly that this is a show that has no aspirations to enter the canon or become a staple of high-brow popular culture. It just wants to entertain the hell out of you. Damien Lewis is very Damien Lewis-y as slimey hedge fund 9-11-profiteer Bobby Axelrod.  His nememis Chuck Rhoades is played gleefully by Paul Giamatti chewing up the scenery.  

American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson

Anyone who was alive and had access to a TV in 1994 remembers everything about the OJ Simpson trial. It was such an all-American story involving murder, Los Angeles, a fallen NFL hero, a Ford Bronco, televised courtroom hearings, and a tense racial narrative. Two decades later, the case is the subject of an anthology series on FX. The casting choices feel odd initially. Travolta's eyebrows are distracting, Cuba Gooding Jr seems to be overacting as OJ, and David Schwimmer plays a perpetually-confused Robert Kardashian. Everyone looks a bit familiar and not familiar at all, so there's an uncanny valley quality to the first episode. But as you go along, that kind of blends into the background and you're left with a well-told story that is revisited with an attention to contemporary context in the aftermath of Fergusson. The celebrity culture stuff is occasionally on the nose (such as with Kardashian's lunchtime chat with his daughters Kim and Khloe — yes, the ones you're thinking of) but overall it's an engrossing courtroom drama.  

Big Black Delta

Big Black Delta is the solo project of Mellowdrone vocalist/bassist Jonathan Bates. Bates launched the project in 2010 after becoming frustrated with the logistics of a band. His self-titled debut album, Big Black Delta was released on his own label and inspired by the Blade Runner and Solaris soundtracks apparently.

The Bullet List #12: Six British Shows You Should Watch

British television is a notoriously singular beast, leaving mass appeal and the ability to translate with foreign audiences to the Americans, British shows tend to go for the quirky and the specific. This often means they end up being absolutely brilliant, if slightly bewildering to non-UK audiences.  

British television also tends to be less bound by decade-long deals, and in the case of BBC shows completely unbound from the need for commercial success. This translates into shows that can have very limited runs. Quality over quantity is the rule. That’s how something as wildly successful and game changing as the Office can have a two-season run. Only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers exist in the universe. Shows like Black Mirror or Sherlock have three episode seasons.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Think of it as a primer. A toe dipped in the proverbial pool.

The Thick of It

I recently met someone who worked for a UK government minister at a wedding. We were having a few drinks and I asked him if his work was anything like the Thick of It. He burst out laughing and said “Pretty much exactly. I feel it’s a documentary sometimes”. Armando Iannucci’s biting comedy about the often ludicrous and incompetent inner workings of UK politics is one of the best pieces of culture to ever be produced. The writing is sharp enough to give you a nasty cut, and foul-mouthed spin-doctor Malcom Tucker has gone down in history as one of the best bad guys in fiction.

Nathan Barley

“Self-facilitating media node” and utter wanker Nathan Barley predicted the Shoreditch hipster 10 years before he became a ubiquitous reality. The show is odd, bleak and strangely colorless, and was created by the brilliant cultural critic and writer Charlie Brooker and Chris Moris (who made the fantastic Four Lions). The cast features stalwarts of a specific generation of British comedians and actors: Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowrd), Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh), Ben Wishaw (Spectre) and even Benedict Cumberbatch. It won't be to everybody's taste, but if you connect with the show, you'll appreciate it as prophecy. 

Black Books

Set in the eponymous bookshop and featuring two of my favourite stand-up comedians, Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran. Moran plays Bernard Black, the unusually sour and spiteful shopkeeper who appears to hate everyone who dares bring him any business. He is essentially a misanthrope (in the great tradition of Basil Fawlty) who despises everyone he has to interact with, except Fran (Tamsin Greig) and to a lesser degree Manny, who both haplessly trying to turn him into someone slightly more agreeable.  

QI

The show has been on the air since 2003, and has cemented Stephen Fry's position as a British pop culture National Treasure. If you're unfamiliar with him, think of Fry as the avuncular erudite uncle everyone wishes they had. In terms of format, it is essentially a panel comedy show, of which there are so many on UK television it feels like they are powering the country's economy. But it differs in that its subject matter stays away from current affairs and celebrity, preferring to traffic in quite interesting — hence the name — general knowledge (with a predilection for debunking commonly held myths). Every episode is 30 minutes of pure joy, where you'll laugh and come away with a few facts to impress your friends with over dinner. 

The Graham Norton Show

You've probably already come across YouTube clips of the show featuring some of the world's biggest stars on Norton's red couch, but I'll recommend it nonetheless. Norton has been a presence in UK television for as long as I can remember, and is such an effortless interviewer. I think the main element that gives his show a considerably different dynamic to other UK and US talk shows is that all the stars come out at once and sit on the same couch. This means that these people who are essentially professional attention-seekers are all competing for attention simultaneously. This leads to really very entertaining situations. Of course the free-flowing booze helps too. 

Never Mind The Buzzcocks

From its inauspicious start in 1996 to its demise last year, Never Mind The Buzzcocks was one of the funniest panel shows in Britain. Hosted by Mark Lamar, then Simon Amstel, then dozens of guest hosts until Rhod Gilbert came in to see it all fall apart, the show was relentlessly irreverent. Ostensibly a pop quiz about the pop music, it was consistently unhinged and featured many drunk, non-sensical appearances by some of the world's biggest stars. It is uniquely British in its approach to a revered industry, and reveled in taking everyone down a peg or two, much to the dismay of the occasional American guest who regularly had no clue what was going on. Pretty much all episodes are available on YouTube. I recommend that beautiful period of time when Simon Amstel hosted and Noel Fielding took over from Bill Bailey as one of the team captains. 

Things I’ve already recommended: Black Mirror, Luther, The Office (or basically the British version of anything that was turned into an invariably US Show) and many others. 

The Bullet List #11: Kendrick Lamar, Fighting Anxiety & J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard’s Short Stories

I just started digging into Ballard's "The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1" and it's a treat. In his opening author's note, he writes "short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination." And Ballard's short stories do not disappoint, treating — as his legendary skill — the "real future" that he sees approaching rather than the distant futures of science fiction. His '20-minutes-in-the-future' dystopian cityscapes are terrifying reminders of where we are headed, and his style is an elegant way to be scared shitless into thinking about what we're doing to our world. 

A Soft Murmur

If studies are to be trusted, anxiety is plaguing more people than ever before. We are taking in more information and more imagery than ever before, and much of it is negative and confrontational. So if you’re looking for some respite from your newsfeeds and whatever metropolis you happen to live in, have A Soft Murmur playing into your ears.  My favorite combination is birdsong and Tibetan prayer bowls. There is an evolutionary theory that states that birds have been comforting to humans for millennia, because when birds are singing it means they’re in the trees and that no danger is approaching. Much like sailors found respite in the sight of swallows as they indicated the coast was near, playing this in a crowded city might be just the soothing presence you need.

Kendrick Lamar at The Grammys

The Grammys are often a great way to understand what the Zeitgest was three years ago. What I’m saying is, they aren’t always terribly relevant. And while Kendrick Lamar was indeed already big news three years ago, his performance at this year’s Grammys was electrifying and hyper-relevant, both thematically and artistically. It’s not that there hasn’t always been an array of compelling black voices demanding more recognition for decades now, but those voices do seem to be coalescing in the (white?) mainstream in a way that hasn’t happened in years. Hopefully this leads to changes, both cultural and systemic. 

The Bullet List #10: Four Songs to Listen to Today

Keeping things simple this week, with four music videos you should listen to/watch at work today.

“South African producer Gervase Gordon recently signed to Hyperdub. Which makes him the label's first Gqom artist. Sort of. That scene — born in Durban and rapidly encroaching across the globe — for those not in the know, is a kind of hybrid of kwaito, skeletally minimal house, and the rollingly glacial tropes of contemporary rap and hip hop production. It's vital, energetic, unusual music; perfect for those of us who occasionally forget that music's meant to excite.

Gordon produces as Okzharp and Duemla 113 is his first EP for the South London label. Translating as "Hello 113" the title's a reference to Gordon's collaborator'sManthe Ribane's Studio113, a creative agency/studio based in Capetown. Ribane's a dancer, model, stylist, photographer and singer. Gordon's got polymathic tendencies too, so the pair are a match made in heaven. South African director Chris Saunders brought them together while shooting a film called Ghost Diamond.” — Thump.

This neo soul band made up of Odd Future members Syd the Kyd and Matt Martians, as well as Jameel Bruner, Patrick Paige, Christopher A. Smith, and Steve Lacy, continues going from strength to strength as soul & R&B continue their revival through the likes of Miguel, Frank Ocean & Janelle Monáe.

Aussie future-soul quartet Hiatus Kaiyote’s track comes from Choose Your Weapon, the band's follow-up to their 2012 Grammy-nominated debut Tawk Tomahawk. They wrote the song out of a motivation to impress Stevie Wonder, whose influence on the track is evident in the strong synth bass line and mid-song key change.

The genre-bending 19-year old Raury from Atlanta takes a stroll through his hometown neighborhood as he tells the tell of d-boys trapped in the trap.

The Bullet List #9: Kamasi Washington, How Music Works, Joshua Ellis, Conan and Zappa

Kamasi Washington

Someone recommended I give this a listen a couple of days ago (thanks Talar) and it is truly phenomenal. A little digging reveals that Washington was responsible for the sax arrangements on the latest Kendrick Lamar album, but his solo work is the kind of jazz that comes around once in a generation. His album — aptly entitled The Epic — was featured in Pitchfork’s Top 50 of last year and he’s recently been the subject of a glowing New York Times Magazine cover story.

From Jackson Allers: “ He represents the progeny of the jazz elders I worked with in Los Angeles with my partner Carlos Gabriel Niño (*working class productions) between 95'-2000. What Kamasi and his family of musicians in the West Coast Get Down represent (Stephan "Thundercat" Bruner, Ronald Bruner, Brandon Coleman, etc.) are the current purveyors of the Central Avenue Jazz scene of Los Angeles from the 40's to the mid/late 60's - culminating in 2015 with Kamasi Washington's 3 disc album - The Epic - on Flying Lotus' label Brainfeeder. These cats are also the chief architects behind the music on Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly.'”

How Music Works by David Byrne

David Byrne’s seminal work is an all-encompassing look at where music comes from, the spaces it occupies and the industry that promotes it. It essential reading for anyone involved in the industry, from musicians to managers and labels, and basically anyone who cares about the context around the stuff they listen to.

“How Music Works is David Byrne’s remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he’s spent a lifetime thinking about. He explains how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and how the advent of recording technology forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music. Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and tells us how they have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators. Touching on the joy, physics, and the business of making music, he also shows how it is inextricably linked to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from La Scala to African villages, from his teenage reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio.How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.” - McSweeny’s 

Joshua Ellis

I came across Josh when an article called ‘Everyone I know is brokenhearted’ popped up in my news feed. I was moved to my core by both his message and his prose, which compelled me to follow him on Facebook. I suggest you do the same. He is a truly gifted writer, and posts regular commentary on life in US as seen from Yakima, Washington. He’s both sensitive to the issues driving our world today (race, gender, religion) and deeply irreverent in his treatment of those subjects and opponents to his views. He was also nominated for a Pulitzer and wrote a very Bukowskiesque account of his trip to Mexico (An American Vampire In Juarez: Getting My Teeth Pulled In Mexico's Most Notorious Border Town) to get his teeth fixed which you can get on online.

Going Down A Rabbit Hole of Conan Remotes

The release last week of Conan O’Brien’s latest side splitting video with Kevin Hart, Ice Cube and Diana Chang (a Conan staffer) is a great reminder of where the lanky pompadoured comedian performs best: out of the studio. Conan remotes have been legendary since his early days at NBC, and a lot of them are on YouTube. There’s no better way to waste an evening than to spend an hour going through them. I’ve linked a few of my favorites below.

Frank Zappa talking about his guitar heroes

Zappa at his zenith ... Think about this the next time you play a "wind-up monkey" note-for-note guitar solo ...

Posted by Paul Dezelski on Thursday, January 14, 2016

The Bullet List #8: Netflix Special

Now that Netflix is rolling out worldwide (except for China, North Korea and Syria) and the internet has gone into overdrive trying to come up with ‘funny’ Netflix and Chill jokes that are culturally specific to the 130 countries that will now know the ecstasy of on demand, you might be wondering where to start watching. It’s a bit tricky to give recommendations on Netflix, as the catalog offering isn’t quite the same in different parts of the world. If you can’t watch Love Actually in Morocco it’s not because they don’t think you deserve Colin Firth in a sweater, it’s probably because the original rights negotiations didn’t include that territory. So I’ve tried to keep the recommendations to Netflix originals or shows Netflix has bought the rights outright to. Anyway, once you start watching, Netflix will tailor some recommendations specifically to you, and most of the time they work out pretty nicely.

 The Square

Ann Hornaday, writing in the Washington Post, said of the film that it “Epitomizes nonfiction film not just as a way to deepen knowledge and understanding, but also as an art form”. And audiences agreed as did jurors and voters at the Emmys, Sundance, Toronto and so on. It is a sprawling and intimate, ground-level look in the Egyptian revolution is a visceral expression of what revolt feels like, and all the complexities inherent to change on a monumental scale. Although the revolution might feel compromised today, the urgency of this documentary transcends current events.

Fireplace For Your Home

While going through my recommendations around the holidays, something called Fireplace For Your Home popped up. I wondered what it was, so I clicked. And I really shouldn’t have spent too much time wondering, as it does exactly what it says on the label. It simulates a fireplace on your screen. I can’t tell if it’s cute or sad, but it’s definitely there. And the self-referential folk in the Netflix marketing team even came up with a fun backstory to whoever put that on the platform.

Danger 5

I still have no fucking clue what I’m watching when it comes to Danger 5, but let’s just say it’s an Australian 2012 reimagining of what a British-American swinging 1960s reimagining of the Nazi invasion would look like if you threw in killer dinosaurs (and season 2 takes things to the 80s. If you've seen Kung Fury, you know what to expect). It is heavily influenced by pulpy men’s magazine fantasies and adds layers of bizarreness and camp, and has a ferociously solid cult following online. Anyway, I’ll shut up and just let you watch a clip.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

The unexpectedly chirpy tale of the titular Kimmy Schmidt, who escapes decades being held underground by a delusional cult leader in Indiana and makes her way to New York ("Yes, there was weird sex stuff). It is full of characters that teeter on the verge of gross caricature but are infused with enough love to stay on the right side of offense and be hilarious. Oh, and Tina Fey is one of the principal writers and producers, so you know that you don't need to take my word for it. The video below is of Titus Andromedon and his rendition of “Peeno Noir”. Watch it. 

Bojack Horseman

I'm not even going to bother writing anything for this one, I'll just paste the show description, and you'll know whether or not it's for you. 

"A humanoid horse, BoJack Horseman -- lost in a sea of self-loathing and booze -- decides it's time for a comeback. Once the star of a '90s sitcom, in which he was the adoptive father of three orphaned kids (two girls and a boy). The show was the hottest thing around, then suddenly, was canceled. Now 18 years later, BoJack wants to regain his dignity. With the aid of a human sidekick and a feline ex-girlfriend who is his agent, he sets out to make it happen. But Hollywood is vastly different from those days, and getting used to stuff like Twitter may take some time. This first animated series from Netflix -- with plenty of references to sex, drugs and alcohol -- is not for the little ones."

Voice talent includes Will Arnett and Aaron Paul. 

PS: Master of None and Jessica Jones aren’t on here because I already recommended them here.

The Bullet List #7

Cholos Try

The internet has helped us reveal a lot of really weird stuff about ourselves, stuff like the fact that we love to watch other people play video games and take products our of boxes. Another thing we love apparently is watching people try new foods for the first time. This seems to make up 96% of Buzzfeed’s video content. But the best videos of people trying out food – by far – is Cholos Try. Go through them all. You won’t regret it.

The School of Life YouTube Channel

Pop philosopher Alain De Botton set up The School of Life as a way to extend the work he does in mega-popular books like the Art of Travel to a real-life self-help-y space. This project comes with an actually very entertaining YouTube channel that offers very helpful primers on subjects we should all be thinking about. I recommend subscribing for regular updates.

 47Soul - Shamstep

I saw two of the artists from 47SOUL during a set at Wickerpark Festival in Batroun a couple of years ago and it was mindblowing. The extended band is an electro-mijwez, shamstep, choubi ensemble whose members are rooted in Bilad Al-Sham, spanning the divides from Amman to the Galilee, the Golan Heights to Ramallah. Their sound combines the electric Arabic debka sound through underground music scenes. And it's amazing.

From their site: “Overcoming physical and logistical challenges, they came together to play electronic Palestinian street music. 47SOUL writes and performs to speak about freedom of movement, whether that’s sparking new dance styles or singing about breaking down border check points. [The] sound is rooted in Arabic Dabke, the celebration dance music from the Bilad Al-Sham area; the name for the land that spans Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan. 47SOUL hypes it up with analog synthesizers, drum machines, epic guitar lines, and tripped-out English and Arabic verses from the four singers. The electronic and urban influence in their music takes them far out of the ‘world music’ context and places them in the genre of a new generation of international electronic/hip hop acts that are reinventing the old for the future. This new sound of 47SOUL is called ShamStep."

This Trailer for the first Tamil Zombie Film

Zombies are a creation of Haitian folklore, but they’ve found universal appeal through American and UK cinema and TV over the years. And the last decade has seen a massive revival in their role in popular culture. Even Bollywood started tucking into the monumentally popular genre in 2013. Now Kollywood, the Tamil-language equivalent, is trying to get itself a chunk of the Walking Dead crowd with Miruthan. The trailer is pretty bonkers. I’ll just leave it here for your viewing pleasure.

Parks And Recreation

Somehow I managed to miss this massive pop culture phenomenon. I mean, I knew Parks and Rec existed, and I knew the memes (Treat Yo’self!) and I knew about Ron Swanson. But I’d never actually ever watched an episode. And now that I have I can’t stop. And there’s something beautiful of knowing I have 7 seasons of the show to look forward to. If you’ve never watched it, do. And if there’s a cozy, hilarious show that isn’t Parks and Rec that you’ve always wanted to get around to but never have, do it. It's cold and grey outside and it'll make you happy. 

Insider's Cultural Guide to Beirut | The Guardian

The Guardian has a great series called Insider's Cultural Guides, in their must-read Cities sections that aims to give a flavor of various cities around the world by trying to get people from those places to express the zeitgeist through various ephemera (Vine accounts, sounds, street art & style, and so on). I was lucky enough to be asked to put together the Beirut guide. 

You can read it here. Hope you enjoy it.

"A beautiful, rowdy, intoxicated mess  – Instagram stories of Syrian refugees, Arabic rap and Armenian food – Nasri Atallah shows us there’s more to the capital of Lebanon than its glamorous clubs, or its troubled politics"