This Week Party in Honor of:

• physical media
• new movies
• queer communities
• lost storyboards
• classic music and books!

Party on, scb0212 and Miller and thanks for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods[at]gmail, post articles below from the past week for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

J Oliver Conroy of The Guardian lauds the film fans who refuse to give up their physical collections for streaming:

When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator. Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children. “I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”

Film Comment‘s Devika Girish interviews Radu Jude on his new film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World and other cinematic topics:

One of my favorite anecdotes about cinema is what Naum Kleiman said about Eisenstein’s bookshelves. They were not organized alphabetically or by field, but on montage principles. So you would have a Napoleon biography close to some book about genetic anomalies, or you would have Ulysses close to Alice in Wonderland. His bookshelves were the greatest films he didn’t shoot.

At The Nation, Vikram Murthi examines the couples and community of Drive-Away Dolls:

Cooke’s involvement here ultimately separates Drive-Away Dolls from the Coen brothers’ films in obvious, meaningful ways. She reportedly used her experiences in lesbian bars and activist circles to flesh out the characters, and Drive-Away Dolls crucially emphasizes “queer community” throughout. Jamie and Marian find kinship with their fellow lesbians everywhere they go, whether it’s in bars or with a traveling girls’ soccer team. With a few notable exceptions, the Coen brothers’ films tend to emphasize the individual plight over the communal experience, dating back to their first feature, Blood Simple (1984), in which M. Emmet Walsh’s crooked private eye intones over a barren Texas landscape: “Down here, you’re on your own.”

Tim Jonze details the story of Salvador Dalí’s lost Spellbound storyboards for the Guardian:

His aversion to cliche was on full display in Spellbound’s dream sequence, which was central to the movie’s plot. While other directors liked to rub Vaseline on the camera lens to create hazy nocturnal visions, Hitchcock strived for something as bright and clear as our most vivid dreams. To attain it, he paid Dalí the princely sum of $4,000 to design a unique centrepiece for the film. “Hitch was savvy,” says Moral. “He knew Dalí was a huge name to market the film with.” And Dalí jumped at the chance, having been desperate to get into Hollywood. He had already made a couple of art films with Luis Buñuel, (Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or), when he was commissioned for Spellbound, and he started work on Destino shortly afterwards, an animated short for Disney that was eventually released in 2003. The problem was that Dalí’s ideas for Spellbound were a little too unique. Among other things, his storyboards involved Bergman turning into a statue that would then break up into ants. “It was basically unfilmable,” says [author Tony Lee Moral].

Stereogum‘s Tom Breihan celebrates the 20th anniversary of MF DOOM and Madlib collaboration album Madvillainy:

Madvillainy came into the world at a crossroads moment for underground rap. The late-’90s boomlet around Rawkus Records had already died away, and former Fat Beats habitué Eminem already existed in a different galaxy. But Kanye West, another guy with connections to the Rawkus world, had just exploded into full-on mainstream stardom, and he was still connected enough to that world that he’d produce and rap on a Dilated Peoples single. Def Jux and Rhymesayers had developed into underground touring empires, playing the same circuits as indie rock bands, but Madlib and DOOM weren’t part of those worlds. They were more elusive and singular, more likely to build their own cosmologies out of their extensive record collections. So it surprised everyone when Madvillainy connected the way that it did.

For the New York Times, Margaret Atwood talks about the enduring appeal of Stephen King’s Carrie as the novel turns 50:

“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage. But his wife, Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a curious temperament — fished them out, uncrinkled them, read them, and famously convinced King to continue the story. She wanted to know how it would come out, and such desires on the part of readers are perhaps the best motivation a writer can have.

And at Tone Glow, Joshuan Minsoo Kim interviews Paul Leary about the life of a Butthole Surfer:

We got asked to come back and play again, and the next time was when we actually got called the Butthole Surfers. Up until that point we changed the name of the band every week. We were the Ashtray Baby Heads and Abe Lincoln’s Bush and 9 Foot Worm Makes Own Food. We played this punk rock club in Austin and the bass player of the Big Boys, Chris Gates, came out and introduced us to play. He didn’t know what the name of our band was that week (laughter), but he knew we had a song called “Butthole Surfers” so he called us that. We were a little confused at first but we were like, okay, let’s roll with it. Then at the end of the show, someone gave us fifty bucks and we were like, okay this is it, we’re gonna be rich.