On The Breeders Last Splash — There’s a corner on Broadway Rd. in Tempe that should have been named Lost Weekend Plaza. It’s a one-stop shop for all your gutter-life needs: a Circle K with an unusually large liquor selection sits kitty-cornered to an OTB bar and a plasma donation center. On any given day, you…

Stick figures, “The Simpsons,” and the downside of immortality It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt) After the bombs drop, after the seas drown our cities, after MEGA COVID-45 makes us all choke to death on our shredded lung pulp, The Simpsons will still be on the air. Matt Groening, Al Jean, James L. Brooks, and all the rest…

As hacky edgelord music takes go, “The Sex Pistols were a boy band” is right up there with “The Beatles suck, actually.” Thanks to Malcolm McLaren’s unwavering self-promotion — selling himself as the P.T. Barnum of U.K. punk to anyone within earshot — this conception of the Pistols as nothing…

A documentary that reflects our own shit back at us. The Task (Leigh Ledare) The geometry of groups trends towards the circular. The huddle, the group hug, the campfire, the cypher, the dance circle the sharing circle⁠ — when we attempt to envision human beings coming together in an egalitarian way, the circle seems to be the shape we default…

On Capitalism, COVID-19, and “The Third Man” The Third Man “When this is over…” I find myself saying that a lot lately, and each time I do the words feel like an incantation. I’m Billy Batson calling down the lightning, hoping that this time when I say the words they’ll work their magic and “normalcy” returns in…

Watching a snake eat its own tail in just ten episodes Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC) From the opening of its very first episode, Dispatches From Elsewhere invites you to see yourself in it. Piercing the fourth wall with his steely eyes, Richard E. Grant’s narrator addresses us directly. Equal parts warm and menacing, Grant’s Octavio talks to us with the slow…

Phoenix performance artist The Ladies dance the pandemic blues away I’ve been thinking about Zaireeka a lot. Sitting in my apartment in week number Who Even Knows Anymore of the pandemic, I find myself thinking a lot about that album. It’s one of many tiny things I tear my hair over, now that I’ve had a few weeks to kick…

I. “I have these intricate dreams” The digital clock under my friend’s TV said it was 6:15pm. The numbers were bright yellow — Pac-Man yellow. The living room was swimming with light: The walls rippled, the floor swayed softly, and the numbers on the clock undulated like seagrass in a current. I had taken a heavy…

Don’t despair, true believers: Just because Stan The Man is gone doesn’t mean we’ll never see him spike the camera in a future Marvel joint. I got a hot tip from one of my many Deep Throats at Marvel Studios that the company shot hours of footage of Stan to…