Quick hits
Do not ever try and lay laminate flooring yourself
It’s been a rough week at Me HQ. We’re in the middle of a series of DIY renovations, and it’s fair to say if I had my time again I would GSETDIFM (Get Someone Else To Do It For Me). I haven’t had a thought worth communicating at length for a while, but I didn’t want to break the newsletter habit, so here’s a couple of quick thoughts in succession.
Firstly, I need to take a victory lap. If you read my Oscars preview, you already know that I got 4 out of 5 predictions correct. I only missed Best Actress, where I confidently declared that Lily Gladstone was a mortal lock. Of course, the winner was Emma Stone for Poor Things, who was not my prediction but my personal pick for the award – so I’m claiming a moral victory.
(For Best Supporting Actress I said the winner would be from a film I hadn’t seen, which was also technically correct if not impressive)
Behind the Bastards: Steve Jobs
This podcast, hosted by Robert Evans, goes where no other dares: multi-part series telling you exactly why and how famous people are awful. I dip in and out depending on the bastard in focus – generally, it’s more interesting the more revered and successful the subject. Steve Jobs, then, is a great pick. The entire fucked-up tech industry is made in his image, and every smoothbrain wannabe entrepreneur who thinks “business” is a skill worships at his altar.
I guess I knew the broad strokes of the Steve Jobs story, but the perspectives and stories Evans pulls out for this four-parter taught me something new: Jobs really stinks! And I mean that literally: he apparently renounced regular bathing in his early 20s, well before he was famous and rich enough to get away with it.
More serious is the way he treated his first daughter (awful), his best friend Steve Wozniak (exploitative), factory workers in China (driven to suicide), and his own pancreatic cancer ( that is, he didn’t treat it with anything but dietary woo, and probably died when he didn’t have to).
But the ends justify the means, right? I’d previously thought of Jobs as a tech genius, but this series also deflates that balloon. The first half of his career is defined by his bad ideas and failures, with his prominent successes coming as a result of exploiting others’ work. Co-host and prominent tech skeptic Ed Zitron keeps comparing Jobs to Elon Musk, and I think it’s a good reference. Similar to Jobs, Musk has enjoyed some fawning press coverage of the years. He’s credited with plenty of breakthroughs and achievements – electric cars, PayPal, AI, rocket ships, green energy and so on. But when you dig deeper into the biography… he doesn’t seem to actually do anything, apart from yell at other people to work harder. We get the public geniuses we deserve – maybe it says something that our most recent generation are mostly weird blowhards with bad ideas, treated as gods.
Anyway, Behind the Bastards is great. I mean, maybe it’s not entirely fair to build a profile of someone focusing only on the negative aspects of their life and personality – but at least they’re definitely honest about it. And what does Steve care? From the sounds of things he’s burning in hell anyway.
Manhunt
Keeping it Apple themed – my thoughts on Apple TV originals are well-documented (by me), but I’ve been sucked into another one. Manhunt is a period piece set in 1865, telling the story of the hunt for the man who killed President Abraham Lincoln. That would be the most influential actor in history, John Wilkes Booth – whose awkwardly-timed assassination of Lincoln, post-Civil War but pre-Reconstruction, altered the course of the United States and the world, redirecting it to the fucked up place we are today. Booth is played by Anthony Boyle, yet ANOTHER hot young Irish actor, who you might recognise from Masters of the Air. His pursuer, Secretary of War and Abe’s buddy Edwin Stanton, is played by Tobias Menzies (you’ll recognise the face if not the name).
There’s only two episodes out now so I’ll reserve full judgment, but I did want to point out how prestige TV is not sending its best anymore. Here’s an early scene of Stanton talking to his wife:
And here’s him repeating this important character trait later:
OK, great – so Stanton is guy who gets into the thick of things and does his own dirty work. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word delegate!
Here’s him seconds later delegating a task to a reporter he just met:
Here’s him delegating a task to his assistant Eckert:
Here’s him delegating another task to his assistant Eckert:
And here’s him delegating the task of finding Eckert to someone else, presumably so that he can delegate another yet another task to Eckert when he arrives:
Look, it’s pretty minor, and I guess they’re just trying to explain why the Secretary of War is an active participant in a police investigation. But I think we need a better attention to detail in 2024. Some of us are still watching without looking at our phones!
Real Lies
Finally – Real Lies, a band that has meant a lot to me over the past few years, have dropped a few new tracks.
To me, they’re the foremost propagandists for late night London. That has been a loaded topic in the city recently, as people bemoan the downfall of clubs and pubs, and the ostensible lack of vibes in previously buzzy neighbourhoods. Is Covid to blame? Is it the Night Mayor’s fault? Real Lies are not ones to complain. Instead, they make paeans to the early hours, a musical demonstration of the potency of clubbing culture.
It’s there in the music – pop, laced with signifiers of London’s rich club heritage. There’s pitched-up voice samples, two-step beats, strobing synth plugins, euphoric chords, all audio motifs that have lit up dance floors for decades. For the Real Lies remix of crushed’s waterlily, they take a downtempo dream pop tune and kit it out for the warehouse.
But it’s the vocals that are Real Lies’ USP. In the breathy half-rapping of Kev Kharas, you hear tales of the weekend, warm with nostalgia, heavy with anticipation, cut through with the streetwise sentimentality of the Pet Shop Boys or the Streets – “what bliss to be alive”, as they say. It’s relatable to anyone who’s ever had a good time past 10pm, but if you’re a (slightly ageing) raver in London, and Kharas’ fondly hazy recollections are also yours – it’s fucking poetry. Real Lies take the ephemeral aspects of generations of club subcultures and string them into a coherent continuum. And guess what? You can dance to it too.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how it all feels in words, but luckily the video for their new-ish single with KETTAMA shows you with images. It’s Purple Heart, and they ain’t talking about war medals – the video is a POV of a Big Night Out, a heady rush that’s universally recognisable. But it’s also dotted with more specific references – the tube, the off license, the night bus, a can of Red Stripe on the street and a lone foxed by a fenced-off park. I’ve been in this video before, and I probably will again! It’s a real vision of what the night can hold, if you just head out into it.