It’s definitely informative and as a lover of lists it’s particularly instructive to see one of my favorites publish his. Which is what I’m doing today. Last year I came up with a different twist on the “top 10 favorite songs” list. Instead of keeping a running list — ten being an ultimately arbitrary number — I would select a song for every year I’ve been alive in an attempt to cast a canon for myself. Instead not all of these are hiding songs. Nick Cave’s list takes a certain melancholy tilt, but I want a more varied list.

I’m pleased to say when I went back to look at my picks last year, I was pretty accurate, though some of my picks I don’t know apply as much to the person I am now. Those are the bubble songs, and they’ll be listed at the very end of this article. If you’re wondering the newest comers to the list are “Blind” by Swans, “Bloxk Party” by Sada Baby and Drego, “Baby I’m Bleeding” by JPegmafia, and “The Drowners” by Suede. Next year these songs might be gone, too, right on that bubble. But then there will be another year and maybe I’ll just solidify old relationships instead of creating new ones.

Here’s my “hidin’ songs”. No commentary. You won’t like all of the list but you’ll love at least one song on this list.

1. Little Red Corvette- Prince
2. Tumblin’ Dice- The Rolling Stones
3. Gilgamesh- Billy Woods
4. ATLiens- OutKast
5. Ave Maria- Joseph Schubert
6. California- John Murry
7. When We Two Parted- The Afghan Whigs
8. O Death- Ralph Stanley
9. Nothin’- Townes Van Zandt
10. Bridge Over Troubled Water- Aretha Franklin
11. Desperados Under The Eaves- Warren Zevon
12. Codeine Crazy- Future
13. The Drowners- Suede
14. Brando- Scott Walker
15. The Shy Retirer- Arab Strap
16. Blue Factory Flame- Songs: Ohia
17. Desperados Waiting For A Train- Guy Clark
18. Hit It and Quit It- Funkadelic
19. Untitled (How Does It Feel) D’Angelo
20. Hyperballad- Bjork
21. Diamonds and Wood- UGK
22. Please Stay Once You Go Away- Marvin Gaye
23. Saeta- Miles Davis
24. Anvil Will Fall- Harvey Milk
25. Blind- Swans
26. Bloxk Party- Sada Baby and Drego
27. Baby I’m Bleeding- Jpegmafia

THE BUBBLE SONGS:

“Sail Away” Randy Newman

“When It Rain”- Danny Brown

“Ghostdeini”- Ghostface Killah

Spotify link for where I could. Everything else I say Youtube. Because these are in no particular order, I recommend hitting “shuffle”. You may get whiplash. Some of these songs I loved because they were companions in the depths. Others I love because they make me feel joy. If you can figure out the song on here that made me cry the first time I heard it, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.

And my Gun Club pick.

Max Landis changed my life and I hate to admit it. It was one youtube clip, I believe on the Nerdist, sent to me by a former writing partner on how to pitch a movie.

Here was the pitch, half remembered: a famous privateer has an important mission. Landis makes sure to run down the crew, including the sexy seafaring ladies who knew kung-fu or some shit. But then, a hurricane swoops up the boat and they find themselves in an an alternate fantasy world. Then, a crocodile comes on the boat! And eats the privateer’s hand! But he also eats the captain’s beloved pocket watch and then the crocodile has a clock in his tummy all going tick tock! They replaced the captain’s hand with a hook and then he swore vengeance! Chris Hardwick and his panel gasp!

Do you get it?

Max Landis had essentially pitched CAPTAIN HOOK: ORIGINS. And there wasn’t a clear eye or drawer in the house. Including myself. I felt like I had been given Dumbo’s magic feather. It was so easy. Before then my pitching process was to lay out the historical materials that informed the artistic choices and explain how they made a story. I once pitched a three page comic about revenge and clowns who owned competing pie shops along with context about hobos and Al Columbia and I got picked last at the dance. If I had walked in and said “It’s Blood Simple with CLOWNS!” I’d have gotten a sloppy kiss and the key to the city.

And that was the extent of his impact on my life. He was in the air, a part of the in retrospect dead in the water progressive nerd nexus including Bob Chipman when he wasn’t making nerd supremacist speeches like a Best Buy employee twitter rping as a Final Fantasy villain and the Birth.Movies.Death crew, all who seemed to sprout up in opposition to nerd culture’s reactionary elements, all around the time its fear of rejection and misogyny became a recruiting ground for the ascendent new American fascism via Gamergate. At least how it seemed on the surface, because, like fellow writers Harry Knowles and Devin Faraci, it was a shell game. The rumblings of misconduct are about to become the thunderings of testimonials and he’s been removed from a DC anthology and the sequel to BRIGHT, certified Netflix loogie and “his BLADE RUNNER”. I imagine the response will be “couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” As Zoe Quinn pointed out, some awful people create lasting meaningful work and other people are Max Landis, who, in the end, could only pitch.

His movies were nothing but pitches to the end, the transference of one cultural material to inhabit the world of another. What if the Fantastic Four were in a high school? What if Jason Bourne was in a stoner flick? What if Mickey, Donald, and Goofy booze soaked sadsacks and Donald screamed about not drinking any fucking merlot? What if the racial strife in L.A. could be represented by inserting fantasy races? To the end, his stories never really transcended their cocktail napkin origins, and, in BRIGHT’s particular case, is an insult to napkins.

It should be said even if most of the nerd progressives were either weirdos who can only give the most milquetoast liberal takes or bad faith mannequins, Max couldn’t dance without tripping over his shoelaces. To contrast him with another faux-woke ghoul, even Devin Faraci called Gamergaters ISIS and you had to be the sort of mutant who could use Twitter for longer than an hour a day without your eyes bleeding to be regaled with tales of the time Faraci stalked a screeenwriter and told them to commit suicide. Max couldn’t go a month without planting his feet in his mouth to the point you wondered if he got his oxygen via toejam. There was the time he bragged about giving a woman mental health issues — though as a crazy person I’d like to interject that he shouldn’t give himself any more credit than a person who flips a light switch should claim they’re Benjamin Franklin — and the fact he sparked an entire wave in the discourse when he claimed Rey from the new Star Wars was a Mary Sue. There’s the stories, apocryphal but likely about how much of a shithead he was in his forum posting days, and then there’s the way he immediately tossed Will Smith under the bus for the “Fairy lives don’t matter” quip in BRIGHT It’s not often a person can claim to be Lucy, Charlie, and the football, and yet, here they were, too rare to live and too weird to die.

I could tolerate a self owning boob and find it pity them but I can’t tolerate a con man, a hack, a creep, a nespot, or a guy who dresses like that. Everything about him screamed a reincarnation of flim flam man and I half expect to excavate a lithograph of him in a covered wagon surrounded by laudanum.

It doesn’t take much to figure out how he got where he did: he was the man for the time and the man for the place, an adolescent primal scream about how they don’t want to put the action figures on ebay to pay for college. His father is also one of the greatest film directors of all time when he’s not moonlighting as the most famous proponent of murder via helicopter after Augusto Pinochet. History is littered with sons who only draw water because of their father, but Max Landis existed as the the ultimate parody of the useless son, with the satire more Friedberg and Seltzer than Voltaire, a whoopie cushion in the dustbin of history full of tragedies replicated as farces.

What’s staggering, even with a jaundiced view of our current pop culture moment, is how much of a fixture he became. His methods were so transparent that making it where he did was akin to a miracle. I have watched a lot of bad movies and I think BRIGHT might have the worst script of any movie I’ve sat through, along with a 2 hour argument for the estate and capital gains tax.

A note should be made here on bad movies, as I’ve seen enough to call myself a dilettante. The more bad movies you watch, the more you learn the good bad movies exist in a parallel to their active badness that are more dumb than bad. They are exercises in glitched logic, ghost trains where the automated miners and schoolmarms forget their lines. They always have in them the seeds of something worth seeing, even something as execrable as THE BYE BYE MAN, one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a good example: CHOPPING MALL is an 80s curio where a set of B9 looking chaps go haywire and murder a gang of teens who decide to have an orgy in a furniture store. The film kicks off with a triumphant advertisement for the robots neutralizing an assailant in the mall while the couple from EATING RAOUL trades barbs (again, glitchy logic). If CHOPPING MALL zigged instead of zagged, it could be a satire on the ends capitalism will take to protect its stupid, maudlin property. In opening scene, the salesman says the robots are designed to “neutralize”, not kill. One accident later, the robots are using lasers on everything. It’s barely an original point that power needs to neuter its language in the service of making its violence appear to be anything but while still remaining as brutal as possible (furtive movements, targeted killing). What is surprising is to see the seeds of that argument in a movie that includes the line “Let’s send these fuckers a Rambogram,” showing how deep the neutering of that language is in our consciousness. It’s merely business as usual. Now granted the movie doesn’t go the ROBOCOP route and it includes a slob at the pizza joint screaming for more butter, but stupidity aside, it’s a zippy watch that could have been something better. No lingering questions, no missed opportunities. And it’s still a better movie about police than BRIGHT, even if it’s about haywire robots frying janitors.

BRIGHT is plenty dumb, believe that. The “fairy lives don’t matter” joke is in the first ten minutes. It’s full of jokes that are probably hysterical at a DND table but flat on delivery, which would be fine if they were crepes. Orcs think death metal is beautiful! Elves shop on Rodeo Drive! This is the sort of bush league stuff that youtube film essayists might think is world building but on close inspection it’s as deep as a one panel Far Side rip off and the seeds of the film’s failure.

Will Smith is a cop who gets shot on a mission by an orc while his orc partner, the first orc cop at ALL (k), played by Joel Edgerton in one of the more grating film performances I’ve experienced, is buying a burrito (which I can’t help but but read as lol random internet humor, even though the movie is set in LA). Rather than reassigning or firing the orc cop the two are still partners, I guess because we really needed this story to be told. On their ride around, they end up having to take in a white supremacist fantasy edition type who says a bunch of prophecy about Dark Lords and Brights. After investigating a warehouse, they find a magic waif with a wand, which is contraband in the film’s universe, to the point the FBI has a magic unit. A gang of dirty cops happen upon them, there’s a flaccid gun fight, the bad guy (which is something called an Inferni. Your guess is as good as mine) pops out of a wall, and our movie is going. They have to run away with the waif from paper tigers like the Dark Lord and a gang of Homies figurines (I’m barely kidding). All throughout Joel Edgerton gets yelled at for being an orc. But when an orc gang kidnaps our trio, he sacrifices himself. The waif brings him immediately back to life because there’s no plot stakes when you have a device that can erase all your story telling. They kill the bad guy, Joel Edgerton becomes a hero, and a sequel is set, though without Max Landis.

I’m not too good for this story or even cop movies. I am too good for laziness, though, which is what all bad movies are: purely lazy. And the Landis pastiche is the laziest trick of all. Beyond laziness, it’s when he takes on something like race that it becomes truly insulting.

Here’s a thought experiment: if orcs and elves were real, how would their portrayal in BRIGHT be taken? All orcs are either Joel Edgerton or sports clad goons with a clannish mentality. All elves are a glamour obsessed one percent, or an FBI agent in the magic unit. If this were a biopic, it’d be a late period Clint Eastwood.

It’s worse: an allegory. The orc struggle substitutes all struggles. But Landis doesn’t try to do the background work of showing his fantasy races as anything other than their stereotypes, except when he needs cops. Only by trodding the thin blue line can you come close to being a human.

This isn’t to say I think the movie is a right wing tract. I think Landis is too shallow, too empty, too hacky, to have considered a movie where the one good orc is a cop and the rest wear football jerseys and durags to be construed as a bad idea. For Max, all you shout is “It’s TRAINING DAY but Middle Earth” and laugh all the way to the Rue 21 to buy an oversized white blazer. And that’s all he seems either content to be or capable of. If it’s the second, let his career die here, let his insurance costs be too high and his talent too low, and may all his victims get the justice they deserve or at least the opportunity of watching his humiliation.

But the magic of who his daddy is and the moment means he never had to be more. He could be a mediocre mashup DJ until the end of time.

God knows there was a market for it in the Cockaigne of nerd culture. Nerd culture, like Max, could never conceive of itself as anything more than a land of toys, a place where could get drunk and smoke cigars until you get turned into a donkey boy. Its rules rewarded the quickest with a reference and the biggest action figure collection. To become king you had to give up money or time, both offered to the privileged more than the serfs. It’s no wonder then that Max found himself atop this pile of lotus eaters.

And it’s probably fitting. The goal for most nerd men might have been Joss Whedon, a second wave feminist who isn’t even comfortable with the perfectly fine label or the bounds of a marriage, but Whedon at least deserves credit for developing a language and style and concerns, two of which Landis certainly benefited from. But all along, Max Landis was both their real saint and the face they refused to recognized, because they never strived for anything more than what they had, just to make She-Ra and Optimus Prime kiss before the Foot Clan attacks their HQ at the Ghostbuster playset. When they made overtures towards progressive politics, it was lip service, a clip on tie at a big boy job interview that they tossed the minute they returned home, and anything radical had no place on the playground that was their domicile, because if they had infused those politics fully it ran the risk of killing both their childhood and their life and its pursuits would just be what they always were: toys.

But maybe the martyrdom of Saint Max can lead to something better, a new revolution. Maybe somebody will take his spot and make the new Star Wars or Star Trek, create memories beyond the parody his work constituted. Getting Max out of the way could start something better, a culture that isn’t reliant only on Frankensteined replicas of its past materials, a place for outcasts and nerds to be free to make it new, to move from the current neoclassicism to something like a modernism. We have to be content to write more than Epic Poohs in reference to yesteryears Epic Poohs.

Nothing truly salacious has came out yet, but when it does come Max’s career needs to be remembered for what it was: one of those t-shirts advertised on Facebook where one IP meets another IP, printed not on cotton, but on a cocktail napkin and slid to an executive, and not as anything having ever been wasted.

Look at this sweaty porcine huckster, the one who convinced the world he’s the Republican Lenin, Rasputin for the new tsars, panicking like a twelve year old lost in a mall, surrounded by his sworn nemeses, the enemies in his “global war”.

The dirty secret of politics is it’s about narrative. And so far, nobody has done a better job of controlling their narrative destiny than Steve Bannon. He’s been called the president, probably much to his pleasure, because he’s been remarkably honest in interviews about Trump as a “blunt instrument…who he doesn’t know if he really gets it”. Every interview, profile, tweet, blogpost, and facebook raving has cast him as some sort of dark trickster God, mainly because he’s read some books and to an intelligentsia that can’t be bothered to see the world in anything but the leftover tea leaves of the Harry Potter franchise, that must be terrifying.

But look at the lovely header gif of Steve Bannon. Eyes darting around, faced with his personal great Satan, we don’t see a wily ideologue, a prestige tv character, or the man with his finger on a button named “Black Swan Event”. We see a decaying racist who looks like a frosted flake that a mad scientist animated wondering where his emergency bottle of Scope is. It’s the ultimate animating principle of the insurgent right: fear as a reason why, fear as an action to motivate. This new right is terrifying but terrified.

If you want to understand the reactionary mind, Corey Robin is a great start. If you need to see it in action, watch Baron Harkocaine having the world’s most deserved panic attack in a loop that stretches from here to you scrolling away.

John Carpenter had to release a statement (read:a tweet) to explain his film THEY LIVE isn’t about Jewish control of the world, but rather, “yuppies and unrestrained capitalism”. If you’re not familiar with THEY LIVE, let me give you a brief breakdown.

Rowdy Roddy Piper (they never give him a name in film and it’s more fun to imagine Rowdy Roddy Piper is just living his life fighting aliens) is a hobo who ends up in Los Angeles. Piper moves into a hooverville and ends up getting a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the reality of the world: a black and white dystopia full of stark typefaces and weird skeleton monsters who control the world, the titular THEY. Things get complicated, Piper gets to spout a bunch of great one-liners, Keith David and him have a fist fight, etcetera.

The idea that there’s a secret network of control that pulls the strings and keeps things from ever approaching justice is common in fiction. Noir, science fiction, and cosmic horror have all drawn considerable blood out of that turnip.

It’s also been mined by nutbars. If it’s not the Jews, it’s the reptilians, if not the reptilians, it’s the Satanists behind pizzagate. So it makes sense that nutbars would glom onto THEY LIVE while operating under the assumption that the author shares their viewpoint. It’s their own real life head canon.

However, coming up with that head canon requires that they haven’t watched the movie with any sort of eye, because THEY LIVE has no discernable dog-whistles that even point towards Jewish control of the world.

Literally all the Jews of the anti-semite’s fiction and the ghouls of THEY have in common is they’re in control. Everything else is a hell of a leap. In fact, and, I will admit to watching this at 5am in the morning, but it’s pretty blatant that most of the ghouls choose to be white, and that the patchwork resistance includes two black men, one of whom is is blind.

Which could be the science textbook diversity we’re all used to (never mind that most hollywood movies don’t even pay heed to, but whatever), but I think if you’re going to make a movie about the secret control of the world by an ethnic group, a sort of Turner Diaries with wrasslers and gargoyles, it probably wouldn’t hurt to actually try. If John Carpenter is an anti-semite with a hard-on for science fiction allegory, his allegory blows. At least George Orwell gave us a pig skull.

So that leaves two possibilities. Either cat avi nazis have only seen THEY LIVE through their mind’s theatre and produced a stupid movie because they’re dim bulbs. Or cat avi nazis have seen THEY LIVE, they’re dim bulbs, and missed how the movie is about a working class coalition defeating fascism.

But that’s all circling around the main point: nobody is better at making things about race than a racist. Nobody. All shapes and sizes of racists. Skinny, fat. Dapper white nationalists, bowl headed dorks with uzis, suburban moms who are terrified their precious little ducklings will get chopped into hamburger by thugs who don’t wear belts, call center workers yelling about south asians, mediocre sketch comedians. To racists, race is the answer, because without that division, they might have to contend with some tough facts: that people do have a tendency to act in self-interest, that the capacity for evil is in everybody, not because people are bad, but because evil is boring and evil is everywhere, and that there is no light brigade you get drafted into without having to do the necessary work of trying to fight against a series of animal instincts that society tries to do the work of ameliorating through things like healthcare and roads until they need you beastly.

There are racists who are racist for the sake of nastiness, without question. But plenty are trying to answer questions about the way society works and picking a retrograde, disgusting answer, one that’s been disproven up and down. What they want is an aleph.

That doesn’t make their answer a forgivable offense. In THEY LIVE, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David show up to a secret gala at the end, one featuring unmasked ghouls and their human collaborators. One collaborator takes them aside and thanks them for coming to the gala and for finally selling out. When Piper and David storm the compound and get to the mind control signal, the collaborator gets shot. He doesn’t get saved because of he has the potential to get back on the right path. He’s already traded his human potential to exist beyond boring evil to make sure trains ran on time. Anybody should realize that. But in order to do that, you have to contend with our worst tendencies and actually watch the damn movie.