popsublime

I’m sure I was born to be the one dissenting voice about Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, his directorial debut. Mainly because I don’t need a gay formula film, although my objections go deeper than that. It’s not poorly made. The pace and tonal shifts are admirable. But its premise isn’t. Strung-out club promoter Peter Green (Firstman himself) discovers that he unknowingly sired a son with the only woman whose vagina his gay penis had ever entered (because that happens all the time). Ten years later Arlo (Reggie Absolom, the only reason to see this movie) turns up on his NYC doorstep. And so the gay narcissist learns to overcome his narcissism by putting his son’s nobler needs above Peter’s own selfishly depraved habits and addictions. Watch how his life opens!

The first thing that came to mind was a former friend who had her son via IVF. She said of the experience that up to that point in her life, it was as if she’d been behind a pane of glass, watching the world pass by, separated from her. And then her little boy came along, “and he walked me through the glass.” I’m sorry, but I really don’t like the idea of a human child being the cause of someone’s redemption or their spiritual awakening or whatever. The self-involved narcissism that the person (Peter Green in the instance of Club Kid) had to overcome is simply replaced with another even worse form of narcissism: your son becomes merely the vehicle for your newfound self-understanding, and that drives the entire concept of the movie. This is why narcissists should always just have pets, not kids.

Yes, some elements of queer community enter into the film, yet they seemed more like colorful sprinkles or ice-cream toppings to me: intradiegetically unrealistic, and lingering not just on the fringes of the narrative (as do those mini-performances, sweet though they may be), but pretty much entirely outside of it. I’d read in a couple of early reviews about the film’s final half-hour or so, so I didn’t need to stay for that part. No need for drama about Arlo’s immigration status, certainly no need for any courtroom scene nor its requisite heartfelt speech. I walked away caring only about the chemistry between Jordan Firstman and Reggie Absolom on screen, which is essentially the magic of casting, with some scattered bits of acting (mostly embodied in gazes and attitudes).

Any movie that tosses in a few quick references to Björk and Cocteau Twins has to be cool, right? Especially if an adorable little 10-year-old British kid is making them? Not necessarily. They have to come from somewhere that’s grounded in the scenes themselves and not tiny flashes of detail that are mostly just accessories. And the flimsiness of being just an accessory, cinematically, is what sank my hopes for this movie. I wanted to see it succeed, not just as a commercial product, but as an artful and worthwhile one. In the back row near my seat were some of the creative team, excited to see the gay audience at Newfest watch and embrace the film, a gay New York movie screened on a Friday night in Chelsea, the gay heart of New York City. I get it. Though I think there’s an insularity to all of that which kind of precludes the sense of objectivity required to make an authentically good movie. Please don’t let this one be nominated for any screenplay awards. Or acting awards. Whatever its successes might be, they’re more external than internal. Give it awards for casting or marketing. (Sorry not sorry, Jordan.)

The one arresting moment in the narrative for me was when Arlo tells Peter point-blank that his mother (who’d become the hazy memory butt-of-a-joke to Peter and his friends over the preceding decade) died by suicide. It’s invoked so fleetingly, however, that it’s almost as if the movie knows that it’s unable to look seriousness more directly in the eye because it’s trying to evoke a world where real tragedies don’t actually exist. They’re mentioned and hinted at, but they might as well be fantasy, just like the rest of the movie is. So I think that’s the tragic quality that taints the film for me, knowing that it could have aspired to be more than what it is, if only it had taken the time and hard-nosed attention required to figure that out in more intricate and rewarding ways.

Sunday, October 4, 2026

The Music of Duncan Sheik

I’m not comfortable writing about people who’ve died. Nor am I comfortable with books in my living space if they’re signed by people who’ve died, so I’ve often sold them or given them away to expurgate those ghosts. Yet being surrounded by music by people who’ve died doesn’t bother me at all. Music is so inherently tied to memory that the eventual loss of those who created it is just an inevitability. Songs project themselves into the future in a way that always foreshadows mortality, so in that sense, every song is an elegy. Of course, some songs are more intentionally elegiac than others, and the songs of Duncan Sheik, who died last month at age 56, while seemingly skyward-gazing, I think were locked in a fairly permanent downturned glance. The word “declension,” for some reason, comes to mind. A browsing down a list. Gentle shifting.

The key song in Duncan Sheik’s oeuvre, and the first on his two-disc pop career retrospective, Brighter/Later, is “That Says It All,” a tribute to his (male) musical heroes that tracks his praise for them while also admitting how he feels he might pale in comparison to them, lyrically. Jagger, Dylan, and Lennon get kudos in the first verse, then the second verse turns darker through the invocation of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, and Nick Drake, all of whom struggled with addiction and in two cases died quite young from drug overdoses, and in Nick Drake’s case, an overdose of an antidepressant, no less. I’d heard Duncan perform a solo concert of only Nick Drake covers, and we admired many of the same artists, so when I first met him back in January of 2007 at an album signing for his game-changing musical Spring Awakening, I told him that he had great taste in cover songs. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of sighed. “Yeah, that will probably be the next album project,” and it was. His covers of his favorite 1980s New Wave classics like The Blue Nile’s “Stay” and The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” are some of the most quietly powerful songs that he recorded, sung in his distinctively dressed-down tones, beyond somber. And so I think his roll of the eyes at me when I praised his taste in covers was not so much a dismissive insult but rather a quick visual admission that I got it. We are what we like.

But I also hadn’t stood in front of him praising his own compositions, just after he’d made the big decision to pivot from pop music to theatre, and theatre was largely where he stayed for the remainder of his career. I have all of his studio albums but little interest in them after his fourth album, 2002’s Daylight, which I think was probably his pop peak. His eponymous debut in 1996 had a couple of hits, which led to songs on rom-com soundtracks, and then 1998’s Humming showed him deepening his palate as he began to pursue Buddhism (quite seriously, not as a hobby). “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” from his debut album were inward-looking for mainstream pop, but that debut also includes contemplative numbers like “November” and “The End of Outside,” conceived in a style that morphed in complex ways (again, for pop music, and even for occasionally orchestral pop music) by the time he arrived at Humming. On “In Between,” the opening track of that album, he sings, “I feel a little undefined” and “I’m in between, no use wondering what I mean,” in contrast to “the endless bright parade” of the apparent certainty of active life surrounding him. The song ends as an intimate apology for not being clearer-cut to the people closest to him.

Sheik’s third album, 2001’s Phantom Moon, featured lyrics by Steven Sater, a kind of preview to their work together on Spring Awakening and other musicals. I remember going over for dinner at the apartment of a guy I was dating, and I had the CD of Phantom Moon in my backpack, so we listened to it while we ate. “Who listens to music like this?” was his response. Needless to say, that was our last date, and the introspective, galaxy-spanning reach of Phantom Moon sort of defined where Duncan Sheik’s music would go from there. “Requiescat,” the album’s penultimate track, could have been written as a song to be played at Sheik’s own funeral, and Steven Sater quoted his own lyrics from the song at the beginning of a tribute piece that he wrote for Duncan after Duncan’s death. Death, as we know all too well, is nothing new, even if it always feels somehow so unfamiliar.

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Sara Bareilles, Good Grief (Epic Records, 2026)

It’s a demanding task to make something durable out of loss. That’s the central theme of Sara Bareilles’ immersive and instructive new album Good Grief, her first studio album (and accompanying tour) in seven years. Set into motion by the relatively early deaths of her close friends and career collaborators Gavin Creel and Chad Joseph, these fourteen exquisite songs chart Bareilles’ journey of mourning and healing; they also serve as a generous gift to her listeners worldwide who might be struggling with similar losses of their own and be grateful to find some redemption in what the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter has so carefully crafted and calibrated here. Last week, I watched Josh Alexander’s excellent documentary about the making of the album at a cinema in Boston, and in the film Bareilles mentions, lightheartedly but seriously, that she’s a total control freak. Having listened to the songs from Good Grief on a loop since watching the documentary, and also having heard her and her band perform the songs live at MGM Music Hall in Boston a couple of nights ago, it’s quite evident to me that the kind of control she’s referring to is what assisted her in creating the most mature album of her career so far, one with a totally clear-eyed vision which I’m certain will cut across all sorts of demographics and generations to help shape works of art that respond to human mortality, and furthermore, that guide us in navigating and transcending the levels of grief that our mortality ongoingly requires.

The album opens with “Home,” which Bareilles has explained was inspired by the Stephen Colbert episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, where Colbert recounted losing his father and brothers back when he was only ten-years-old. The song’s refrain, “So tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine,” is the very intentional heart and mission of the album, demonstrating how the pain and difficulty of grief can become “good grief” by relying on the human capacities for narrative and memory. That transformative power can only really be accessed through sharing with others our stories and recollections of those who have passed from our lives. In the midst of inhabiting the tale of Colbert’s own losses and the wake of silence that followed in his childhood home, lines such as, “You be the universe / Nothing to hide” show how Bareilles’ aim is to widen her specific thematic focus to include and embrace all of us. That thread of far-ranging truthfulness continues on the album’s second track, “Just a Kid,” Bareilles’ homage to her college soulmate and first manager, Chad Joseph, who died young at the age of 40: “You never got to get married / And I hate where you’re buried / You never got old / You were just a kid… / This one’s for my best friend and he’s everywhere.”

Other forms of grief enter into the album’s midsection as well, with the powerful “Hands Off My Body” reacting to recent upheavals surrounding women’s physical autonomy and right to choose, and “Ladies in a Line” movingly addressing visits to the fertility clinic and attempts to have a child just a bit later in life because of career obligations throughout one’s younger adult years. The former song cleverly interrogates political right-wing Christian fundamentalism, while also sharply critiquing the cultural notion that women should just be as submissive as patriarchal authorities expect them to be: “So if I whisper it in silence / And deliver it swiftly / If I can make it sound godly / Would you get your hands off my body? / If I call for it gently / While I’m burning up / Would it be enough?” The latter song, by comparison and counterpoint, quietly and contemplatively speaks to the women hoping to be mothers and grappling with infertility: “Empty arms / With lists of names / The cruel truth of starting late / Life was asking / Other questions until now… / The depths of this are changing / Reminds me of the ocean floor / I’m just swimming where they tell me to / Till I can’t swim no more.” In the documentary’s studio scene before and after recording “Ladies in a Line,” Bareilles and her background vocalist Butterfly Boucher bond and cry together since they’re both struggling through the exact same issues at that time, which of course lends the song and its beautifully consoling harmonies an even greater resonance.

Two of the album’s finest songs showcase the work of the late non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who wrote unforgettably about their last few years before dying of metastatic ovarian cancer in July of 2025 at age 49, as documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson’s voice is featured in a profound excerpt from their poetry on the song “A Love Story,” and the end-credits song from the documentary about Gibson, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is Bareilles’ astounding duet with Brandi Carlile that also should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s followed by the album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” which finds Bareilles taking on the tender posthumous perspective of her recently departed friend, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel, with whom she co-starred on Broadway and spoke on the phone nearly every single day, right up until his death from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma at age 48: “And if you need me / And we’re not together / Close your eyes to see me better / I’ll be here forever… / If you are the bird I am the movement / If you are the words I am the music.”

Perhaps my favorite moment from Bareilles’ wonderful and memorable concert in Boston this past Thursday night, after she and her band had performed most of the songs from Good Grief and had expertly led the audience through that amount of thematic weight, came when she suddenly launched into a spirited and rousing rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and got the audience up on its feet to dance joyfully in unison. It was such a smart, unexpected move, and the perfect balance and antidote to everything that she’d played just before it. That particular and very precise song selection (out of the many upbeat, affirmative pop songs by other artists that I’m sure the band could have played instead) actively embodied what the closing excerpt of Andrea Gibson’s poem “The Nutritionist” from the song “A Love Story” exemplifies and rhythmically urges us all to do as the survivors:

“So let me say right now for the record,
I am still gonna be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.

You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.

Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
‘Live. Live. Live.’”

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Cinematic Endgame from the First Two-Thirds of 2026

At the cinema that I go to a few times each week where I live up in midcoast Maine, they know me as “the guy who sees every movie.” They know me the same way at the cinemas where I watch films regularly near my workplace in Boston. It’s true that I’ll sit through anything or sometimes sleep through anything, and this year the sound of my own snoring has jolted me awake more frequently than in any other cinematic year of my lifetime. I always have at least some written comments to make about movies throughout the year and then again at the end of the year, but this year I’m starting to fear that it might be the year that I end up having nothing much to say at all, so I think this is probably the best point in 2026 for me to attempt to articulate why exactly that is. It’s a kind of cultural precipice (and, moreover, a critical precipice) that I feel like we’ve been approaching for a very long time, for most of my adult life to be honest, and now the fateful edge may finally have arrived. What’s the point of criticism if we ultimately reach the stage where there’s no longer anything that’s worth writing critically about?

I really kind of hate to invoke Kane Parsons’ mostly dreadful Backrooms, but it’s the most obvious thing to turn to after having rounded the bleak corner from that opening paragraph. It’s almost embarrassing to have to point it out: mainstream cinema (which quite rapidly devolved into the only sort of cinema we really access) has now largely become that endless labyrinth of grim indistinguishable rooms and hallways where everything looks deadeningly the same, a self-consciously horrifying prefabricated hedgework maze of disconnection and dissociation. Not that the film itself has some type of durable analytical framework to approach those ideas in any useful way. It’s simply (and overly simply) a blunt example and symptom of the selfsame cultural deadlock that’s produced it, or given rise to it, or rather, sunk and lowered it as far as it’s been sunk. Somehow improbably, an even worse example came out in American cinemas a bit earlier this year, a Japanese film called Exit 8, in which a guy walks around endless identical white tiled corridors trying to find his way out of a subway pedestrian tunnel. I don’t care whatsoever that these films originated as internet phenomena or video games or whatever. That very lack of any serious or meritorious or educated provenance, and the increasing distance from its own historical sense of echolocation that instead results in a form of infinite unfolding simulation, is exactly what all of the postmodern theorists theorized is where we’d now wind up, and so we have.

Each spring I teach a course on music lyricism, and the most difficult aspect of it is getting the students to listen intently to songs with some intricacy of thematic meaning, structure, or songcraft, and then to analyze even briefly what makes it intricate and how. They’re so accustomed to listening to and watching things only in brief snippets that I have to keep the pace moving swiftly in order to huddle them together inside the boat, which is fine by me since I can row us alongside and past more songs and lyrics that way. I encourage them to bring in whatever interests them in any way on the days that they present songs they’ve selected, rather than forcing them to stay within any sort of rubric, almost as a way to create formal contrasts that they might or might not notice. While any kind of immersion is good in these days of continual distraction (though sometimes it’s cleverly disguised as meditation), in the realm of cinema I think it’s even more important that it be worthwhile immersion, the kind that wakes you up as it envelops you because if there’s one thing that I can assure you of after watching pretty much every single cinematic release so far this year, it’s that our cohesion to forms in a truly generative sense is actively fading; I would argue it’s even willfully fading. The more complacent you are, the more they can continue to sell you at far too high a price.

How strange then, and strangely sensible, after making us essentially strangers to ourselves, that the outcome and ultimate downfall of it all would be a glaringly obvious cultural narcissism, wanting to see only your own face in something: that’s what’s funny enough to laugh at, or sad enough to cry about, because if I can’t see myself in this thing, then why am I paying to sit here? There has been almost no cinema this year for me that’s represented any kind of serious travel, intellectual or spiritual travel. As if seriousness or rigor or historical reference to form (or even an authentic challenge to that form) would too easily upset the simplistic tidiness of capitalist narcissism, which has reset the terms in such a way that the form can only function as you’ve come to expect it to commercially, no matter how ironically you title it Spider-Man: Brand New Day because there’s not a single fucking new thing about it, nor do you want there to be. Or maybe Avengers: Doomsday can just obliterate it all, set a continent of wildfires around the endlessly skull-numbing repetition, or you can just suddenly kill off James Bond at the end of the last movie if he no longer suits your purposes or your bankroll, who cares if he ever comes back or not, even The Odyssey isn’t worth reviving if all you have is a grand technician like a wizard of detritus to knock stuff around with bombastic drumming while sucking the poetry out of all of it since poetry’s not worth writing anymore anyway, but people sure will shell out $30 or more to pack every seat in front of the wall-to-wall IMAX screen to convince themselves that they’re inside Plato’s cave and it's art. Give all of that money to the small people out there who’ll still know how to take you on an actual journey, an experience that’s the psychological opposite of your own, one that’s not wrapped up in the blindly inherited narrative that you demand.

When I was in college back in the 1990s, I worked in the box office a couple of nights a week at a cinema in Cambridge that was at the time the largest art cinema in the country, nine screens that showed nothing but art films and independent fare all day every day. Now that cinema is showing only all of the same junk that every other cinema is showing, and for only about half of the day most days of the week. You still had over 200 cinematic releases per year that were indie films or more artfully crafted only 20 years ago now. This year you’ll be lucky to have barely 50 or so at the very most, and all of those I’ll have to watch at the art museum in Portland. So I don’t want to hear anything about how we’re in some cinematic golden age, or wow look at the young people returning to cinemas in bigger numbers because of something as comically dumb as Obsession or as much of a blatant substandard retread as Project Hail Mary, and don’t even pretend that to some degree the more artful and more culturally crucial films aren’t dying because “well they’re being made just not widely distributed anymore, you’ll just have to catch them at film festivals instead” since that’s clearly equivalent to some kind of death. People better start teaching future creators in the right ways again, and fast, yet even that’s too hopeful. More likely I’ll be back to scanning the underground, not for the exit, but for those rarer ways to burrow in more deeply. It’s still there in quick flashes, if you take the time and have the patience and insight to look for it. Robert Aramayo’s performance in I Swear. The opening credits sequence of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. André De Shields setting the pace of heartbreak in the recent cinematic release of Hadestown. Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen in The Invite. Leo Woodall in Tuner, Rose Byrne in Tow, Paul Rudd in Power Ballad. So much that nearly nobody is seeing because we now live in a culture almost entirely devoid of curiosity and adventure, just sell sell sell sell sell, and so everything with a heart behind it gets missed.

Monday, June 15, 2026

28th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 10th - 14th, 2026)

I’m happy to report that this was a routinely strong year at the annual film fest in Provincetown, with documentaries again leading the pack for me, along with a variety of distinctive narrative features. I even laughed along with spirited audiences at the campy sex comedies on Friday and Saturday night; past audiences have sometimes asked for some lighter fare to be included in the line-up, and well, they got it. Even this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award recipient, Ryan Murphy, fulfilled that request as the first recipient of the award to receive it mainly for a body of work in mainstream television rather than cinema, a feat that John Waters commented on in their conversation on stage at Town Hall on Saturday afternoon. If getting to ask Ryan Murphy some questions about TV shows like Glee and American Horror Story doesn’t appease the masses, then it’s unlikely that anything else will.

That pivot into the realm of television marks a particular moment in the current trends and evolution of cinema as well, perhaps. There’s plenty of discussion at the moment about the surprise runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession, horror films by young directors that have drawn younger audiences back to theaters. John Waters asked Ryan Murphy about that, too, of course, and they both agreed that getting a successful film made for relatively little money while exponentially increasing ticket sales at cinemas certainly must be seen as a commendable endeavor, though Murphy also remarked that a phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project turned out to be less an innovative pivotal point artistically and more of an inspiration for plenty of insipid copycat movies that simply ripped off its artisanal hand-held camera, perspective-based concept.

All of that industry-level talk aside, I was glad that my first film out of the gate at the festival last Wednesday afternoon, Matty Wishnow’s insightful documentary The Last Critic, was so enjoyable since it was the first time that the festival has held film screenings prior to the opening night feature. I wrote a weekly music review column for a newspaper a little over twenty years ago now, so it was fun to hear Christgau as the “dean” of American rock critics comment at length on the development of his own tastes and critical style. Famous for his Consumer Guide and its graded capsule reviews of significant albums, and equally infamous for his trenchant takes on albums that he deems insignificant, Christgau is more humorous and self-effacing on camera than the tenor of his reviews may imply. Because he’s a voluminous collector and a true music fan, the film works to boost the viewer’s trust in him as a guiding critical source. Christgau claims there are only two criteria to become a critic: you have to know what you like, and you have to be able to explain why you like it, no matter how "completely disgraceful" the reasons are. Therefore, the most useful commentators in the documentary are often other music critics such as Ann Powers, maybe even more than the musicians who are interviewed, from the great Randy Newman to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.