Das Lied zum Sonntag

Placement - Insect

  

The End of the Road in Poker Face

“If you ask me a question and I lie, who are you having a conversation with? Nobody.”

Spoilers for the second season of Poker Face!

2025 has already been a great year for television, if only because the final season of Andor and the first season of The Pitt were so good, and between the two are radically different approaches to how a season of television can work that both succeed wildly. Michael Clayton’s Tony Gilroy (I mention the film because it gets its accolades in Poker Face, as the greatest film ever made for Anne in A New Lease on Death) turns Andor into what can be most accurately described as four full-length films, split up into episodes – maybe television reluctantly made by a film director, and yet it works. The Pitt, with its unique format, reforms the tired hospital drama into something that feels radically new, an ode to the idea that self-imposed constraints (each episode is an hour of a very, very long shift, and we don’t follow anyone home unless home happens to be inside the hospital) can yield awesome results. They both fulfilled some kind of need that I had for storytelling this year, and they both feel made for this moment in time, sharing an urgency of concern about community and working towards something elusive (meaningful resistance against an overwhelmingly powerful regime, dignity and humanity in the face of limited resources and the cruelty of managerial principles applied to essential services) together, frequently at dire cost to the individual. 
There’s a reason why the main thing that has been able to break through or emotionally touch me, in terms of narrative, has been stories about characters who try in spite of overwhelming odds, and it’s the same reason for why I’ve spent the last few months (realistically, all the months since Trump’s inauguration) watching Star Trek, old and new: it feels hopeful, because even when there’s catastrophic failure and terrible loss in these stories, they are about making the attempt regardless, holding on to the idea that it matters to try. It’s rarely the institutional idealism that sways me with Star Trek, because my first love is Deep Space Nine which had a much more cynical view of the civilising potential of the Federation – it’s the beauty of seeing colleagues who are friends (and lovers, and sometimes rivals) come together with their complicated feelings and individual passions and talents to do their best at a shared goal. 

This is a very long-winded introduction into a reckoning about the great villain reveal at the end of Poker Face’s second season left me mostly sad and emotionally exhausted. Poker Face is a rare example of appointment TV that works beautifully as a week-by-week show and makes me deeply nostalgic about when I was a child and would occasionally catch bits of Columbo, watched by grown-ups, on a weekend night. It isn’t a cozy show in the sense of being emotionally unchallenging – there have been many devastating moments throughout its two seasons – but there is a deep comfort in a show that has a clear concept determining its narrative arc, from witnessing a crime to figuring out how Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale will be roped into solving it, and how her ability to tell if someone is lying will help her discover the culprit, who is already known to the viewer. We’re lucky to live through Natasha Lyonne’s re-emergence into an era that gives her the perfect material: nobody else could play Charlie Cale, and capture her curiosity about people and joy at connecting with them as well as she does. It’s such an unlikely quality to have, for a character who has spent so much time on the run, who has encountered so much moral depravity, who keeps losing people who are close to her. Just in this season, there’s Katie Holmes’ Greta (in Last Looks), who is about to embark on a new life of freedom after being trapped in an unhappy marriage, only to be killed before she can leave. There’s Charlie’s romance with Corey Hawkins’ Bill (in One Last Job), who is killed in a botched robbery after their first date. Not only must it be near impossible to have any trust in people if you have the ability to identify every single lie that they tell you, but the most harrowing fact of Charlie’s life is that she seems to doom almost anyone she cares about, and in spite of all that grief and loss, she keeps on. She’s witnessed the horrors of human selfishness and cruelty (Giancarlo Esposito’s Fred, killing his wife and turning her into a vinyl recording of a song she has always hated – and Alia Shawkat’s whole deal in A New Lease on Death, and the gerbil-murdering demon child in Sloppy Joseph) and still goes into every new situation with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of someone who is endlessly fascinated by people and their stories. 
Patti Harrison’s Alex is only introduced late in the season, when Charlie settles down in New York for a beat thanks to a kindness by her only other steady companion, Good Buddy, a heard but not seen Steve Buscemi, but she makes an impact beyond the four episodes she’s in. Alex seems created for Charlie, specifically: she does not lie, a perfect companion for someone who can’t be lied to. They also share a certain loneliness: Alex’ compulsive truth-telling isolates her just as much as Charlie’s inherent lie-detecting. Alex is upbeat, eager to make a friend – Charlie is hesitant as first, specifically because bad things happen to people she allows close – but by the end of the season, they’re a two-act, not just an oyster-shucking duo (Charlie’s even more hesitant about that business venture, but she shows up for her new bud) but also crime-solving together. There is something about both of their energies: Charlie’s gruffness, Alex’ enthusiasm – that combines into a kind of magic that I thought would carry over into the next season, if Poker Face should get renewed. In short, I was fully signed up to watch these two solve crimes together for the foreseeable future, for Charlie to have a companion going forward.
What happened instead is summarised perfectly within the show: instead of a Watson, Charlie gained a Moriarty. It was glorious to watch the switch, because Patti Harrison was so good at it: she revealed how she targeted Charlie with the intention to prove that she could beat the human lie detector. As the world’s best assassin, she was ready to end everything for lack of a new challenge, because everything else had grown too boring: until she was given a new job that hinged on her ability to deceive Charlie Cale. Instead of a beautiful symmetry of a truth-teller teaming up with someone who can detect lies, we get the only person in the world capable of lying to Charlie becoming her nemesis. Maybe it’s what the show needed, just like super-hero stories require kryptonite so their heroes can be fallible when required. Even in the face of this betrayal, Charlie’s main reaction to it was, astonishingly, a kind of gladness that she had provided a reason for “Alex” to live, a reaction that summarises her whole character. But there was something about the twist that stung: disappointment for Charlie, being robbed of a kind of goodness that seemed so impossible to start off with that I should have seen it coming, but at the same time felt like a little gift in a year where they are thin on the ground. So, at the end of the second season, Charlie is back on the road, now without her Barracuda but with Natasha Lyonne’s real-life dog Rootbeer: and Alex’ body is nowhere to be found in the wreckage of the car. 

(2023-), created by Rian Johnson, starring Natasha Lyonne.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Dylan Atlantis feat. FRIDAY* - Thought You'd Know By Now 

Reading List: June.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Fergus Fleming: Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole. 

Stefan Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers.

 

Fiction: 

 

Stephen King: Never Flinch. 

Caitlin Starling: The Starving Saints.

Mac Crane: A Sharp Endless Need.

Ocean Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness.

V.E. Schwab: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.

Marie Rutkoski: Ordinary Love.  

S.A. Cosby: King of Ashes. 
Shoshana von Blanckensee: Girls Girls Girls.  

 

Films: 

 

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922, F.W. Murnau).

The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor, George W. Hill).

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926, Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch).

La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer).

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024, Rungano Nyoni).

The Wedding Banquet (2025, Andrew Ahn). 

Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler). 

 

Shows: 

 

Dept. Q, Season One.

The Better Sister, Season One.

Bay of Fires, Season Two. 

Hal and Harper, Season One. 

Squid Game, Season Three.  

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season One, Two. 

 

Other: 

 

Japanese Breakfast live @ Sydney Opera House. 

Favourite Books I've Read This Year (in progress)

Non-Fiction: 

Manisha Sinha: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.
Wright Thompson: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.
Richard Flanagan: Question 7.

Fiction: 

Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys.

Mac Crane: A Sharp Endless Need.

Marie Rutkoski: Ordinary Love.

Emily St. James: Woodworking. 
Ocean Vuong: The Emperor of Gladness.  

Trang Thanh Tran: They Bloom at Night.

Emily Tesh: The Incandescent.

Katherine Arden: The Warm Hands of Ghosts. 

Liz Moore: The God of the Woods. 

Liz Moore: The Unseen World. 

I read The Nickel Boys just before watching this year's cinematic adaptation by RaMell Ross, which will be somewhere on the top of my favourite films this year: this is a beautiful, painful book about two boys caught up in the horrors of a fictionalised version of the Florida's Dozier School for Boys, the same setting as 2023's The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. The transit from the gentleness, pride and support that Elwood Curtis experiences growing up under the tender care of his grandmother into the system of abuse and violence at the "school" he ends up in through no fault of his own is jarring - his inability to realise that the rules he has internalised all his life about fairness and equity do not apply here, his focus on truth and justice, doom him, as much as his friend Turner tries to guide him. 

Trang Thanh Tran's follow-up to She is a Haunting, this year's They Bloom at Night, is set in a fishing community on the Gulf of Mexico, where a mysterious algae has literally transformed life after a Hurricane. There is a sense that the world has already ended there in some way, that the cataclysm is in the past and the remaining inhabitants are slowly coming to terms with it: Noon, daughter of a shrimper, tries to solve mysterious disappearances in the town with the help of the corrupt harbourmaster's daughter Covey, but also begins realising that she herself has been transforming into something not entirely human anymore ("a story about a monster learning to love herself") - and the story is very much about the question of what is monstrous, in a world where truly monstrous acts are being committed by people because they fear what they do not understand. 

I came to Liz Moore's fiction after starting to watch the adaptation of Long Bright River, starring Amanda Seyfried. The two novels I picked up are The God of the Woods and The Unseen World, and the range between them is truly amazing. The first one is the story of two disappearances in a manor and summer camp - one in the past, the other in 1975. The lost children are siblings, son and daughter to the rich family that employs most of the people in this part of the Adirondacks, and in revealing the details of the investigation and the people connected to it, Moore tells a story about class (specifically the relationship between the blue collar workers and the rich who depend on their labour, in spite of their claims of "self-reliance", literally the name they've chosen for their estate) and misogyny, focusing on women struggling to be heard and to have agency over their lives. 

The Unseen World is a marvel that reminded me of the best of Richard Powers' fiction: the story of a single father raising a daughter, Ada, by himself. Ada grows up surrounded by her father's colleague at a computer research institute in the 1980s - her father is heading a team that is building an early version of artificial intelligence called ELIXIR. It's an unconventional education that centres curiosity that prepares her poorly for transferring to a regular school later on, where she struggles to understand the societal rules of teenage cliques. When her father begins exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, Ada realises that he has kept secrets from her, and she begins a journey to try and find out who he really is. I'm excited that both of these books have been picked up to be turned into television shows. 

n+1: We Have Always Lived in the Convention, January 10, 2025.

coda.: The death of truth was by design, January 14, 2025. 

Vulture: There Is No Safe Word. How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades, January 13, 2025.

Atmos: The World’s Northernmost Coal Mine Closing Is Good News… Right?, January 14, 2025.

.coda: Trump, Museveni and the anti-LGBT agenda, January 31, 2025.

Wired: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover, February 2, 2025. 

New York Review: Darfur: A War Within a War, February 2, 2025.

The Guardian: Wall Street Journal editorial calls Trump tariffs ‘dumbest trade war in history’, February 3, 2025.

.coda: Shattering the Overton Window, February 7, 2025.

n+1: Full-Throated Explicit Dehumanization, February 10, 2025. 

Undark: Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’, February 19, 2025.

.coda: How the West lost the war it thought it had won, February 24, 2025. 

Reactor: Severance Is the Future Tech Bros Want, February 26, 2025.

Atmos: On the Anniversary of Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier’s Release Sparks Reflection and Hope, February 27, 2025.

The New Yorker: The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus, March 17, 2025.

Vulture: My Cool Friend Michelle, March 18, 2025. 

Atmos: Australia’s Heat Is Rising. So Is Its Climate Inequality., April 17, 2025. 

The Guardian: Daria Kasatkina: ‘If I wanted to live a free, open life I couldn’t do it in Russia’, April 25, 2025. 

The Verge: Wandering Souls, April 2025.

Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies, May 4, 2025. 

Dissent: Schengen Surveillance, May 2025. 

The Guardian: Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says, May 7, 2025.

The New Yorker: In Defense of Despair, May 16, 2025.

New York Review: Gaza: Starvation and Exile, May 18, 2025. 

LitHub: Michelle de Kretser: “I ask you—I beg you—to join us in speaking out for Palestine.”, May 30, 2025.

New York Magazine: Crimes of the Century, June 2025. 

Links: 17/06/25

Politics: 

I spent the last week reading Stefan Zweig's posthumously published autobiography The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, in German). It's a tragic book in the sense that the author writes about his deep affection for a world that no longer exist - the Habsburg Vienna of his early years - and from a position of indefinite exile in Brazil with no prospect of ever returning to his home. Zweig died in Petrópolis in 1942. What struck me about the book is how Zweig reckons, as a self-declared non-political artist who is driven by reverence for great masters of the arts, many of whom he name-drops in the book (and has long-standing friendships with), with the radical changes in the world after WW1. Zweig approaches this not as a politically engaged person or activist, but as a (culturally and socially - there are sequences in the 20s that find him horrified at the prospect of women cutting their hair short and men becoming more feminine, and a very bourgeois - he's only in his thirties at this point! - outrage at queerness) conservative, widely read and highly respective establishment artist who realises bit by bit what is happening and how dangerous it is becoming - for the most part perched in Salzburg (there isn't much reflection on Austria's homegrown Dollfuß/Schuschnigg authoritarianism that made the ground so fertile for the Nazi takeover) and watching what is occurring across the border in Bavaria. The two avenues we have now, in 2025, to diagnose the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, is comparisons with the past (not available to Zweig) and keeping track of the things that would have been unthinkable and out-of-the-ordinary but have now become normal (from Zweig's perspective: the deliberate cruelty of the new laws, the deliberate use of bureaucracy to terrorise people, his shunning by society). As much as I found parts of the book frustrating, especially his rose-coloured view of a past from the perspective of someone extremely privileged and not really considering how other classes or people in other parts of the empire may have experiences the same years, I've found it useful as a document for reference. 

The great In Bed With the Right podcast has been running a series of episodes that tracks the Nazi regime month-by-month through 1933 as those months are passing in 2025 with the same goal of focusing on how quickly the concept of "normal" radically changed and how it affected people. It's been in my mind while watching the videos and reading the reports about the protests against the escalating Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Los Angeles, which are targeting regular people who are going to work, daycare centres, or attending church services. The decision to go over the Governor of California's head to federalise the California National Guard (a federal judge's order to overturn this has been blocked by the US appeals court), which hasn't happened since Lyndon Johnson sent troops to protect civil rights protestors in Alabama, feels like a test case to see how far the judiciary has been undermined and how willing the country is to tolerate a militarisation of the streets (Trump also deployed active-duty Marines to LA). The disproportional response has highlighted the level of violence deployed by police against peaceful protestors and journalists. 

In Minnesota, a politically motivated gunman disguised as a police officer killed Democratic former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and attempted to assassinate another Democratic lawmaker, John Hoffman. 

 

And into this context of rising political violence and a changed international order comes Israel's bombing campaign against Iran, "which began with attacks on air defences, nuclear sites and the military chain of command, but appears to have drifted towards a war of attrition focused on Iran’s oil and gas industry and on the capital."

 

Pop Culture: 

 

I've been re-watching all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over the first half of 2025, which has been my first full revisiting of the show since I originally watched it when it came out, and it still stands out as the most ambitious show to ever come out of the Star Trek universe. It's almost prophetic in its recasting of Starfleet and the Federation as a less idealistic construct than before (or since) - here, there's a secret organisation within that is willing to commit genocide against an opponent (it is almost prophetic as a show that ended before 9/11 happened but shows the length that a threatened institution will go to in the face of an enemy that can't be clearly identified), and so many episodes of the show focus on the shades of grey within a resistance movement against a brutal military occupation (and then there's episodes like Far Beyond the Stars, which stand out as some of the best television ever made). I've followed it up by catching up with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which goes the opposite direction: it's a love letter to the original show, the idea of scientific research and beauty (sometimes horror) of diversity in these new frontiers, telling mostly self-contained stories (that frequently feel like they are, or are based on, short stories), with so much love and sense of humour and an unapologetic moral compass (one episode is essentially dedicated to the idea of asylum - the grace of an organisation that can grant it and provide safety, and the moral imperative to do so when asked). The cast is amazing throughout, but I think there's something particularly magical in Ethan Peck taking up such a beloved character and making him his own. I didn't expect to love it as much as I do but it functions like a balm without feeling like it ignores the world that has created it. It's strange to have this duality of Andor's second and final season, which feels like the most relevant season of television for this particular moment, and Strange New Worlds, a hopeful portrait of a different future that seems so impossible to reach now. 

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Connan Mockasin - Faking Jazz Together