
What the Great Teen Movies Taught Us
Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, in which a fresh-faced McConaughey appears as Wooderson, the guy who graduated years back but still hangs with the high-school kids, is that kind of teen movie: eternally jubilance-inspiring. Set in 1976 and released in 1993, it's a paean to the let-loose ethos of a certain decade of American high school. And boy do these kids let loose.
On the final day of the school year, a group of rising seniors in small-town Texas set out with custom-made paddles to whack the bottoms of soon-to-be freshmen, and then take a couple of them to a 'beer bust' out by a soaring light tower. Along the way, they shoot some pool, cruise the town, smoke joint after joint. If the film has a point, it's that the teens want to party all night and still wake up in time to buy Aerosmith tickets in the morning. (The last frame shows them driving into the sunrise.)
What makes Dazed and Confused so pleasurable is its adherence to a devil-may-care freedom just inside the bounds of believability. You can really imagine a group of mid-'70s high-school boys throwing a bowling ball through a car window. You can really envision (especially if you went to my high school, which held on to similar hazing rituals well into the 2000s) senior girls screaming at rising ninth graders, ordering them to lie on the ground and 'fry like bacon' while being squirted with ketchup and mustard. And if you're as jealous of a '70s upbringing as I am (largely thanks to Dazed and Confused ), you can daydream about a version of adolescent life with nary an adult to correct you or even shake their head. Only the school's football coach tries to hold the line on drugs, and he's roundly mocked. Wild partying is just a rite of initiation.
As Bruce Handy—a journalist, critic, and fellow Dazed and Confused fan—writes in his new book, Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, relaxing the strictures on kids in the throes of puberty and letting them call the shots has been the modus operandi of the teen filmscape for decades. Teenagers coalesced as a demographic group and a niche market in the 1940s and soon became box-office-boosting conveyors of cool. By the time the first batches of Baby Boomers were graduating from high school in the mid-1960s, teens had arrived as 'the prime movers of American popular culture,' Handy writes.
Over the ensuing six decades, 'teenagers and teen movies would come of age hand in hand,' stirring moral panic along the way. In Handy's astute and spirited account, grown-ups live in fear of the culture that teens have helped create—unnerved again and again by what they learn on-screen about an age cohort hell-bent on charting its own detour on the way to adulthood. 'They're just afraid that some of us might be having too good a time,' the coolest kid in Dazed and Confused concludes about his elders. As the genre has evolved, their unease has extended well beyond that.
From the start, Handy argues, the on-screen adventures in teen movies have been targeted to a double audience of rebellious teens and anxious adults. Kindly caretakers of youths in prewar times (Judge Hardy in the Hardy films helps his aw-shucks son navigate chaste first kisses, etc.) retreat from view. Early-1950s headlines such as 'Youth Delinquency Growing Rapidly Over the Country' are the backdrop to Jim Stark (James Dean) in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), roaring across the California landscape in his Mercury Coupe, morally adrift and crying out for adult guidance he never gets. Posters billed the movie as a challenging drama of today's juvenile violence, savvily marketing it to hell-raisers and handwringers alike.
Handy, who presides as a proudly pro-teen Boomer, is a clear-eyed critic who's not about to buy into the panic himself. Digging into movie backstories, budgets, ticket sales, and social trends, he is interested in how the films repeatedly glamorize adolescent acting-out in charged and timely ways.
He situates the Beach Party series of 1963–65 ('crap, but interesting crap') amid early-'60s worries that teens would take over the culture. Watch out, warned a 1963 book called Teen-Age Tyranny; they're 'permanently' imposing 'teenage standards of thought, culture, and goals.' Or lack of goals. The seven Beach Party films feature airheads enjoying sandy weekend fun, no teachers or parents in sight—though an anthropologist on the sidelines scrutinizes youthful mating habits through a telescope. The fact that no sex was in sight either (even visible navels were deemed off-limits) didn't stand in the way of ad copy that deployed titillation and terror. 'When 10,000 Bodies Hit 5,000 Blankets …' invited thousands of viewers to fill in the blank with their imagination.
In Handy's telling, teen culture rapidly became a lucrative feedback loop: Teenagers repeat the behaviors they see on-screen, Hollywood in turn tailors scripts to shifting concerns about kids, and the results both lure teens to theaters and encourage further antics—rattling adults even more in the process.
Surging late-'70s drug-use statistics dovetail with Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), based on the year Crowe spent undercover at a real California high school. Its memorable pothead character, Spicoli (a young Sean Penn), literally rolls out of a smoke-filled VW van on his first day of school—and has the last laugh, flouting the history teacher who tries to set the wasted kid straight. But the movie makes room for more sober realism too, with its teen-pregnancy subplot and kids juggling jobs. These teens aren't just hedonistic idlers; they've prematurely saddled themselves with grown-up burdens they can't always handle.
And in John Hughes's films, teens do what adults dread most: cast blame on their elders. In The Breakfast Club (1985), the kids consigned to Saturday-morning detention (a microcosm of high-school social tribes) conclude that it's their 'wintry, stone-faced' parents, as Handy puts it, who 'are the root of all their children's problems.' Hughes, who insisted on happy endings, grants the students victory: The film wraps with a freeze-frame of a freshly released detainee's defiantly raised fist—and it belongs to Bender (Judd Nelson), the disaffected, angry loner most inclined to stick it to the grown-ups.
More recently, the flavor of the moral panic has changed in a way that Handy doesn't quite latch on to. Adults were once afraid of teens: the greasers of Rebel, the boppers of Beach Party, the stoners of Fast Times, the screwups of The Breakfast Club. They were threats to the order of things, both too grown-up to control and not grown-up enough to properly wield control themselves. But since the arrival of the 21st century, teen films have taken a turn. Adults have become afraid for teens, and newly distressed about their own role (or lack thereof) in the troubles facing them. The mode of anxiety has shifted, and the culture of concern is playing catch-up.
As A ninth grader in April 1999, I came home one Tuesday to a news bulletin that showed a boy dangling from a window at Columbine High School, desperately trying to escape two schoolmates on a shooting rampage. That day, real-life teenagers entered a new era, one of victimhood. The fraught terrain has steadily expanded since, and now encompasses fears about social media's pernicious influence on teens, their growing anxiety and loneliness, their future in a polarized society on a warming planet.
Handy does not underrate the bleak fallout in teen films of 'our current wretched century.' He also rightly identifies the rise of 'girl power' as a force in teen culture, and the popularity and quality of girl-centered movies, even as old-school sex romps (the American Pie franchise) never disappear. Tina Fey's 2004 film, Mean Girls, is near the top of his list of best teen films, as it is of mine, and he embeds it in a discussion of articles and parenting guides (Fey drew on Rosalind Wiseman 's Queen Bees & Wannabes) that sounded the alarm about aggression and insecurity in the world of American girlhood. But in emphasizing bullying's links to the usual teen-film theme of high-school tribalism, Handy stops short of recognizing the portrayal of it, both comic and horrifying, as part of a larger shift toward incisive psychological probing that skewed dark: When Fey watched the movie with test audiences, she took note that girls were responding to it less as a teen movie and more 'like a reality show.' They weren't 'exactly guffawing.' Recently out of high school myself at the time, though I laughed, I also remember wincing at the no-safe-spaces aura of the cruelty.
In his choice of other 21st-century films to focus on, Handy veers away from depictions of teens whose newly stressful struggles for autonomy portend dire consequences. He omits Sofia Coppola's excellent and grim feature-length directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides (based on Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel and set in the mid-'70s), which was released with a sickening thud in 2000—a bookend of sorts to the freewheeling laxity of Dazed and Confused, set in the same era. When 13-year-old Cecilia, the youngest of five spectrally beautiful sisters whose severe parents keep them cloistered, throws herself out a second-story window in the middle of a rare party at their house, she is the first of the girls to successfully take her own life; the rest follow. With the haze of inexplicable death clouding every sequence, The Virgin Suicides reset the barometric pressure of teen movies. Who could or would protect these kids from themselves?
Instead, Handy homes in on the biggest teen blockbusters of the 21st century— The Twilight Saga (2008–12) and The Hunger Games (2012–23)—two series, one fantasy and the other science fiction, in which teens succeed in summoning rare strength not just to manage their own hormones but to deal with their elders' destructive drives. The themes are familiar: sexual initiation for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) in Twilight and peer competition for Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in The Hunger Games. But a vampire boyfriend for Bella and gladiatorial combat in a totalitarian dystopia for Katniss—and ultimate wind-in-the-hair domestic bliss for both—leave the current social realities of teen life behind.
The pressures of a hyper-meritocratic, social-media-saturated world surface elsewhere, with girls again in the foreground. Handy mentions the hilariously incisive Booksmart (2019) only in passing, but its two super-stressed-out, overachieving Los Angeles seniors, Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), embody a strain of contemporary, and contradictory, fears about teenagers: Have they been so intent on molding themselves into some optimized version of young adulthood that the only thing they're headed for is burnout or disappointment? If they just chill, though, what about their future productivity? On the last day of school, the two girls are busy resolving student-council-budget issues—only to be jolted into questioning their rule-following zeal. Together, they dare to let loose before it's too late. Booksmart delivers a giddy quest-for-a-party ride, while also feeling like a heady glimpse into a teen therapist's session notes.
For poignant scrutiny of the digital revolution's repercussions for teens, Handy might have explored the sweetly rendered Eighth Grade (2018), which arms a fledgling adolescent with her own camera. Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a painfully shy and insecure 13-year-old, is glued to screens, a voyeur obsessively scrolling for glimpses of lives that seem intimidatingly alien and glamorous. At the same time, she's a vlogger, posting wishfully affirmative videos online. Set during the last week of the school year, the movie deftly captures a kid caught between the digital and real worlds, trapped in her own head and stranded on the margins of an inaccessible peer scene. Finally daring to show up at a pool party, she doesn't reach for beer or pot; she has a panic attack.
I couldn't help comparing the scene of Kayla, in an all-wrong bright-green one-piece, anxiously descending into the pool, head down as if to make herself invisible, with a memorable moment in Fast Times: the sexually-savvy-beyond-her-years Linda (Phoebe Cates), clad in a fire-engine-red bikini, majestically emerging from the water, a symbol of an era freighted with such different fears.
By now, in the TikTok-teen era (vlogging Kayla was a little ahead of her time), the feedback-loop premise of Handy's history shows signs of being under strain. Teens, once Hollywood's lucrative market, no longer flock to theaters. And the place where their adventures are playing out isn't as readily accessible as it once was, even to hyper-hovering adults. If teens are still showing up at parties, they're on their phones there; if they still venture out to whatever malls they can find, they're on their phones there. When they're at school, they're mostly on their phones there, too.
And what they are consuming is content produced by other teens—stories and TikToks and straight-to-camera diatribes more real to them than any film written by adults and shot through their anxious, or nostalgic, lens. The cohort that took over mass culture more than half a century ago has now built a sprawling culture for itself, by itself. In 2025, the most potent media produced about teenagers will likely emerge on those pocket-size life changers, and most grown-ups will never get wind of what's on display. How's that for something to worry about?
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Geek Vibes Nation
28 minutes ago
- Geek Vibes Nation
'Frailty' 4K UHD Blu-Ray Review - Bill Paxton Crafts One Of The Finest Psychological Thrillers Around
Frailty, Bill Paxton's striking directorial debut — now in chilling 4K for the first time — centers on the God's Hand Killer, who terrorized a small Texas community with his axe-wielding butchery. Years after the murders, Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) walks into an FBI office with a shocking revelation: he not only knows who the killer is, but where the bodies are buried. Fenton recounts how his father (Paxton) received an angelic vision commanding the destruction of demons in human form, and enlisted Fenton and his brother, Adam, to aid in the divine purge. What the boys witnessed tested the limits of their minds and souls, fusing family, retribution, and redemption in horrifying, unsettling ways. For thoughts on Frailty, please check out my thoughts on No Streaming Required: Video Quality Frailty debuts on 4K UHD Blu-Ray with a 2160p/Dolby Vision presentation in 1.85:1 which allows the film to look absolutely spectacular. The previous Blu-Ray released in 2009 looks awful in comparison with its ancient, processed master. At long last, this gem from Bill Paxton is being treated with the proper respect, and the results are astounding. The new 4K presentation unlocks an invaluable amount of detail in the smallest facets of the rustic production design, clothing, and makeup effects. The increase in detail is a blessing in the exploration of textures, including the beads of perspiration on foreheads. Skin tones appear to be consistent throughout and show a notable amount of facial detail including stubble and blood splatter. Color refinement is another area of significant improvement in comparison to the Blu-Ray thanks to the implementation of Dolby Vision. Colors look more natural and complex, especially with such lush greenery around the farm. The most worthwhile upgrade comes in the handling of the contrast. With so much of this narrative occurring at night or in shadows, it would be easy to succumb crush and banding, which it often does in the standard Blu-Ray presentation. The 4K UHD Blu-Ray shows off with particularly deep black levels with digital noise nearly completely absent from the screen. The presentation also holds up with a firm handling of the highlights that show no evidence of blooming. This is an unbelievable 4K UHD upgrade that is not to be missed. Audio Quality This disc gets an upgrade with a phenomenal Dolby Atmos presentation that entrenches you in this spiritual nightmare. Sounds are faithfully deployed with the sharpest directionality from the more thrilling moments to the interpersonal exchanges. The effective score from Brian Tyler flows through you to make you feel more unsettled than ever. The sound design is not required to deliver an action-packed assault, but it is appropriately lively in order to make everything feel authentic. The low end gets activated more so when there are sound effects such as thunder or when visions are triggered. The mix here is respectfully expanded with noble engagement of all the channels, so those with a proper system should be pleased. Dialogue is presented clearly without ever being overwhelmed by any of the competing sonic elements. This track is often immersive, such as the sounds of rain coming down from the overhead channels. Lionsgate has made this audio experience really sing. Optional English, English SDH, and Spanish subtitles are provided. Special Features This release comes in an incredible new Collector's Set exclusively at Lionsgate Limited that is quite fetching in person. The set features a hard slip box case and a printed reproduction of director Bill Paxton's complete original shooting script, with handwritten notes throughout. Video of the release can be found at the top of this review. Father Figure: A new 34-minute featurette that weaves in both new and archival interviews with Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, writer Brent Hanley, producer David Kirschner, producer David Blocker, Bill Paxton's son James Paxton, and more. In this piece, you get great insights into the production of the film, the directorial vision of Bill Paxton, the relationship between the performers, the music of the film, and more. Establishing Shot: A new seven-minute featurette that delves into the care put into the 4K restoration of the film. More Stories from the Frailty Set: Another new 19-minute featurette in which many of the subjects providing new interviews from the first piece relay more stories that could not fit neatly into that piece. There are great anecdotes about inviting James Cameron to watch the movie, Bill Paxton imparting acting wisdom to the young performers, and more. There is even a nice reunion between Matt O'Leary and Jeremy Sumpter. 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Even with its acclaim, it is an underrated piece of cinema. Lionsgate Home Entertainment has released a 4K UHD Blu-Ray that sports a top-tier A/V presentation and a valuable section of special features in lovely packaging. This is as respectful of a tribute to Bill Paxton as you could wish for. Highly Recommended Frailty is currently available to purchase exclusively at Lionsgate Limited on 4K UHD Blu-ray. Note: Images presented in this review are not reflective of the image quality of the 4K UHD Blu-Ray. Disclaimer: Lionsgate Home Entertainment has supplied a copy of this disc free of charge for review purposes. All opinions in this review are the honest reactions of the author.


Atlantic
4 hours ago
- Atlantic
Why No One Knows What's Happening Tonight
About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor'easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show's cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town? This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark's Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman's mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case's bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she'd recorded them. But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: 'New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus' reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker 's Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month. From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves. As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today's critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise 'discovery,' they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we're missing. The listings were my lodestar. And that star's orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith. Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He'd gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation. Time Out 'was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,' Smith told me. 'Nobody said, 'Oh, that obscure thing that's happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that's too weird.' I was basically told, 'List what's interesting; list what people will want to know about.'' A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic's pick. 'I had the privilege,' he said, 'of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.' One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith. These listings weren't just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: 'Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.' In its heyday, the Voice 's newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance. Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile. The demise of listings is 'tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,' the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that 'the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out' to see a gig: 'The immediate danger is that artists play and people don't know about it.' Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it's harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great. The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward 'poptimism,' a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough! But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism. In the 21 years since Sanneh's essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today 's hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down— 501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it's easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices. Indeed, much of today's cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people's contributions to the common good solely by 'the market value of the goods or services they sell.' In other words, covering what's popular doesn't just serve journalism's economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it's no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities. A reader might object: Aren't you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can't hack it in today's algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles' White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape music, no Rosalía's Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support. To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith's great gifts as an editor. 'He crafted listings,' Giovetti told me, 'in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.' You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire's founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and you've probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018. The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. 'On any given day,' Chinen told me, 'there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe's Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That's the garden. That's the plant mix that existed.' How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life? In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. 'The phone has stopped ringing,' he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it's important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too. Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context. Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues What's to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren't left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders. The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can't be readily calculated on a balance sheet. For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He's now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, 'I never really stopped.' Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.


Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Atlantic
A Gritty and Genuinely Readable Book
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily's Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what's keeping them entertained. Today's special guest is Luis Parrales, an assistant editor who has written about what the border-hawk Catholics get wrong and why the papacy is no ordinary succession. Luis is a new fan of the author Mario Vargas Llosa and a longtime listener of the singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. His other recommendations include 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan; The Bear; and anything by Conan O'Brien—whom he deems 'the king of American comedy.' The Culture Survey: Luis Parrales Best novel I've recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark — The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I've ever encountered. That's both because Vargas Llosa's crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience. I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven't already, read David Brooks's reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump's appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I've read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great. A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: 'If I Don't Hear From You Tonight,' by Courtney Barnett. Loud: 'Femininomenon,' by Chappell Roan. Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness. The television show I'm most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX's exquisite The Bear. The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O'Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he's always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn't have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a 'mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.' I've been keeping up with O'Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night's episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it's a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans. The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass's version of the hymn 'This Is My Song.' These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism: This is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine; but other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City. A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn't super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he's pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist. Only I discern— Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn. Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Week Ahead The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock) Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday) Essay The Mistake Parents Make With Chores Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with … Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I've been known to say, 'You live here!' as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes. More in Culture Catch Up on The Atlantic Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan's show Trump's Epstein denials are ever so slightly unconvincing, Jonathan Chait writes. ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship. Photo Album planned wedding date.