Ad Nauseam Presents: Screen Time

Your monthly media recommendation roundup

Clocking in at the hot take factory for Screen Time, your monthly roundup of media recommendations. I don’t pretend to be a tastemaker, I just like to participate.

Reads

The Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. After devouring the sleeper hit Apple TV show over the holidays, I immediately added the books they’re based on to my Libby queue. I haven’t had this much fun with a series in years — it’s about a ragtag team of British spies, rejected from MI5 for their poor performance at headquarters. Herron hones his characters with a sharp sense of humor but never loses an undercurrent of care for them, a balance that’s difficult to strike while continuing installments of a single story. A treat. (Bonus points for Gary Oldman’s performance as Jackson Lamb, a Cold War agent who came in from the cold to find himself the leader of MI5’s punishment post.)

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. I’ve spent the majority of my leftist reading life avoiding Klein because I thought she’d be too heady. Thankfully, I was wrong. I listened to this on audiobook, just as I did with Shock Doctrine, and I didn’t wish I’d had a print version to annotate like I do when I try listening to other political texts. Doppelganger touches on more than it suggests. It’s a fascinating deep dive into the right-wing media circus, what conservative radicalization looks like, and how neoliberalism warps the individualized perceptions we hold of our roles in the world.¹

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. Opt for the audiobook if you would like to hear Michelle Williams say “so pimp.” Justin Timberlake can choke.

Movies and TV

Theater Camp. The natural inheritor of the Christopher Guest mockumentary. Not for the easily secondhand embarrassed.

Past Lives. Before Sunrise for people who know how to shut up. I am not one of those people, so I can find quiet movies a little jarring. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo communicate so much through their characters’ silences, though, that I felt like I’d learned something by the end. John Magaro took me out of it, but that’s my only real complaint.

All of Us Strangers. I like this movie more the longer I think about it. It’s quiet in the same way Past Lives is quiet — it doesn’t suggest that any words linger in the air, begging to be spoken. Instead, the silence holds a conversation unto itself. I left the theatre feeling like I’d seen a possibility held by another world.

Naked Attraction. I have roped too many friends into watching this full frontal dating show. I pull it out like a party trick. It’s awful. Please watch it.

For Your Ears

February was a month of stellar covers: Paramore’s of “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads, for one. Royal Otis does “Murder on the Dance Floor." Remi Wolf and Norah Jones take on Adrianne Lenker.

Every month, I have a different Tribe Called Quest earworm. My Spotify algorithm has blessed me recently, and FORAGER is a new favorite thanks to Discover Weekly. And Waxahatchee is BACK! Hurray for the Riff Raff is BACK!

I heard the soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha for the first time at the Atlanta Symphony’s recent performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Here’s another Verdi performance of hers, from his opera Don Carlos.

Judging by Glennon Doyle’s book cover for Untamed, I thought I’d never engage with her work. From my high horse within sight lines of airport bookstores, she seemed like just another victim of the 2010s girlboss feminism I wanted to distance myself from. I listened to her podcast episode with Jia Tolentino on a whim last summer and the depth of her insights took me by surprise. Humbled, I added a few more episodes to my queue and then realized that internalized misogyny is real. This episode, “How Glennon Transforms Sadness Into Power,” is one of my recent favorites. Glennon, her wife Abby Wambach, and her sister arrive at a fundamental truth I haven’t heard addressed very often - that sadness is a hodgepodge of layered feelings, the most insistent of which is love for the world. As a person with clinically diagnosed chronic sadness, I know it goes deep, and I appreciate the internal equilibrium this podcast buffers me with. It makes me feel so held.

In Memoriam

Pouring one out for Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery in Goochland, Virginia, a landmark on the drive from Charlottesville to Richmond.

Also, maybe Kate Middleton?

1. Sidebar, but if you’re working to remedy a gap in historical understanding from your early childhood, Klein’s work on the 90s and aughts is a great place to start. It’s hard to remember that background noise from my elementary school days translated into real sociopolitical consequences. Single chapters of Shock Doctrine provide more clarity than I gleaned from an entire season of the (in my opinion, unfairly) much-beloved podcast Blowback, and it’s all the more relevant as Israel doubles down on its commitment to violence in Palestine.