I’m Not There review by Helena Fitzgerald

The looming arrival of a certain James Mangold–directed biopic inspires Helena Fitzgerald to write about her admiration for Todd Haynes’s earlier cinematic consideration of the same inscrutable subject, Mr. Bob Dylan. This review of I’m Not There goes beyond simple considerations on Haynes’s filmmaking to insightfully weigh in on Dylan himself and the way his very elusiveness became a special touchstone for Fitzgerald across the years. As usual with Fitzgerald’s writing, I’m continually struck by the almost offhand, wily comic observations that are also dazzlingly right and true, such as: “I’ll rush into the living room of my apartment wild-eyed to ask my unsuspecting husband ‘ok can I just say one thing about Dylan?’ What comes next is usually about 45 minutes of unbroken raving, which he puts up with and maybe even enjoys because love is a miracle and a sickness.” Fitzgerald published this on her own Letterboxd account.

The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis Of Bag Culture by Patrick Redford

As we plod through the fall of the American Empire, it is entirely possible that Haliey Welch will wind up the exemplar of every one of the accumulated fatal flaws in our rotting society. Rising to fame on the basis of comically crass viral moment, she has parlayed her fifteen minutes into all manner of celebrity moneymaking schemes, including cryptocurrency hucksterism that resulted in a spectacular flameout. I don’t mean to imply that she merits condemnation. Instead, she’s correctly playing the rigged capitalism game that was handed down to her generation. Patrick Redford writes about it for Defector.

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement, Part Deux by Tim Quirk

I regularly think about an essay written by Tim Quirk, frontman of the band Too Much Joy, and self-published around fifteen years ago. In the piece, Quirk used his intimate professional knowledge of how the then-nascent streaming music business worked to reveal exactly how his band’s former label was clearly and ruthlessly ripping them off. I’ve long known that music industry executives were proudly corrupt in the treatment of the artists that make them money, but the piece made it real and specific in a way that was genuinely revelatory for me. All these years past, Quirk provides a follow-up that is just as brutal in laying bare the laughable practices of the corporation that once fed false promises to he and his bandmates. The essay is published, like its predecessor, on the Too Much Joy website.