The Good News, #5
Hello True Believers!
Welcome back to The Good News! We can’t wait for our show on 1/10/26 with Gila Teen and Reposer at the Black Buzzard!
But for now, The Good News:
Something fun to get lost in this week:
The board game Atmosfear, was a VHS game from my childhood that I'm almost certain we got from goodwill because it was cheap and weird looking. We tried to play it a few times but it was just way too complicated for our young minds. Years later I just randomly looked into it (and finding a copy on ebay for like $20), and holy smokes you won't guess how wild of a ride their full story is. Chad the bird touches on it in one of his recent sets, but there’s so much more outlined in their wikipedia. Check it out!
A nice thing to listen to this week:
Egyptian Hip Hop - Good Don't Sleep (2013)
Another another another late 2000's/early 2010's English band that I completely missed until recently, Egyptian Hip Hop admittedly has a pretty tone deaf name, especially considering that the Arab Spring movement happened a full year before the record came out. Setting that aside for a more adept critical theorist, Egyptian Hip Hop's full length record is one in another line of pretty darn good 2010's English Indie/Art Rock album from a band that only put out one record. I don't think I could put forward 4-5 paragraphs about them like in their pitchfork review, but I will say I rather liked it :)
Terrific thing to watch:
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
When I was a kid we would watch the movie The Night They Saved Christmas every year around the xmas holiday season (my wife and child thankfully put up with my continuing this tradition ... for now haha). There's no way to know why, we did so, but either way, we would, and every time Paul Williams would show up as the Elf Ed, my parents would remark "oh that's Paul Williams". It would take a lifetime before I understood why they would remark as such, and I'm glad I learned. Paul Williams has written so many wonderful, incredible, lovely songs throughout his storied career (he even did a collab with Daft Punk!), like The Muppet Movie soundtrack, the Bugsy Malone soundtrack, and the 1976 A Star is Born. Phantom of the Paradise is a different beast altogether. It's the story of a tortured songwriter being eaten up by the music industry, a story I'm sure Paul Williams knows more about than most (see: playing a supporting role as an elf in The Night They Saved Christmas). It's also, oddly enough, a bit of an adaptation of The Phantom Of the Opera. Which is a little curious, because if we loo
k at the cultural landscape since the 1980's, you'd think there was only one adaptation, the Andrew Lloyd Weber version. I have a pet theory that Weber didn't rip off Ken Hill's musical version, but William's. But I've got nothing but a suspicion to go off there, so take it all with a grain of salt. Just don't take anything heavier than that before diving into Phantom of the Paradise, or the wild ride you're in store for might be more than you're willing to spend...
A good read:
Nomen Ludi - Rob Beschizza (2010)
Nomen Ludi floats between potentially autobiographical and certainly nostalgia-punk, and it has haunted me since its first publication. I even went so far as to do a dramatic reading of it for my old radio show (if I can find the time to find that recording on Archive.org, I'll post it one day in the future). I revisit it every two or three years, and every year I feel like it only becomes more important ... but in distinctly different ways. It's not a long read, but if you're of a certain type and maybe even a certain age, there's enough in there to keep you hooked, maybe for longer than you're signing up for.
And finally, our weekly pic of the pup, Apollo:
Be nice to each other, and we'll see you next week!
Best,
Luke