Hivemind Times Issue #87

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

Good afternoon fellow folks of the world. This is The Hivemind Times #87 and I am your loyal comrade Graydon. 

This week has been a haul and a half working on some of the most fun stuff to hit the internet since funnyjunk. Apologies for lack of drops but your patience shall be rewarded greatly.

Hopefully you will all join me tonight in saying GO CAVS, thank god the Raptors aren’t in the playoffs for the ICEMAN drop. 

Anyway, have a ridiculous weekend, and enjoy a brand new column from friend of the show Ro Ramdin, good tunes, poem and other shit talking.

- Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

Some nice old jazz romance.

MOVIE REVIEW

Suffering for Celluloid with Rose Ramdin

My May in Moviegoing

Hi, it’s Rose back with a report on cinema for Hivemind Newsletter readers. I am pleased to announce that I have found a filmgoing soulmate in my friend Selena: a wonderful individual who recently programmed for NFFTY and is presently programming another festival while finishing their Cinema and Media Studies degree. Sel is a regular at the Seattle International Film Festival, so I’ve attended a few of those screenings this month for the first time - here are some thoughts on a couple of those movies and two others I’ve seen in May.

Eight Bridges (SIFF) -Dir. James Benning

James Benning is a director known for his minimalistic, austere, and durational approach to filmmaking - producing several major American experimental works whose titles dictate exactly what they show; 13 Lakes, Ten Skies, Twenty Cigarettes: it’s all ‘on the back of the box’ so to speak. His work has made him a lodestone for artistically engaged filmgoers, and he was once termed “American cinema’s preeminent landscape artist” by media scholar Scott Macdonald. Needless to say, his movies are not traditional entertainment.

Benning is operating in a space adjacent to directors like Chantal Akerman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming Liang, and Michael Snow - but with a delicate specificity of subject. Eight Bridges, his most recent work, consists of eight 10-minute long shots of various bridges; each deliberately composed, recorded, and cut to blend time to a hypnagogic flow of water, clouds, and horizons.

There’s not much else to say - during the film I meditated on the transitional identity of the bridge, the sorts of vehicles and pedestrians different milieus produce, the industrial thrust of concrete through the natural world, industrial transportation, and many a bird flying directly into a headwind. It was delightful, relaxing, engaging, and occasionally funny - giving myself over to this film was relentlessly pleasant; it’s not everyday that noticing an obscured train peeking about the treeline elicits a cheerful gasp. 4 Stars. <3.

Mārama (SIFF) - Dir. Toa Stoppard

I wish I could say I enjoyed this Māori take on a Get Out/Witch/Midsommar/Stepford Wives/Pride and Prejudice-esque thriller/horror/slasher/racial commentary film, but the exact problem with its pitch drifts into the film itself. It’s recombinatory to a fault, has a scintilla of new ideas (save for the phasing resonance of two stones clicked together as sonic leitmotif), and ultimately sputters into a conclusion that I’ve seen play out all too many times, both overstuffed and undercooked. 

If you’re hankering for exactly what the movie is serving up, give it a go. Otherwise, I’d say skip it unless you want to listen to white people wax poetic about representation after the credits roll. 2 Stars.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie - Dir. Matt Johnson

My favorite movie of the year I like the part where he go to the movie theatre and see the hangover. And i like he have soda. 5 Stars.

Original Cast Album: Company - Dir. DA Pennebaker

We used to make real things in this fucking country. Stuff where white people were singing and Steven Sondheim was writing and Elaine Stritch was blowing the top of your skull out the back of your head.

Just an incredibly impressive group of performers in a room, recording an official cast album for a Broadway show. I fucking hate musical theatre, and I still got along with this swimmingly. 3.5 Stars. 

That’s all for this week folks, I gotta go back to doing job applications and doing homework. Y’all take care, and take a trip to the movies for your old pal Rose. <3

- Rose

BIG NBA PLAYOFF NIGHT TONIGHT

ALBUM RECS

Very well could have suggested this before but either way listen to it.

This one is forever.

- Graydon

SPORTS

Things That Aren’t Fair

1. The Oklahoma City Thunder

It is extremely likely the Thunder will win the NBA Finals for the second straight year, except this time, they might not lose a game. Some people say the Thunder’s brand of basketball is “unethical hoops”. I’d argue there are no hoops more ethical than their hoops. Do you remember how the Thunder just signed a whole host of superstars and high level role players and then they just so happened to mesh together incredibly well as a team, leading to immense overnight success? No? 

THAT’S BECAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN! 

These guys took the remnants of a dynasty that never was, stripped it for parts, sold those parts to gain an exorbitant amount of capital, and then worked the draft to perfection year after year after year until they built a team full of stars that has so much chemistry it’s recognized as a Class 1 Carcinogen. 

They have become so much better than every other team that it’s definitely unfair. It almost feels like they just enter every series already up 1-0. But, they deserve it, because they did it the right way. So, is the final product unfair? Yes. But is their methodology unfair or “unethical”? No.

2. Victor Wembanyama

I know it has been said before, but I will say it again, and I really want you to sit with and grasp what I’m saying here. If you were tasked to create the perfect basketball player, you would come up with Victor Wembanyama. We’ve been looking for the perfect basketball player and we found him, the search is over. 

The sheer gravity he possesses over the other 9 men on the court is that of the Sun. Earlier in the series against the Timberwolves, he tied the single game playoff record for blocks with 12. You would think that is what I’m referring to when I speak of his gravity. But no, what I am speaking of will not show up in the box score. 

I have never seen someone so intimidating on the court that the mere sight of him causes superstars to simply give up. They get in the paint, see him waiting there, and freeze. As Anthony Edwards - fellow Number 1 pick and one of the faces of the league - said “Some of the stuff Wemby was doing, you don’t really have too much of an answer for it”. When faced with the task of simply doing their job as basketball players, they throw their hands up and surrender. 

Victor Wembanyama is palpably unfair.

3. LeBron James

I don’t believe this was LeBron’s last season. I have a hard time believing he will surprise retire without a farewell tour. But this will never, ever be replicated. He is 41 years old, old enough to be some of y’all’s dad I’m sure, and he just averaged OVER 20 POINTS A GAME with an insane 33 minutes per game this season. It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of a feat like this because we have no reference for it at all. 

Nobody has even come close to this. Nobody other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has ever averaged even double digits at this age, and even Kareem only managed 10.1. LeBron DOUBLED second place. This kind of dominance for this long is incomprehensible. 

The day LeBron was drafted, I, Reese West, would not be born for another 48 days. Since that day, I was born, went through elementary, highschool, and 1 semester of college before dropping out, then entered the full time workforce where I have been for 5 years. And LeBron James has been, at worst, a Top 10 player in the league the. whole. time. 

I’m not saying nobody will ever have a peak that surpasses LeBron’s, in fact I think the guy who I just talked about before this has a pretty good shot at it. But I am saying nobody will ever be as good for as long. He is the epitome of unfair.

- Reese

POEM OF THE WEEK

B. H. Fairchild (1942-)

Old Men Playing Basketball

The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,

rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone

and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love

to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing

to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,

radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,

gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.

MERCH