A very chill song with an unchill video, “Fixture Picture” kind of floats through itself on a cloud of sonic smoke, never really peaking or falling, but sometimes coalescing around harmonies at the chorus. Lovely. Laid back. Sublime. The visuals, however… The scene starts as a made-for-the-gram juxtaposition of bleached landscape and splashy woman. Fine. But then we approach that woman– Aldous, dressed in red– and the veneer comes crumbling down: for the rest of the video, she bops and gyrates awkwardly with her tambourine, holding a disquieting level of eye contact with the camera. It’s almost as if she’s dancing *at* you, to her own music. Which maybe actually is actually an avant-garde commentary on social media. I really hope so. Listen, watch, then anticipate her full album, coming out Friday.
You know you’ve streamed a lot of TV when you think, “You know what we need? A shuffle button.” But if that describes you, you’re in luck; that’s just what Netflix is working on. Right now you can only shuffle episodes of a given show like The Office, but it doesn’t seem like a stretch to extend the function to the entire platform. We’re sort of at the point in TV now where we don’t care what we’re watching as long as there’s something on, and Netflix is king of mediocre, data-informed content. But, maybe, if you’re out of Netflix, try a book.
You’re not the only one that Netflix is trying to convince to “discover new programming.” Ahead of Emmy season, they’ve produced a magazine as propaganda on their award-worthy shows, talking them up for critics who are on the fence or haven’t seen all the Netflix shows yet. You remember how movies have to basically campaign for Oscars, right? This is that for the small screen, and Netflix is the most super of PACs. But the moral of the story is that Netflix produces so much garbage that, if they want those awards, they have to manually surface the good stuff that may have been lost in– forgive me– the shuffle.
Join everybody else in reading “Normal People” by Sally Rooney. Highly anticipated and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it’s about teenage friends in Ireland who “become intimate,” though never quite make it a relationship, which makes for a lot of messing with each other’s emotions. Critics love it for its dazzling psychological insight, and also because it is deeply horny. Maybe jump in as soon as you finish with Pen15? (Hulu, I know.)
