We Are Lady Parts -- Pure Punk Poetry

A sitcom featuring a young, female Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering who becomes the lead guitarist for an all women fem-core Muslim punk band in London -- that is the pitch, and I absolutely loved it from the opening three-chord downstroke. 

We Are Lady Parts (wow, what a title), a British TV show from creator Nida Manzoor, is an incredibly unique and innovative piece of television with clever writing, smart social commentary, witty quips, tight filming, and some truly kick-ass music. Having finished up its second season, and only available for streaming on Peacock, Lady Parts was so intriguing to me, I was willing to sign up for the channel just to check it out. 

It did not disappoint. 

Amina Hussain. 26. Capricorn. Finishing a PhD in microbiology. Prone to excessive sweating, secret American folk-guitar-playing in her wardrobe, and husband-finding. Desperately seeking a nice Muslim boy with eyebrows you can hang on to. No, strike that! What she wants is to join an all-female, Muslim, post-punk band called Lady Parts. Truly, this is the British-Asian comedy series you’ve been waiting for your whole representation-starved life. And yes, I am addressing my own young self here.

We Are Lady Parts is a rowdy, spoofy, extremely silly and surprisingly sweet Channel 4 sitcom written, directed and produced by Nida Manzoor (Doctor Who, Enterprice). Her first series deserves to secure her reputation as a rising star. To put it as bluntly as one of Lady Parts’ songs (such as Nobody’s Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me), we have not seen anything like this on mainstream British TV: a comedy in which Muslim women are permitted to be funny, sexual, ridiculous, religious, angry, conflicted. Themselves, basically.

There is truly "nothing on TV like 'We Are Lady Parts.'"

When I sat down to watch the first season a little over two years ago, I was expecting to be amused, perhaps charmed. And there is certainly a whole lot of subversive humor in the series, which was created by the British Pakistani writer-director Nida Manzoor. Two of the first songs we hear Lady Parts perform are “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister but Me” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf”; a rival Muslim punk band introduced in Season 2 is called Second Wife. But We Are Lady Parts is so much more than a collection of jokes about the absurdities that young Muslim women often encounter. By turns raucous and earnest, the series is unlike anything else on TV right now—in part because it doesn’t consider representation to be a worthy end goal of its own. Instead, the show allows its characters to riff on their identities in ways that reflect how young people actually talk to one another, without becoming didactic or self-serious.

Louvre Heist -- Made for the Movies

It never really happens like it does in the movies ... until it does.

The daring robbery at The Louvre in Paris on Sunday seemed like a plot taken straight from an action film. In just under seven minutes, thieves parked a truck with a cherry picker bucket lift outside the museum, using a construction site as cover, raised themselves up to a window, which they quickly broke through, and in a coldly professional manner lifted priceless jewels including nine pieces from France's legendary Crown Jewels. And it took place in daylight hours, just moments after one of the world's most famous museums opened, an incredibly popular tourist destination already filling with visitors.

The thieves allegedly fled on mopeds through the busy streets of Paris, if that's not a poetic and cinematic ending. I mean seriously. Can't you see it? You've seen it countless times before.

In classic pop culture fashion, it didn't take long for writers to begin listing favorite heist films, like this piece from the New York Times: "Watch These Six Heist Movies". And that got me thinking about some of my personal favorites. Of course the Oceans Trilogy immediately springs to mind, and I have always been a fan of the updated Thomas Crowne Affair with Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. In fact, the TCA remake of the original Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway film was so good that studios are remaking the film again, this time starring Michael B Jordan.

When I think about what we find so appealing with the heist movie, I think about the thrill of a roller coaster and the classic line from Bender in The Breakfast Club: "Being bad feels kind of good." And, of course, there must be an element of the anti-hero - a character who is outside of standard conventions but has some redeemable qualities with which the audience empathizes. It's a cool conceit -- we want the bad guy to get away with it.

Marc Maron packs up the podcast

"W-T-F"?

No, seriously. Have you heard the news? Longtime podcaster, comedian, and all around interesting dude Marc Maron has wrapped up his well-known and widely respected podcast "WTF with Marc Maron."

The New York Times recently sat down with   Maron to discuss the decision to end the influential podcast that has informed and enlightened, engaged and entertained, amused and even annoyed, millions of Americans for the past sixteen years.

On a drive to lunch one sunny recent afternoon in Glendale, Calif., the comedian and actor Marc Maron was contemplating the term “burnout,” trying it on and inspecting it from different angles, like a new pair of pants he wasn’t sure were to his taste.

Maron had used the word a few times in a June episode of his podcast, “WTF With Marc Maron,” in which he announced that he and his founding producer, Brendan McDonald, would be ending the influential show after 16 years. Many responses to the news had echoed the term (including Howard Stern’s “I was burned out in 1996”) and now Maron seemed to worry that he’d sounded weak, or self-aggrandizing.

“The fact is, we’ve been doing this a long time,” he said, turning the wheel of his tan Toyota Avalon, a graveyard of empty seltzer cans, coffee cups, and Zyn packets. “And now we kind of want to live our lives. That may be burnout, or it may just be the natural course of things.”

This cycle of conjecture and revision — Maron grasping for, and occasionally reaching, some kind of emotional truth — was the essence of “WTF.” Over more than 1,600 episodes, he engaged in raw and personal dialogues with a staggering array of comedians, artists and public figures. Among them were Robin Williams, Lorne Michaels, Louis C.K. and Barack Obama, who became the first sitting president to appear on a podcast when he was a guest in 2015.

I have to be honest about this post -- I've never listened to Marc Maron's podcast. In fact, I've never really listened to any podcasts. For someone who loves talking and engaging in discussions and debates, I am surprisingly uninterested in podcasts. That said, if I were to listen to one, Marc Maron's likely would have been a top choice. Maron seems like the kind of guy that I would generally agree with and even when I didn't would respect his criticisms and counterarguments. And I have enjoyed Maron's stand-up, which I see more as spoken word monologues.

I guess what's also interesting is that numerous people over the years have suggested or observed that I should have a podcast. As an English teacher who basically organized his instruction around Henry James' description of being "a person on whom nothing is lost," my Socratic approach the English classroom certainly would lend itself to the podcast model. Of course, many students and colleagues might also observe that my class was not so Socratic as it was "listen to Mazenko and then respond." And I have several text threads with various friend groups whose banter certainly reads like many podcasts.

That said, there's a part of me that considers the whole podcast idea a bit of a mindless time wasting. I know I feel that way about the talking heads on television news, an issue I wrote about for The Villager a couple years ago. Seriously, do we really learn anything from listening to a few other people just ramble around in casual conversation. Or, is it all just "infotainment"? Listening to loose conversation is certainly not enlightening in the way a lecture or presentation or even a TED Talk can be. The Lyceum Movement in American history -- a key venue for the lectures of Henry Thoreau -- was arguably an enlightening and educational experience for its audience.

So, I don't know. I don't think adding podcasts to my daily life is ever in the cards. But I won't discount the impact of Maron's podcast run, and I don't doubt it's leaving a bit of a hole in American culture.

The Pop Punk Superman Movie

Who knew we needed a pop-punk Superman? 

Well, in an era -- perhaps the tail end of one -- where Marvel Comics dominated everything, DC Comics was sort of an afterthought in terms of big blockbusters, and the Man of Steel had become probably the least cool of the superhero genre, it seems like a reboot and makeover is just what Superman and movie audiences needed.

I'll be honest, I did not see the latest rendition of Superman that hit movie theaters this summer, and I didn't really have any interest in it. But, then I ran across this cool piece of commentary on NPR from Ann Powers - "Why the World Needs a Pop-Punk Superman" - and I am definitely intrigued. The film is now on my to-watch list. And the inclusion of the Teddybear's song "Punk Rocker (ft Iggy Pop)" on the soundtrack as the closing credits song is an added bonus.

Like so many hope-seeking people sweating out this summer, I plunked down my dollars last week to see director James Gunn's Superman. I showed up for the superpup Krypto, but found the old-fashioned Earth-saving shebang to be a balm — a sweet shot of moral clarity at a time when that can seem to be in short supply. And I joined the chorus of surprised chuckles when the scene destined to go viral arrived. In it, reporter Lois Lane and her metahuman lover are sharing a moment of vulnerability that turns into a low-stakes but highly revelatory argument. Wondering what he sees in her, she calls herself "just some punk rock kid from Bakerline," to which he indignantly responds, "I'm punk rock!" Then they're off, thrown into one of rock and roll's classic showdowns, between a "real" punk who found her tribe in the underground and a former clueless kid who probably bought his first Ramones t-shirt and Green Day CD at Target. It's a great early-in-the-relationship values check, as two people still feeling each other out voice their anxieties in the form of a tussle over definitions.

And Powers at NPR is not the only one weighing in with some interesting thoughts about the pop-punk angle of the new Superman. Author, music critic, academic, and lifelong punk Gina Arnold also noted the merging of what would seem to be arguably disparate and contradictory traditions with the inclusion of punk references in one of the nation's oldest superhero comics - the archetypal hero of "truth, justice, and the American Way." In her substack post "Man & Superman: 'Superman' and the Politics of Punk," Arnold explores the inspiration and effect of James Gunn infusing the Superman story with the punk ethos.

I don’t feel qualified to write about movies, especially “Superman,” but I do feel qualified to muse at length about the brief but apparently important reference to punk rock that is threaded throughout “Superman,” because I am the (co) editor of the Oxford Handbook of Punk! If the movie had confined itself to the brief exchange between Lois and Clark/Superman, where she says she’s a punk rocker and he says he likes punk rock too, and then she mocks the bands he names that he likes, saying, “that’s not punk, that’s corporate pop sell out stuff!” (or something like that), then I might just have passed on by. The exchange seems to be shorthand for character-building: Lois is supposed to be edgy, and Clark is supposed to be square. And maybe that is the purpose of the exchange, although if so, I still think it’s kind of interesting that the term ‘punk’ has taken on that shading. But later the theme continues when Clark announces to a skeptical Lois that exuding kindness is being punk rock.

I feel like that’s a lot of air-time for the idea of punk, at least in a movie that has nothing to do with punk, and who’s original texts predate the genre by many years. My friend Marie, who is associated with DC Comics, tells me that the director James Gunn used to be in a punk band, which may explain his interest in inserting this concept here, and I appreciate that impulse. I have all these great ideas (and scripts) for movies about those days, and I know, and James Gunn knows, there’s no actual market for them. Punk has to be inserted like a virus into other texts for it to have resonance.

But what is being punk, or rather, what does it mean NOW, as opposed to then? People have always accused punks of being phony in some way, because of the way they dress - and the subsequent revelation that it is actually more “punk” to not be punk is another oft-bandied about interpretation of the genre. In some ways Superman’s defensive words are just a gloss on that, but it also touches on what I have always thought was a major a part of punk philosophy: in the world of punk, all the outsiders (and let’s face it, being an alien from outer space makes Clark Kent the ultimate outsider) are now on the inside, and here on the inside, love will prevail.

Appreciating Wayne Thiebaud

Wandering into the Allicar Art Gallery on the CSU campus in Fort Collins, I ran across a pretty cool painting of Wayne Thiebaud's, and it reminded me of how much I enjoy this artist's work. Thiebaud's work in a variety of media, using vibrant colors to depict simple objects from everyday life, is not only visually appealing but also symbolically or metaphorically engaging as a reminder of the art and beauty that is always around us. 

Clearly associated with the Pop Art movement, Thiebaud was not only prolific but widely influential in contemporary pop art. But as WashPost art critic Philip Kennicott observes in this cool profile from 2012, "Wayne Thiebaud’s artistic eye was so much keener than pop art confections." Honestly, until I read Kennicott's piece, I couldn't fully articulate why Thiebaud's work is so appealing and also important. But I was struck by his observation that:

We need art because we are not particularly good at looking at the world. We see things all the time, yet when some truth finally registers in the mind, we say, “I see,” as if our eyes were closed before this epiphany.

What's the deal with Coffee?

My definition of bliss is a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie, a cup of dark roast coffee with heavy cream, and a cool piano jazz trio in the background. 

But while the pie is mostly a seasonal thing and the jazz is simple ambiance, the coffee is a non-negotiable. That's true for millions of Americans who relish and even rely on a daily cuppa joe. In fact, it's the one thing that, according to a recent piece in The Atlantic, consumers seem unwilling to give up, even as price shocks, trade wars, and industry changes are making the ubiquitous beverage a more complicated choice.

Coffee is in trouble. Even before the United States imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazil and 20 percent on Vietnam—which together produce more than half of the world’s coffee beans—other challenges, including climate-change-related fires, flooding, and droughts, had already forced up coffee prices globally. Today, all told, coffee in the U.S. is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was a year ago. Futures for arabica coffee—the beans most people in the world drink—have increased by almost a dollar since July. And prices may well go up further: Tariffs have “destabilized an already volatile market,” Sara Morrocchi, the CEO of the coffee consultancy Vuna, told me. This is a problem for the millions of people who grow and sell coffee around the world. It is also a problem for the people who rely on coffee for their base executive functioning—such a problem that Congress recently introduced a bipartisan bill to specifically protect coffee from Trump’s tariffs.

The reporting on the coffee crisis has been growing in recent years, but it has picked up considerably since April with the imposition of tariffs on a product that simply isn't grown in the United States. And the idea that Congress comes together in a bipartisan bill to exempt coffee from tariffs gives you an idea of just how sacred that beautifully bitter beverage truly is.

Thursday is the Best Day of the Week

I love Thursdays.

Thursday is a day of infinite possibilities, and it has long been my favorite day of the week. 

Now, obviously, people will reasonably argue that a workday, a school day, cannot be as great as a weekend. Even Friday has to be better because while it's a work/school day for most people, it's also the kickoff to the weekend. Friday night is always a party, and for good reason.

But hear me out.

If you are having a busy week with a lot on your plate, then a Thursday offers the chance to get good work done, and you still have a day to finish up before the weekend. So Thursdays can be very productive -- no sense of panic because there is still time in the week. 

On the other hand, if you are having a miserable week that seems like it will never end. If it's the kind of day that has been Tuesday three days in a row, then Thursday offers some relief. When you wake up on Thursday, you realize, "Ok, I just have to get through today and then tomorrow is Friday." And Fridays are always awesome because nothing has to be done on Fridays -- whatever is left over can be pushed to Monday.

We all know Mondays are the absolute worst, and Thursday is the furthest thing from Monday. And let's face it, while Fridays are great, and Saturdays are pure joy, there is always the creeping feeling that Monday is coming soon. As wonderful as Sundays can be, there is an impending gloom over getting up Monday morning. 

But none of that anxiety messes with a Thursday. On Thursday, the long dreary week is beginning to fade in the rearview mirror, and the glorious weekend is just peeking over the horizon. 

So, enjoy your Thursday, arguably the best day of the week. 

Indie Bookstores You Should Visit

Like many people, whenever we travel and explore a new town or region, the local independent bookstore is mandatory destination. There is nothing better during a leisurely stroll through an unfamiliar neighborhood than to happen across a quaint, cozy, comforting bookstore. I'm not sure what it is for bookies that makes walking into a bookstore feel like coming home, but I always relish those first few steps inside the door. What displays are front and center? Which books have the curators deftly placed to invite a glance, a perusal, a skimming of pages?

Living in Denver for many years, we were blessed with a truly legendary indie store, The Tattered Cover. It's an impressive institution that can hang with the best of the big indie stores known nationally, like Powells in Portland, The Strand in New York City, City Lights in San Francisco, and of course Shakespeare & Co in Paris.

Some smaller but well-known indie stores I've had the pleasure of visiting include Books are Magic in Brooklyn and the wonderful Left Bank Books in my beloved St. Louis. Some spots on my wish list included Parnassus Books in Nashville and Painted Porch in Austin.

Don McClean & the story of American Pie

"It could be the greatest song in music history."

That praise comes from none other than Garth Brooks, one of the greatest songwriters and performers in music history. And he's talking about "America Pie," the richly textured tale from Don McClean about "the day the music died." And the song is undoubtedly one of the most well known in the history of American music. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who, if prompted, could not finish the refrain of the song:

"Bye, bye, Miss American Pie; drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry; them good ol' boys drinkin' whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die."

McClean recently "took the stage to sing the song with another artist," something he has done only twice in fifty-five years. And Guitar Player magazine caught up with the legendary singer who revealed some interesting facts and insight into the song.

Don McLean scored more than a hit when he composed “American Pie,” the tune he released as a single in 1971. He also created an iconic cut that has continued to resonate with the public some 55 years later. Generations since its original release, “American Pie” is an anthem known and loved by members of every generation.

The tune offers a kaleidoscopic ride through the social unrest and changes brought about in 1960s America. McLean was famously reluctant to discuss the song’s enigmatic lyrics for years, preferring to let its mystery endure. But even while he kept mum about the meaning behind its words, “American Pie” remained the centerpiece of his live performances, a showstopper that got everyone in the venue singing along.

Despite the song’s popularity — second only to that of his 1972 hit "Vincent" — McLean never sang it with another artist until his 1997 performance with country artist Garth Brooks. At the time, Brooks was at his peak, with Diamond-certified albums like No Fences (1990) and Ropin' the Wind (1991), playing major stadium tours, and holding a record-setting Central Park concert in 1997. Which is why singer Jessie Murph’s show on September 27 was such a big deal.

The rising star used her sold-out show at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium as an opportunity to bring out McLean for a rare performance of “American Pie,” making her only the second artist in 55 years to perform the tune with him.

The 20-year-old singer/songwriter wrote in her Instagram Stories, “I have so much gratitude in my heart today. Last night was so magical and incredible and sparkling, I feel like the luckiest girl on earth.”

And, you may not be aware (I wasn't) that a documentary was released about the song back in 2022. It's  an homage to the song, of course, an exploration of the lyrics and story behind the stories. And it is a testament to the career of Don McClean, who had one other widely known song with the elegiac Vincent, released in 1971. 

Few songs are so easily identifiable and singable as:

Gregg Deal, Indigenous Punk Rock Artist

Indigenous artist, activist, spoken word performer, and punk rock front man for his band Dead Pioneers, Gregg Deal is impressive. He's a big deal. And, if you're in or around Los Angeles in the next month, you owe to yourself to stop by the Adler Smith Gallery in Santa Monica for the latest installation of Gregg's unique, and uniquely powerful, art exhibit "The Others."

If you've followed this blog or my writing with Westword Magazine in Denver, you know I am a huge fan of Deal and have covered the band Dead Pioneers several times in the past year. And I will continue to follow the band as they work on their third album for Hassle Records, following a strong response to the second LP Post-American and a string of live shows in promotion that included opening for Pearl Jam and touring Europe with punk legends Pennywise and Propagandhi.

But today on Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking about Deal's visual art and his series "The Others" which first caught my attention years ago before I met him or the band had formed. The series is a powerful statement about Native American stereotypes, white supremacy, cultural appropriation, and the power of punk rock. In the series, Deal has taken offensive "cowboy and indian" comics from the 1940s and reappropriated them with a reversal that features the Natives winning. Each of the image's speech bubbles features punk rock lyrics that resonated with Gregg from his youth.

In Deal’s own punk way, The Others points to an ongoing struggle for liberation from white settler-colonialism and violence. For The Others series, Deal appropriates individual panels of comic book illustrations from the 1940’s and 1950’s, changing out the dialogue of each speech balloon with lyrics from late 20th century punk rock music—bands such as Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Marginal Man, and Operation Ivy (I’d recommend exploring some of the musical inspiration on your way to, or while viewing the work). Grit is apparent in Deal’s delivery. Stencils, aerosol, and hand-painted words appeal to a non-conformist sensibility, enhancing the overall subversive message.

Take a few moments and listen to Gregg discuss that series at the opening on October 11.
And of course continue to follow his impressive career both as an artist and musician. 

Thriller Master Dan Brown is Back with a Secret

I can still recall reading a review of a new and intriguing thriller called The DaVinci Code from a relatively unknown writer, Dan Brown. I'm fairly sure the review was on Salon.com, and I was curious enough to check out what became a true publishing and mass media phenomenon. 

Now, Dan Brown and his alter-ego - globe trotting Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon - are back for another smart thriller exploring history and mystery. I say "smart," and that may leave many readers rolling their eyes, to be sure. For, Brown has been widely criticized for his literary style, or perhaps lack of it. He is truly a great storyteller even though he's not a great writer, per se. But the "smart" descriptor has to do with his topic matter -- history, language, symbols, secret societies, religious texts and iconography. And, of course, the power of the written word.

That's the angle New York Times critic-at-large A.O. Scott takes in her recent review of Brown's latest offering The Secret of Secrets:  Book Review: ‘The Secret of Secrets,’ by Dan Brown - The New York Times. 

You will find many astonishing sentences in “The Secret of Secrets,” Dan Brown’s latest TED-Talk travelogue thriller. One that caught my eye arrives early in the book, at the beginning of Chapter 7: “The world’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, publishes nearly 20,000 books a year and generates over $5 billion in annual gross revenues.” This is a purely factual — and, as far as I can determine, accurate — statement, and therefore a particular kind of Dan Brown sentence.

Of course there are other varieties, including ones that start with a breathless adverb (“impossibly,” “remarkably,” “conveniently”); ones that burst into excited italics; ones that are entirely in italics. Brown is above all an action writer, and his hero, Robert Langdon, is continually in hot pursuit of whoever is hotly pursuing him, whether in Florence, Rome, Barcelona or some other popular tourist destination. The nearly 700 pages of “The Secret of Secrets” zigzag across a hectic day, mostly in Prague, during which guns are fired, locks picked, hidden passageways discovered and shocking revelations delivered on the run. The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose.

But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel. Since Langdon is, by profession, a professor (of symbology, at Harvard, in case you need reminding), his adventures are punctuated, or you might say padded, with brief lectures on a great many topics in history, science, philosophy and real estate.

GoGo Penguin - the Jazz Trio You Need

Sometimes you don't even know you were missing something in your life until you find it, ... or perhaps it finds you. That's how I felt the first time I heard the jazz trio from Manchester known as GoGo Penguin. The song was GGP's "Hopopono":

I had the pleasure of catching the innovative and highly entertaining trio on their North American tour when they stopped by Boulder Theater on November 5. I was surprised to hear it was the third time the group has played there, and the 90-minute set did not disappoint.  Touring in support of the new album Necessary Fictions, the guys played pretty much non-stop, offering many new selections from the release to a nearly packed house.

GoGo Penguin have already given us one album, Everything Is Going To Be OK (XXIM, 2023), following the departure of their original drummer Rob Turner and the arrival of Jon Scott. With its tendency to introspection, ‘Everything’ marked a successful new start for the trio of Scott, pianist Chris Illingworth and bassist Nick Blacka.

After touring the album worldwide, the three of them considered their musical direction anew. Illingworth and Blacka re-equipped their studio in Manchester and started jamming. Scott joined them after a few weeks and throughout 2024 the three took their time to work on new pieces. Necessary Fictions is the result, which sees them invent their version of GoGo Penguin.

The sound is recognisable, of course: strong piano lines, powerful bass and novel drum parts. However, their new album dives headfirst into adventure. Illingworth has been exploring synthesizers and uses them brilliantly, while Blacka and Scott are in top form.

From the opening track Umbra, it’s clear that the sheer joy of playing is renewed, and with that the emotion and all the fantastic builds and crescendos that make their tracks hard to resist. Fallowfield Loops follows on seamlessly. Vintage GoGo Penguin, rock solid.