RENAN BORELLI - MARCH CULTURE



Who am I, and what am I doing here?

I’m Renan. By day, I’m a journalist, but I’m largely here because of my preoccupation with movies and TV and books and music, as well as a mild-to-moderate problem with collecting things. Most importantly, I’m a lifelong friend of the founder of this company, which means I’m here thanks to nepotism, which I’m absolutely thrilled to take advantage of for the first time in my life. As your occasional nepo-columnist, I’ll share some recommendations for things that I’ve watched, read or listened to that I think more people should know about.


RENAN BORELLI - MARCH CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - MARCH CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - MARCH CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - MARCH CULTURE



This month, I devoured Chris DeVille’s Such Great Heights , which charts the path of indie rock over the course of the 21st century, roughly from the emergence of The Strokes and The White Stripes through Taylor Swift’s Folklore. DeVille, a longtime editor at Stereogum , maps his own coming-of-age journey along the way, from reading Pitchfork in its abrasive early years and watching Seth Cohen name Death Cab for Cutie his favorite band on The O.C. through the many backlashes and backlashes-to-the-backlashes that emerged in their wake. The term “indie” has largely lost all its meaning, but DeVille skillfully captures how that happened: through 25 years of overwrought debates that mattered a lot to the generations who lived through them, and not very much to those who came right after.



There’s something a little “first-year film student” about recommending Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which I watched for the first time this year. (Half the people reading this are thinking, “what took you so long, you philistine?” and the other half are rolling their eyes thinking, “ooh, you like the Criterion Collection , you’re so cool and different.” Both are fair.) But really, what I found most interesting was its cinematic genealogy: Kurosawa cribbed the plot of his period samurai film from Dashiell Hammett detective novels. Then, Sergio Leone copied from Yojimbo for A Fistful of Dollars. And then, of course, private detectives and samurai films and spaghetti westerns influenced everything from Star Wars to Tarantino and the Coen brothers to Breaking Bad. I think it’s cool they’re all cousins; roll your eyes if you must.




When I was a kid, I had a giant black boombox. It could play tapes and CDs, but you could also use it to record songs off the radio. I was obsessed with our local alternative rock station — the now-deceased WHFS — and I’d make little mixtapes, rushing to press record when I’d hear the opening chords of, say, Spacehog’s “In the Meantime.” 30 years later, boomboxes have largely been replaced by little Bluetooth speakers. This is why I’ve been lusting after We Are Rewind’s Blaster Curtis. It doesn’t come cheap — $579, and it doesn’t have a radio — but it looks like the embodiment of what a modern boombox could and should be. And it plays tapes. Long live Radio Raheem.



 

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