I don’t let myself play Tetris very often. This is because generally, when I do let myself play Tetris, I become so compulsively Tetris-brained that I go deep down into the Tetris-hole and nothing else exists for me, and then at some point — days or weeks later — I need to claw my way back out, and into something more like observable reality.
NO MORE, screams my psyche, lest the entire world become nothing more than a hazy mirage, a veil of “the real,” behind which lie blocks, tetrizoids, Ls, lines, waiting for me to cleverly sort and stack them into wave after orgasmic wave of tetrises.
Anyway: this Tetris bingeing happens to me about once every 18-24 months, give or take. It takes around that long a period of no-Tetris before I go “ah fuck it, I’ll play a round of Tetris,” and into the hole I go, only to claw my way out again, days or weeks later. It’s fine. This is just a thing that happens in my life. It happened last week.
Interstitial note: I’m really good at Tetris. It’s an easy flow state for me, one where primary intent just turns all the way off and my thumbs react purely on instinct. It’s probably what using the Force is like, I’d imagine. But regardless, while that is happening, my conscious mind just… floats.
I mention this because: when I go into one of these Tetris ratholes, I seem to process a lot of subconscious ~s~t~u~f~f~ that was just kind of sitting there, below the surface, waiting for the operating system to go into standby.
Grief. Compassion. Regret. Lingering worry. People I miss. Hilarious shit I haven’t thought about in a while. It all just bubbles up, as from the swamp of the primordial, as I’m sitting there plinking away on Tetris. And then it passes through me and out of me, and dissipates away into the nothing.
Where does it go, one wonders. If it was held for that long in me, what was it, if it can so effortlessly become something else and then gone. As if the particles of an exhaled breath.
Lookit: last month was hard. I know months aren’t a thing that exists; and I don’t mean “the month of January” so much as the four-ish weeks that ended last week. I’m just saying: that block of time, for me and perhaps also for you, was a motherfucker. Street executions were playing out on TikTok. Toronto was in a sustained deep-freeze. The broligarchy proved their worth (zero) and their perversion (depthless). The Year of the Snake was bleeding out. All the stuff had to keep getting done, which probably got in the way of the ~s~t~u~f~f~ getting dealt with.
That was last month. It was what it was, and then it dissipated away into the nothing.
Dan Romer!
I was all hopped up and excited to listen to the Stranger Things 5 soundtrack when it dropped on the first day of the new year, and then when I listened to it and realized that the three or four best tracks in the whole season weren’t even on it, I was really, really bummed out.
I figured — without googling, without evidence — that some stringer (a Stranger Stringer) was probably brought in to fill out the more “remix our themes with orchestra” tracks in the overall score, the ones that give the big moments in seasons 4 and 5 their “oomph.”
And having theorized all that, I further speculated that if that were the case, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s deal as the credited composers on the series might mean we’d never hear those “oomph” tracks at all.
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying I was pretty delighted when an adjunct Stranger Things soundtrack album dropped last week, and even more excited when I found who did the “oomph” tracks in question for season 5: Dan Romer!
Romer, for those not really in the soundtrack game, wrote one of the quintessential scores of the 2020s, for the Station Eleven limited series (which is also one of the quintessential television anythings of the 2020s, if you’ve yet to watch).
Romer’s also doing the music on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in which HBO has mercifully released us from House of the Dragon’s questionable decision to just use the original Game of Thrones music, over again.
Romer was also going to do No Time To Die, before Hans Zimmer got brought in instead. I’d do just about anything to hear those tracks.
All this to say, Dan Romer’s turning out to be one of the more interesting composers in Hollywood this decade. His three tracks for Stranger Things 5 (Rob Simonson was the Stranger Stringer on Stranger Things 4) are eye-watering: from the operatic major-key recapitulation of Eleven’s theme as we see her striding across Iceland, to the magnificent denouement reprising “Kids” in the final episode. (And don’t get me started on a glimmering, deeply-felt rendering of “The First I Love You,” underscoring Mike’s narration of the flash-forwards.) Those three tracks, alone, will probably birth ten thousand TikToks this year.
Speaking of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: it rips. The music; the whole damned show. Dexter Sol Ansell and Peter Claffey are both magnificent, out-of-nowhere superstars, carrying what is becoming, for me anyway, the most rewarding Westeros-set television story yet made.
I absolutely love it. And I’m pretty impressed by how tastefully HBO is managing this brand, given what everyone else is doing.
Speaking of which…
YOLO: The Movie
That little fucker, that little green guy, he’s back.
Full disclosure, Yolo’s charms wore out (on me) about two episodes into The Mandalorian‘s second season. I need a bit more meat on my story than “cute animal is cute.” As such, I identified that The Mandalorian & Grogu isn’t for me, not really. I hope it’s great, for the people it’s for (6-year-olds and their parents). The big gasp (for me) remains how woof the visuals of this entire project remain.
I know the series wasn’t exactly gorgeous, but it was oftentimes sturdy, especially for something shot in front of a television screen. This… is something else. I think it’s pretty remarkable that the guy who wanted to use practical liquid tanks for the space effects in Zathura, and had Stan Winston build a working Iron Man suit for Iron Man, plays exclusively in this world now. But I bet he’s a lot richer than me, having done so.
Speaking of music, the one guy who remains undefeated in all this is Ludwig Goransson. If I end up wandering into a movie theatre and seeing The Mandalorian & Grogu one day, it will almost certainly because on that day, as with today, I was just walking around downtown Toronto whistling the Mandalorian theme endlessly, helplessly, on repeat. Whatta fucking earworm.