#5: It's Time For Trader Joe's Bag-Core
I saw the new Hunger Games movie and I am being VERY vulnerable right now!
For me, November 1st marks the first day of two separate but concurrent seasons: One, Christmas. The moment Halloween is over, I’m firing up “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home).” Two, the season for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.
October is always too hot. My bedroom in my Brooklyn apartment settles between 80 and 96 degrees for roughly 7 months out of the year, and October is full of allegedly beautiful but personally infuriating 80 degree days. November is when the first truly chilly days occur, days when I realize one layer of normal pants is not enough and that I really have to find my gloves. With this chill comes a primal need to listen to Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, his brilliant, brilliant adaptation of the fun and sexy chunk of War and Peace.
Great Comet is one of my favorite musicals of all time, easily in my top 10, but like Christmas music, I don’t feel right listening to it until the weather gets cold. It’s not just that it’s set in Russia (I know Russians get summer but like… do they? The first thing that always pops into my head is Lara and Zhivago’s frozen love nest) or that Natasha is costumed in a little white coat with fur trim. It’s that when November comes around, it feels like time to submit to the dubious pleasures of what I am going to call Trader Joe’s Bag-core.
Trader Joe’s has all sorts of bags, so what I mean are the ones that look like the tattoos on a guy who owns a novelty hat store and is really trying to sell you on the notion that hats are back (this happened to me once and one of the meaner jokes Adam and I share is that the type of guy who runs a hat shop tends to be the worst advertisement for the idea that it could be normal to wear a hat).
I first used Trader Joe’s bag-core to describe the “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” sequence in Across the Universe, which finds our whole crew of hippies on psychedelics hallucinating (?) a circus led by Eddie Izzard. It is, respectfully, the worst scene in the film but I can’t deny it is a cousin to the kind of circus crap I like.
Trader Joe’s is not a 2010s creation, but their design sensibility captures a specific 2010s spirit: the golden age of handlebar mustaches, indie folk music with an Appalachian twang by seven men wearing suspenders and one woman, obnoxiously long song titles, whiskey bars, barn weddings with mason jars and twinkle lights. TJB-core is not the same as steampunk, despite some aesthetic similarities, because steampunk is too British and frankly too sexually deviant and TJB-core is very American and for people who want to get married at 35 and walk around the farmer’s market with their partners. TJB-core isn’t strictly seasonal, but it does tend to circle back into my consciousness when the weather is dreary and I begin to crave a certain obnoxious verbosity and comforting old-timey quality in art.
This whole vibe is immensely easy to make fun of, especially since it gave us such Starbucks acts as Mumford & Sons (no offense to Mr. Carey Mulligan) and The Lumineers, and has generally become low-hanging comedic fruit but what I am here to argue today is that sometimes… this vibe can be good.
Here are TJB-core works of art that I think are good, on a spectrum from pretty fun to actually great (not listed in any order though): the aforementioned Dave Malloy’s Great Comet (dense, operatic, accordion-forward), Hadestown (I don’t like Hadestown all that much but I do like “Wait for Me”), Kate Beaton’s Hark, A Vagrant! comics, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Altoid tins, the book Water for Elephants (sue me! It’s readable!), the tv show Penny Dreadful starring very hot actors Eva Green and Josh Hartnett, the band Beirut. There’s so much more music that fits the bill, but I’ll get back to that in a second.
Last Saturday, I went to see the new Hunger Games movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The Hunger Games movies have always been TJB-core adjacent on account of District 12 canonically being in Appalachia and because of the companion albums.
The first three movies each received a companion album featuring Hunger Games-inspired songs by various artists, most of which weren’t featured in the film but would occasionally land in the credits. These various artists were all the most obvious, usual suspects, and I mean ALL: The Decemberists, Arcade Fire, The Civil Wars, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Glen Hansard of Once fame (Once is SO TJB-core), The Punch Brothers, Of Monsters and Men, The National. Randomly, Mockingjay Part 1 was accompanied by a more electro-pop/hip-hop oriented album. I’m not sure if this was because by 2014 the tide was turning against stomp stomp fiddle music or if they really thought Mockingjay Part 1 warranted such a sharp change in energy but in any case, it doesn’t really work.
(light spoilers for Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ahead, except really you know what happens if you have seen the other ones??)
The latest entry into the Hunger Games-verse, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a Star Wars-prequel style look at the early days of budding dictator Coriolanus Snow and his mentorship of/doomed romance with forgotten District 12 victor Lucy Gray Baird in the decidedly unglamorous 10th Hunger Games (we find out it’s Coriolanus who has the bright idea to spruce the show up and therefore keep the Games running for the next 64 years). It’s a villain origin story, but it is also sort of a folk musical and a deeply Trader Joe’s Bag-core movie on account of Lucy Gray Baird.
Lucy Gray Baird is played by unfairly maligned theater kid Rachel Zegler who is doing an Appalachian accent that is distracting for 5 minutes and then honestly, fine. The line Zegler’s been dropping to press about her character is: “Lucy Gray is a performer forced to fight and Katniss is a fighter forced to perform.” I like this line! I think it’s very succinct. I am also a sucker for characters like this: performative, horny, confident, attention-seeking but in a likable way, can’t fight for shit (this is important), wins out of a mixture of sheer luck and getting a hot1 guy to cheat on her behalf, calculating but decent.
Lucy Gray is part of a traveling theater/music troupe called the Covey that reminds me of the wandering Shakespearean theater group from Station Eleven2. She’s a singer-songwriter and the costume she wears for most of the runtime is the most polyamorous outfit I have ever seen: a dress with a floral embroidered corset on top and a long, layered rainbow tulle skirt on the bottom paired with little lace up boots (when she shows up on TV in this outfit, one of the Capitol girls immediately calls her a clown).
This movie basically got good reviews but right out of the gate, there was a lot of yelling about the singing. People HATE singing and people hate theater kids. I hate that thing where someone starts singing with the obvious aim of getting your attention as much as the next person, but I simply do not hate theater kids! I like them! Good for them! In any case, I think Zegler is good in this movie and I must make the humiliating admission: I really like the songs. I like them so much I’ve been listening to them all week. I think they’re catchy and pleasantly twangly jangly and sung very well by Zegler. Listening to the soundtrack has put me in such a state of musical regression that I was compelled to write this newsletter.
On account of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes being basically-a-musical (she sings 6ish songs in this?), there’s no accompanying album, but here are some songs from the deep recesses of my teenage years that I’ve been listening to this week as well and that I think would make good companions to this movie:
“A Spell for Letting Go” by Dark Dark Dark – I have no memory of where I came across this song but it busts out instantly with an accordion and then the two singers go “la da da da dee.” Remember when songs would just go “la la la” for a while? Kate Nash used to do that.
“Ghosts” by Laura Marling – This song would go pretty well on an edit, I think. I’m not the greatest understander of lyrics.
“The Ghost Who Walked” by Karen Elson – This song would for sure go well on an edit, it is about being exceptionally menacing to the woman you love! And that woman haunting you afterwards!! Anyway, Karen Elson is an extremely TJB-core lady.
“Pursuit of Happiness” (performed) by Lissie – Remember around 2010 when there were a lot of blonde women doing guitar-forward covers of popular hip-hop songs? Actually I can only think of two examples, but I assume this means there were more. One was, of course, Anya Marina’s “Whatever You Like” of Gossip Girl-fame. The other is this cover of “Pursuit of Happiness” by Lissie. I’m about 92% sure I came across this on Tumblr and for a long time it was only available on Youtube. I think her performance is extremely Lucy Gray-ian. Lissie tells the audience gamely that she’s going to take a shot of tequila before performing and the crowd cheers and the forcefulness of her “fuck thats” feel very akin to the “kiss my ass” line in “Nothing You Can Take From Me.” I still think this cover is so good if I am being honest…
When I walked out of this movie I confidently told everybody that it was “just fine, mediocre, too long, probably shouldn’t be openly peddling nice girl x fascist romances to teens”, and then I went straight home and typed “Snowbaird edits” into my Tik Tok search bar so my algorithm would show me more TBOSAS edits. I think maybe I loved this movie? I don’t know! Jason Schwarztman is also here, looking hot and doing magic tricks. I was entertained throughout. It’s true that the relationships and characters in this film are far less fully formed than those in the original trilogy, and this gives the movie the somewhat unfortunate tone of well written fan-fiction. I do have to give credit where due though: I’ve seen a lot of takes that this should’ve been two movies or a TV show. I can see the merits of having more time to flesh everyone out, but selfishly I cannot thank god and Lionsgate and Francis Lawrence enough for not doing that and just making a really long movie instead. I cannot overstate how much I would never have watched the TV show version of this.
I’m not here to convince you that TJB-core is good if you hate this kind of thing. Truly, fair enough. I’m just enjoying one of the great pleasures of getting older: becoming less and less ashamed each year of what I like. I was a dorky teenager in the late 2000s and early 2010s, so all of this is deeply embedded in me and going to see The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes shook it all right up to the top of my brain. You can do whatever the hell you want with your November. I’ll be listening to “Abraham’s Daughter” by Arcade Fire and praying it doesn’t show up on my Spotify wrapped (I still have some shred of shame).
I think he’s hot, sorry. Sorry!!! But the bleached hair is important.
I know I also compared the tombaroli of La Chimera to the Station Eleven troupe and both are true! The Covey is a better comparison since they are actually performers, not thieves in quirky outfits who get a fun, folksy theme song written about them.