162. The past is never dead, it's not even past

I.

On his new album Celluloid Illusies, Meindert Talma builds musical monuments to people who played a role in Dutch film history. The focus is on the 1970s and 1980s. Talma sings about the lives of actors including Rutger Hauer, Monique van de Ven and Silvia Kristel.

Director Paul Verhoeven forms the thread running through the songs. Two tracks are specifically about Verhoeven; in others he is mentioned in passing. “Religion in my films is no comfort, no peace / but fire, violence, desire, lust”, he sings in the opening track Seks, Geweld en Religie, in which he tries to understand Verhoeven. “A mirror, black, a hollow laugh / God looks back, but not down.”

Talma comes from the north of the country and sounds like it. I saw the word ‘gnarled’ mentioned somewhere and that feels intuitively right. The rhyming is often simple (“My name is Paul Verhoeven / and in my films it’s not always comfortable viewing”) but sometimes that is precisely what works.

As in the magnificent De Ballade van Hans van Tongeren, for instance. That song — a highlight on the album — is about the short life of Van Tongeren, who took his own life after the success of the film Spetters. “He was always hungry for a life’s purpose”, sings Talma. “Hans van Tongeren.”

I find it a fascinating album about the golden age of Dutch cinema.

II.

Last year I read Maus for the first time. A graphic novel, no less, considered one of the most important documents about the Holocaust and its aftermath. For creator Art Spiegelman, biographical comics are the best way to understand life and find a place for trauma. He also wrote Prisoner on Hell Planet about his mother’s suicide, and In the Shadow of No Towers about 9/11.

These are not exactly light subjects, which is why Disaster is My Muse is the title of a documentary made about Spiegelman in 2024. The American public broadcaster has been kind enough to put the film on YouTube for free.

In the documentary, Spiegelman looks back on his life and career. From an early age he studied comics. “Almost everything I know I learned from comics”, he says. “I learned to read by watching Batman and figuring out if he was good or evil. I learned about sex from Betty and Veronica. I learned feminism from Little Lulu and economics from Donald Duck. I learned philosophy from Peanuts. And ethics, aesthetics and almost everything else from Mad Magazine.”

Spiegelman later became an important figure in the New York underground comics movement, where he got to know Robert Crumb and our own Joost Swarte, among others. Spiegelman quickly grasped what most perceptive people know — that comics are far more than picture books for children.

Nick Cave sang: “Some people say that it’s just rock and roll. But it’s getting right down to your soul.” Spiegelman could say the same about comics.

Although he made countless works, Maus would become and remain his magnum opus. With mice representing the Jewish people, hunted by Nazis portrayed as cats. In recent years the book was banned in several places in the United States, because of swearing and disturbing images. Spiegelman was speechless when he heard. “I never thought I would live to see America — the country that saved my parents after the war and gave them a new start in life — sliding towards a new kind of fascism.”

Fortunately, Maus is celebrated by most people as the masterpiece it is. Yet there will always be a group of people who don’t get it. “I still remember being asked once whether it wasn’t inappropriate to make a comic about the Holocaust”, says Spiegelman. “I said: ‘No, I think the Holocaust was inappropriate.’”

PS.

In The New York Times, Willy Staley writes that brain rot has long since taken over the internet (and our thinking). “One of the big fears about artificial intelligence is that as it digests the entire corpus of human culture, it will eventually surpass us, revealing the hidden logic that guides our creative output, or at least prove more economical in comparison, good enough, if hard to control — infinite monkeys on typewriters, grinding away at no marginal cost. The concern is that we’ll lose some essential human quality to the culture we consume, that it would be stolen from us, either by robots more clever than we are or executives who never cared about culture anyway. But hasn’t something like that already happened?”

I enjoyed this enthusiastic birdwatcher answering viewer questions.

A lovely newsletter from Maarten Reijnders about how artificial intelligence influences writing. He responds to the argument that AI can help everyone formulate their thoughts. “There’s perhaps something to be said for that: long live the emancipation of the mediocre writer! But is this where we want to go? Should marathon participants also be allowed to use an electric bicycle to ‘democratise’ running?”

A sad story about American homeless people dying inside clothing donation containers. (And what else is found: “A live puppy. Live Japanese grenades. An 1854 tombstone for Rebecca Jane Nye. Old skulls. A stolen Frederic Remington sculpture. Customized Air Jordans made for Spike Lee. Three pounds of marijuana. Five pounds of marijuana. A five-hundred-pound US Navy practice bomb. A mas­todon tooth.”)

The sequel to Godzilla Minus One is on its way and this time the Japanese monster arrives in the United States to cause havoc. I’m excited for this.

The biggest surprise of this week: new work from Massive Attack and Tom Waits. Together they made a protest song against ICE.

You just read blog №162, written in the week of 13 to 19 April 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and receive it in your inbox every Sunday for free.