Monthly Media #3

The Escape of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc

Available anywhere you buy books

I love the Penguin Archive series. It’s a slightly gimmicky vehicle for publishing out of print titles which have been gathering dust, wrapped up in a heartfelt love letter to the company’s design history and, as someone who likes both out of print things and brand history, it’s very much up my street.

But, if I can be honest, I didn’t expect to fall in love with any of the titles I bought. I hate to admit it, but sometimes things are out of print for a reason. Some titles need schemes like this to generate interest and actually sell copies, otherwise they gather dust both on the shelf and in the archive...

This is not the case for Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin stories. They’re pulpy, fun, and incredibly compelling – I was swept away by the charisma and genius of the exploits of the titular Gentleman Thief and I am honestly incredibly annoyed that Penguin has not published the rest of De Mattos’ Lupin Translations in physical editions that I can devour. I will steal them from the Penguin Archive myself if I have to!

Andor Season 2

Available on Disney+

Andor is just really good television. The practical sets and costumes are eye-wateringly good. The performances are incredible all round – Elizabeth Dulau, Genevieve O’Reilly and Faye Marsay in particular are all brilliant this season and the return of Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic is a welcome addition to an already stellar cast.

The show is as at home blowing up spaceships or Imperial facilities as it is capturing the simmering tension of a wedding reception or senate hearing, and it tackles its plot threads with a gravity, maturity and sophistication that I did not think post-sequel-trilogy Star Wars was really capable of.

It is quite heavy, and I fear Disney will learn the wrong lessons from the show’s success, however, it makes a compelling case that Star Wars – not as an IP but as a vehicle for storytelling – still has something to offer in a world where fundamental rights are being constricted, and the vice of authoritarianism seems to be growing ever tighter.

Land of Hope & Dreams (2025) by Bruce Springsteen

Available anywhere you buy music

I have also found myself listening to a lot of late Springsteen recently. By ‘late’, I mean 2000s Springsteen – The Rising onwards, the Springsteen that historically I have always struggled with. I use the word loosely, mainly because I do not believe that lateness is a sudden, emergent strain in Springsteen’s work (it looms in his sweeping landscapes as a thing to be escaped, fought, railed against – it spurs on the overwhelming feeling of needing to get out of this place) nor do I use it believing that the man shows any signs of slowing down – having seen him live I can testify that there is not a bone of lateness in his body. But there is a current, a feeling, not a change but a shift in focus in those 2000s albums. As the feeling of lateness seems to crystallise, he matches it (a couple of times per album with varying degrees of success) with a kind of rallying cry. Lateness is not just something tangible and oppressive that needs to be resisted it is something that can and crucially will be resisted, and he actively calls upon the listener to do so. The performances that make up this EP – of Land of Hopes and Dreams (2012), Long Walk Home (2007) and My City of Ruins (2002) – drawn from his recent show at Manchester’s Co-op Live, radiate a kind of optimism and heartfelt faith in humanity in the face of a fundamentally broken America. An America which – as he intones in the introduction to My City of Ruins that got Trump all riled up on his crummy circle-jerk Twitter knock-off – we are watching slide into authoritarianism right before our eyes.

What I think is compelling about Springsteen and compelling about these tracks is that he is willing to stare the grim realities of Trump’s America – its deportations, its staggering inequality, its sickening attack on civil and human rights – square in the face and still insist that somewhere, beyond all this, the “America that I have sung to you about for fifty years is real.” That through solidarity we will survive this moment.

I’ve been listening to this version of Long Walk Home and the cover of Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom that closes out the EP on repeat in an attempt to try and bottle up something of that optimism, an optimism that feels sorely needed right now.

I never thought the church-y, gospel-y side of Springsteen would get to me, but the Boss contains multitudes.