Spectre Collie

Mid-season of the Witch

Agatha All Along revealed a bunch of stuff we already knew, and it was surprisingly good

Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals¹, but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

1
My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: When I Say Stupid I Mean Stupid Fresh

Two tangentially-related tunes for the machine gun ladies in the house

I’ll admit that this week’s two-fer is mostly just because I wanted to hear “Machine Gun” by The Commodores. It came out when I was three years old, but I didn’t discover it until I was almost thirty.

My version of The Commodores was in the 1980s, when they were doing inoffensive R&B hits and I had absolutely no idea that they were ever a funk band. (I’m not proud of it, but I admit that I always thought “Brick House” was by Parliament).

I just assumed that they were indistinguishable from Lionel Ritchie’s solo stuff, until I found out that “Machine Gun” was sampled in “Hey Ladies” by the Beastie Boys.

Which I’d always thought of as a product of the 1990s, but which I’m seeing now came out in 1989. At that point, all I knew of the Beastie Boys was Licensed to Ill, so I didn’t even bother listening to Paul’s Boutique or any of the subsequent albums, thinking they’d be more of the same. It wasn’t until Hello Nasty came out that I got hooked and went back through all of the previous albums. And basically discovered two bands that had been cool this entire time, right under my nose.¹

1
I still really don’t like “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet, though.

Fourth Estate Sale

Democracy Dies In Disappointment

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

We’ll Get There Eventually

Thoughts on twenty years as a known homosexual

I wouldn’t have made the connection myself, but I was reminded that today is National Coming Out Day, which this year marks 20 years that I’ve been out.¹ It feels like much longer. And I wish it were longer, since I highly recommend coming out in your teens or twenties if at all possible.

Earlier this week, I was trying to find digital photos of an old project I’d worked on, for a presentation at work. I was horrified to discover that for some unknown reason, my iCloud photo library seems to have stopped keeping any pictures older than 2011 or so. My backup hard drive failed a couple of years ago. I believe that I have photo backups on a CD-ROM or DVD somewhere, but haven’t been able to find them. And I no longer even have an optical drive that could read them.

It felt as if there’s been an enormous wall of entropy that’s been relentlessly following me ever since I was born, and if it ever caught up with me it would wipe me out of existence, and I just looked back and discovered it had jumped forward 15 years.

In any case, I resolved to dig through all of the old prints I had stuffed away in my closet, and I ended up finding a lot of photos from the late 90s and early 2000s, when I’d just moved to California and was perpetually overwhelmed by just about everything. Several of them I’d forgotten even existed; for years, I’ve been thinking that I had almost no photos of myself from my 20s. The truth was that I’d hidden them away because I hated how I looked — like a combination of young John Flansburgh and Skippy from Family Ties, but completely lacking the charisma of either.

Looking through them made me sad for that guy, who lived so long ago that he’s basically a stranger. He was smiling in most of the photos, but in others, it seems more like a grimace. I remember he was just a shuffling jumble of insecurities, and I wish I could go back and tell him that it’d be difficult, but he’d make it through, and eventually settle down with a mostly different set of insecurities.

As if the universe were trying to drive the idea home, later in the week, there was a meme going around of posting the oldest photo you have of yourself, next to a current picture.² Unsurprisingly, this prompted quite a few gay men online to get introspective about everything they had to go through to change from the kid in one photo to the man that exists today.

What’s standing out to me is everything that happened to the four- or five-year-old kid, sitting shirtless on his front lawn smiling and chewing on flowers, that changed him into the stubbly, sad-looking guy in his 20s, taking a picture of himself in a mirror as if to prove he still exists.

It makes me think about everything he learned in the years between those two photos. He learned to keep his mouth closed in photos, because his teeth are embarrassing. He learned to be embarrassed about being seen with no shirt on. He learned that a photo like this was kind of gay, and that was bad for some reason. He learned not to go around hugging people because it made them uncomfortable. He learned that by several different standards, he was a weirdo, and he needed to keep that shit under wraps and try to be normal.

Comparing sexual orientation and gender identity to just being a weirdo can trivialize the issue, especially when religious beliefs get involved. And it can be just plain offensive as well: obviously, plenty of LGBT people are stultifyingly normal, and plenty of straight people are flamboyant freaks. But for me at least, it helps explain why “coming out” still feels like an ongoing thing, 20 years on, after the traumatic and difficult parts are long past.

That’s the part that makes a “national coming out day” worth observing and celebrating: encouraging people to take that difficult first step. Not because it’ll suddenly fix everything, but because it’s the only thing that will make fixing everything possible.

At the moment, it feels like I’m still trying to unlearn all the things that weren’t an inevitable part of getting older and wiser — as I kept telling myself — and were actually all about keeping that weird, overly emotional, overly earnest, undeniably gay kid stuffed away in a closet and out of sight.

It’s been nice rejecting all the excuses I had for hating myself throughout my twenties. Not because I got better glasses and a better haircut and realized that I’ve been cool and impossibly attractive this whole time, but just because I stopped giving a damn about any of that.

Or I guess I should say almost any of that. The best conclusion to this blog post would be 53-year-old me recreating that photo, sitting shirtless and smiling on my front lawn while chewing on some flowers. But I’m not eager to share that with the world just yet. Maybe in another 20 years or so.

1
Almost to the day, even, since the first time I told any friends was in October.
2
No doubt to train LLMs on, because hooray for the future.

Hat Speech

When you get maybe a little TOO into a piece of campaign merchandise and what it means for America

Back when Kamala Harris’s campaign took off, she quickly secured the Democratic nomination, and then announced Tim Walz as her running mate, I got swept up in the moment. I quickly blew through my “campaign donation money” budget and even bought a couple of pieces of campaign merch.

One of those is the camouflage hat, which was quickly sold out and was immediately called “iconic” by the campaign. And sure, that’s a little too over-enthusiastic, but not by that much, surprisingly. It’s a pretty great piece of merchandise because it’s got layers of significance to it.

Most obvious is that it was introduced to welcome Walz to the campaign, since he’s apparently an avid hunter. It’s intended to underscore that contrast between Walz as being from the rural heartland, Harris from the coastal urban areas, coming together with a shared vision of America. And it’s pointedly taking back that rural heartland imagery from the Republicans.

For my entire lifetime, the Republicans have somehow managed to push tax cuts for the wealthy and anti-consumer deregulation, all while painting themselves as the America-loving populist party. It’s been a bizarro world for decades, but it’s gotten especially ludicrous as we’ve seen these guys who’ve clearly never been to a fast food restaurant before try to pass themselves off as Champions of the Common Man. It’s fitting that they’ve ended up with Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan as mascots, because they both made fortunes selling a cartoonishly trashy version of America.

And the Democrats have just shrugged and said “let them have it.” What’s also been true my entire lifetime is that the most visible people in the Democratic party have acted like there’s nothing more cringe than being “folksy.” I remember Clinton being sold to us on the idea that he was the anti-Jimmy Carter; southern but with no trace of Hee Haw, cool enough to go on Arsenio Hall’s show with his saxophone, and highbrow enough to fit in with the liberal elite.

One of the things I love about the Harris-Walz campaign is that it’s often felt like a rejection not just of the modern GOP, but of the weird, elitist disappointment that the Democratic party has become. And the camo hat is a symbol of that, too: I would bet you just about anything that Schumer and Pelosi were more comfortable appropriating West African clothing than they would be wearing anything that had a whiff of Wal-Mart about it.

So the hat just underscores the whole idea of the Harris campaign as being a big tent — they’ve stressed that everybody is welcome in their version of the Democratic party: not just rural types and city types, not just all races, but anybody who wants sane politics in the United States. I could tell how clearly that message was coming through by how angry it was making leftists on social media any time a Republican was given the stage at the DNC.¹

So getting a camouflage hat was me being a poseur, but I felt like it was in the spirit of this campaign being a dramatic reboot. Anyone who actually knows me is well aware that not only am I not a hunter or fisher, I don’t even like being outdoors that much. So I figured that a camo hat would be for me like wearing drag. Practical clothes turned into a costume for a pasty-white computer boy. Maybe the beard helps me get away with it? Whatever the case, I figured it would be important as a middle finger to the GOP and to anyone who would reduce all of us to cartoonishly broad stereotypes.

But I have to say that actually putting it on felt more momentous than I’d expected. If I were in an anime, or an early-80s Amblin movie, there would’ve been blue sparks of electricity coming off of the hat. I never expected that a performative show of anti-snobbery would have me flashing back to being a kid. Like I said, I’ve never had any interest in hunting, and I pretty much immediately disliked fishing as soon as I tried it. And that was treated vaguely like a failing on my part. Never quite explicitly, and never by my parents, who were always completely supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but it was all still enough to suggest that I wasn’t quite a “real” man.

And I felt like I had a fleeting moment of clarity. I remembered how much I tried to lose my accent, and how much I aspired to distance myself from anything that would get me branded as a redneck. I realized that I wasn’t so much assigned the stereotype of “gay liberal computer nerd” as I embraced it, and even aspired to it. A bunch of rich people decided that these people fit into a stereotype that has nothing to do with these people, and I’d dutifully picked my side. It was like realizing I’ve been spending all this time putting the clown makeup on myself.

Considering how big a fan I am of Miller’s Crossing, I should know that sometimes a hat is just a hat. But I really, really like the idea that we’re chipping away at the last 50 years of stereotypes and assumptions and finally understanding that people are capable of a hell of a lot more than a bunch of political strategists ever gave us credit for. I like the idea of actually moving into the 21st century.

1
To be fair, more or less: Nancy Pelosi has frequently gone on about the need for a sane, rational, and functioning Republican party in the US, but there’s a very clear sense that she wants to go back to the pre-Trump days, where there was an eternal stalemate between Reagan/Bush Republicans and Clinton/Obama Democrats. No thanks.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Firestarter Starter

Two tunes to help make your own 90s dance hit

Hey! Do you remember the international mega-hit song “Firestarter” by the Prodigy from 1996? It wasn’t my favorite track from that album (I still say “Breathe” is a more interesting song) but it sure was popular and made them a ton of money.

If you’d like to get in on a piece of that action for yourself, it’s pretty straightforward: first you just need a charismatic and interesting-looking singer¹, a sewer to hang out in, and samples from a few songs.

Easiest to guess, especially if you’re a fan of The Venture Brothers, is the “Hey!” from Art of Noise’s “Close (to the Edit).” That’s a Tuesday Tune Two-Fer repeat, unfortunately. I’d hoped to include the drums from “Firestarter,” which are sampled from a remix of the song “Devotion” by Ten City, which I can’t find on Apple Music.

The biggest surprise to me, though, was that the other main sample in “Firestarter” was from a song I’d heard about a billion times by 1996, because I listened to Last Splash obsessively. It’s from “SOS” by the Breeders. Which I never noticed, and only learned just recently, over 20 years later.

I think we’ve all learned something important here today.

1
Who, by literally all accounts after his passing, was a really nice guy

One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

Even in the middle of super hero fatigue, the WandaVision spin-off insists that it has a reason to exist.

I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

Two tunes that weren’t as tangentially-related as I thought but I like them anyhow

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell.

As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on a variant of “Maps” and sent it to Beyoncé, who turned it into “Hold Up.” Even if it’s not that complicated a story, it still is interesting to me just how much that article in Billboard is a bizarre time capsule. How many of those words would be recognizable to somebody reading it 100 years from now?

Or even farther? It’s fun to imagine a far-distant civilization that had never heard of Karen O, Vampire Weekend, Diplo, or Twitter, and had only vaguely heard of Beyoncé (in the same way that we know of pharaohs only by mention of their names), somehow discovering this pop culture Rosetta Stone and suddenly being able to piece together entire sub-genres of 21st century popular music.

And they’re both great songs, without feeling like just a cover or a sample. “Hold Up” not only borrows a lyric from “Maps” and a hook from Andy Williams, but even the idea to combine them from Ezra Koenig. But it’s still undeniably a Beyoncé song, something powerful built on top of a base of something clever.

My only context for “Maps” was playing it in Rock Band enough times for it to become a favorite. And then hearing it in countless karaoke nights, with the entire room singing along by the end. All my connotations of the song feel completely separate from the “meaning” of it, and couldn’t possibly have been in mind when it was written and recorded, so it seems like it’s gone on to have a life all its own.

Except that the reason the song is so memorable is because its hook isn’t just musical, but meaningful. I’m not sure I understand the lyrics to the original song, but I feel like I get the hook, and it’s universal. So maybe it’s not getting reinterpreted and reinvented, but actually Karen O was so good at capturing an intense emotion inside a single lyric, that she’s shared that exact feeling with everyone who’s ever sung it.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Nobody Loves You More

Two tunes from someone so cool that no matter how cool you think she is, she’s even cooler than that

I’ve been a fan of Kim Deal ever since I first saw the video to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies — they were all doing the same gag, but she was the one really selling it, said my impressionable late teenage mind. On top of having a voice that sounds like only one other person in the world, she’s maintained a kind of integrity that I think is completely unique. It feels like she doesn’t care in the slightest about being a rock star, but cares a lot about music.

It’s something that seems to baffle a lot of people. I’ve seen multiple videos purporting to document The Breeders from formation through Last Splash and the years afterwards, or talking about the success of “Cannonball,” and the guys¹ making them just seem incapable of getting Deal’s work on its own merits. It’s always framed as a competition between The Breeders and the Pixies², as if she’s incapable of ever escaping the looming shadow of Charles Thompson. And people can’t understand how a song as non-traditional as “Cannonball” became such a big hit, without dismissing it as a one-hit-wonder fluke of the 1990s.

I may be a little guilty of it, too, since when I heard that Kim Deal was releasing a solo album called Nobody Loves You More, I wondered why not just make another Breeders record? After hearing the two singles so far, “Coast,” and “Crystal Breath,” it’s obvious: this isn’t going to be a Breeders record.

Usually with a Breeders record, even when I can’t tell who’s singing what part, I can tell what each instrument is doing. It’s odd to hear Kim Deal songs with a ton of production around them, instead of two guitars, a bass, drums, and sometimes violin. “Coast” emphasizes horns — it initially reminded me a lot of Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” — to feel lazily tropical. “Crystal Breath” emphasizes the back beat, and it reminds me a little bit of St Vincent’s self-titled album.

The trick is that all the production is still in service of a Kim Deal song, and she is a master at coming up with hooks. In 2013, she released a bunch of disparate singles not collected into a single album, and “The Root” was my favorite. It’s pared back to nothing but guitars and drums (and a car’s back-up camera in a snowy parking lot, for the video), and it still gets stuck in my head.

“Cannonball” still baffles some music critics because it seems too weird to be popular. I think the truth is that it’s full of hooks, but they’re not in the expected places, and I think that’s a recurring trick of Deal’s. She could be cranking out catchy songs non-stop, but she seems to be more interested in making songs that are catchy enough to stick, but weird enough that they don’t just evaporate from memory the second they’re over. I still can’t say I’m a fan of Pod, but in the rest of The Breeders’ albums and her solo work, I think there’s a lot to be said for making music that challenges you to ignore it.

I get the sense that Nobody Loves You More is something like the opposite of all the “Unplugged” performances that bands were doing in the 1990s. Those were intended to show that the bands being given tons of money by record labels were actually talented musicians underneath all the noise and over-production. Kim Deal’s new album seems like it’ll show us what’s core to her music, whether it’s stripped down, or with guest musicians and a full suite of studio tricks.

1
Always guys, it’s worth pointing out
2
Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: The Worst Cake

Two tangentially-related tunes for going through a down time

Pictured is my attempt to make a belated birthday cake for myself, since my favorite kind is just a yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting, and it seems foolish to order one from a bakery when they’re (ostensibly) so easy to make. As the keen-eyed viewer might be just able to make out: the process didn’t go well. The cake tore apart in multiple places, and the frosting was too runny and never solidified. The message of that cake is not so much “Happy Birthday” as “Why Do I Exist?”

Honestly, I thought the whole thing was funny. But it also happens to be a good metaphor for my overall mood the past couple months. Varenicline (aka Chantix) is a wonder drug in terms of helping me quit smoking when literally nothing else can, and as of today, I’ve gone five weeks without a cigarette and haven’t missed it a bit. But the side effects of the drug (and withdrawal) are lousy. For me: getting extremely nauseated after I take one, and a lengthy depression.

It takes over gradually enough that I’d forgotten that the same thing happened last time I took varenicline (and quit smoking for three years). It feels like something gunking up the gears in my brain, so that they grind imperceptibly slower each day, until they just sieze up. That means going from not really enjoying anything, to being not motivated to do anything, to just not being able to do anything, no matter how urgent it is.

“On Being Blue” is from Art of Noise’s last album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, from 1999. That means I was either on my way out at LucasArts, or I’d just left, and was likely suffering from career-ambition-oriented depression at the time. The song is actually about mood and color, though, which you can tell was a fixation of Debussy’s just by listening to La Mer, a composition that doesn’t sound like the ocean so much as feel like the ocean.

“Sunless Saturday” is from Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings, released in 1991. That means I was in my second year of college and probably still feeling pretty optimistic. Fishbone was singing about injustice, not depression as a side effect of medication, but the reason I like it so much today is the same reason I liked it so much then: it doesn’t shy away from describing what it feels like to be in the pits, but it also doesn’t wallow in them.

It’s stabilizing to know that whatever you’re feeling is temporary. I’ve only got a few weeks left of this prescription until I’m done with it and the needless hassle of smoking. And of course, the upcoming election is filling me with hope instead of dread, for once. If you’re in the US, remember to verify your registration — or register to vote! — at vote.gov.

One Thing I Like About Ready or Not

Ready or Not is a black comedy/suspense movie that feels completely like an independent production

I just learned tonight (from the Dead Meat channel on YouTube) that Ready or Not, along with Abigail and the new Scream installments, were made by a group called Radio Silence. I think that’s worth pointing out for a couple of reasons: first is because this movie is so similar to Abigail that I would’ve accused the latter of being derivative. Second, both movies feel like stubbornly independent original projects.

It’s possible that I’ve just stopped going to theaters except for big franchise installments, but it does seem increasingly rare to see standalone, self-contained movies get much popular attention. No doubt the production companies would like to be able to turn them into long-running, profitable series, but Ready or Not seems to reject any attempt whatsoever to continue the story.

There are a lot of aspects common to both Ready or Not and Abigail: A premise that could work as the “twist” that sells the movie, but it’s given away in the trailer. A protagonist trapped overnight in a huge gothic mansion. A combination of comedy and pretty extreme violence. And a few gory specifics that would be spoilers if I gave any more detail. It almost feels like Ready or Not was a kind of first draft for Abigail, because I think the latter is quite a bit better.

One sequence I liked — or I guess it’s more accurate to say admired — in particular: main character Grace has been found and gets wounded by a bullet. She ends up falling into a horrific pit (something that also happens in Abigail), and after being fully traumatized by what she sees down there, she has to climb back out, wound and all.

The reason it works so well is because it’s excruciatingly suspenseful, in the way the best horror movies are suspenseful. You’re not wondering what’s about to happen; you know exactly what’s going to happen, because there is a single shot of an exposed nail that the camera lingers on for just a second too long at the start. And after sticking that image in your mind, the movie makes you wait an eternity for it all to play out, as if it were a Final Destination sequence. When it finally ends, it’s made a hundred times worse, because we’ve had to imagine the pay-off for so long.

That pay-off is also a good example of my biggest problem with the movie, though: the tone is all over the place. The studio lists it as a “horror comedy,” but there aren’t enough scenes where it’s both at the same time. Once the action starts, it feels like it’s spending most of its time either putting its protagonist through horrible and not-particularly-funny situations, or trying to draw out too much drama from the characters who are supposed to be sympathetic. It seems to take itself too seriously for what the trailers and screenshots implied.

But I thought it all came together satisfyingly in the end, even if I wished more characters had gotten their comeuppance earlier on. (I haven’t seen You’re Next, but from what I know about it, the structure is more like what I’d been expecting from Ready or Not). And I liked that it felt almost old-fashioned, for telling a complete, original story from beginning to end, with no hint of a sequel.

The Audacity of Cringe

Giving up smoking and other bad habits, and rebuilding a better outlook based on The New Honesty, Good Vibes, and Trust

I mentioned that I started using social media apps again once I noticed that the Kamala Harris campaign’s account had started firing on all cylinders, making politics fun and engaging instead of anxious and dreadful.

But what I hadn’t considered was that I’d also quit smoking around the same time. In retrospect, I was just trading one previously-reliable dopamine-hit distraction for another. And once I made that connection, it also helps explain so much of everything I’ve been turning over in my mind, trying to make sense of things that refuse to make sense, and wondering how we all ended up in this state.

There are several eerie parallels between addiction and this whole social/political dystopia we’ve made for ourselves in 2024:

The distraction becomes the focus. For me, the “quick smoke break to clear my head” gradually turned into “I’ve got to finish this so I can have another cigarette.” This doesn’t feel that different from watching the glut of political media put all of their focus on the politicians and their campaigns, instead of the real-world problems that they were trying to address. People have been pointing out for years that the emperor has no clothes, which the political media has taken as a cue for incessant discussions about The Power and Significance of Nudity In America’s Fast-Changing Political Climate.
It rejects the idea of ever having enough. In the 80s, it was 24-hour news channels. Now, it’s having to fill every pixel of every screen, and every nanosecond of the day, with content. Old-fashioned notions of relevance and newsworthiness were discarded long ago, because there always has to be something to focus on, something we can make seem important, even if it isn’t.
It feeds off of self-awareness. I always felt like being aware of how much I was smoking was the same thing as being in control over it, but for me, it wasn’t.¹ With media — traditional or social media — and politics, self-awareness is never used towards changing behavior, but reinforcing behavior. People on Twitter came up with the ostensibly ironic term “doomscrolling,” and then dove back even deeper into their phones and their imaginary, perpetually angry and miserable communities. And one of JD Vance’s least-harmful bits of weird behavior was saying that he had a Diet Mountain Dew and “people will probably say that’s racist.” The GOP is perfectly aware that they’re (with good reason) perceived as racist, but instead of engaging in any actual introspection, they’ve simply decided that the accusation is meaningless.
It reinforces the same patterns over and over again, until it loses any resemblance to the original. It’s been over a decade since I actually enjoyed a cigarette; by the end, it became more of a burdensome obligation than anything pleasurable. I’m reminded of that when I see how political media took the necessity of fact-checking and turned it from actual journalism into the performative ritual that it is now, giving nonsensical rebuttals to obviously true statements, presumably just because they have to write something. So now, instead of being a reliable source of truth, they just reinforce the (false) notion that everyone is always lying to some degree or another.

1
Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help.