It’s funny, last week I said winter seemed to be officially over. I was wrong. It snowed last night and everything outside is buried in white. It’s going to be in the 50s by Monday, though, so it won’t last long.
I’m really tired this morning. I stayed up a little later than usual, and then couldn’t fall asleep. Part of why I stayed up too late is that I started messing around with Spotify’s AI DJ. (Full disclosure: I’m about to ramble about Spotify data for a bit, if that sounds boring, skip to the New from me heading)
I’m a pretty tech-skeptical and definitely AI-skeptical person. I also know that Spotify already has so much data on me that I've kind of just given up. Long live the new flesh or whatever. I’ve been using Spotify long enough to have humiliating teenage playlists. I think I’ve been using it since 2011 or so. I can’t remember.
I actually just requested my data from Spotify out of curiosity here, so if I happen to receive it by the time I’m writing the music section, I’ll add that. It says it can take 30 days to prepare, though, so probably not.
Anyway, Spotify has a lot of my data already. They have information on my listening patterns and how my taste has evolved over the last decade or more. So I was curious what the AI DJ would do.
It’s definitely still in a Beta mode. Basically, every five songs or so, the DJ voice comes on and he introduces a new theme or genre or whatever for the next five songs. He’ll come on and go, “Alright, next up, we have some hip-hop” or “Next up is a vibe—that vibe is pumped up!” Stuff like that. When it panics, it defaults to playing a few Top 40 songs.
When it’s actually using my data, it can sometimes be a bit weird. At one moment, the DJ came on and said that it was going to take me back and play some music from “when you were kind of an up-and-comer yourself.” It, of course, played a few tracks that I listened to in middle school or early high school. I don’t remember which songs. Obviously I knew they had that data on me, but something about it being framed that way—this very human sounding voice saying “alright, here’s some song from when you, specifically, were 15”— was very weird.
At another point, it said, “The next few songs are going to have a summer vibe. I pulled from what you listened to a lot in past summers.” Immediately giving me Young Hearts Spark Fire by Japandroids, Songs for Teenagers by Fake Problems… songs that don’t actually sound like summer, but for me they feel like summer because, yes, the DJ is correct—I had those songs on repeat during past summers. Spotify has had a feature kind of like this already where it would produce a summer playlist based off your past data, but something about an AI DJ leading into the song by being like “alright, here’s some really hyper-specific memories” beforehand is bizarre.
Anyway, it’s a mixed bag. I actually found a bunch of songs using the AI DJ that I will probably listen to. Even when it drifted out of my usual genres (rock, generally) and into something I listen to less, like rap/hip-hop, it also knew what artists in that genre I preferred, so it went straight for those and stuff adjacent to it.
Spotify represents my weak spot for all of this data stuff. I am, as I said, tech-skeptical and AI-skeptical, on philosophical, spiritual, and political grounds, but I also have that natural narcissism that this stuff plays on. I mean, think about one of the biggest ways research groups have been able to collect data in the past: through personality quizzes, political compass quizzes, etc. We love to learn about ourselves. We love to learn stuff we maybe didn’t know about ourselves.
With something so tied to my emotions and my place in life like music, having decades of data on my listening patterns and the evolution of my taste is really tempting to me every time. I want to know what it knows about me. There’s a lot of misses, but the hits can be a bit spooky. I wonder how far they’ll get with data and the AI DJ. Will I eventually be able to type something like “give me songs I listened to in 2016” and get a few? Or “give me songs I usually listen to in the winter”? “Songs I listen to late a night.” “Songs I listen to when I’m depressed.” Etc. I’m curious how elaborate this can get. I mean, they have over a decade of data on me.
Well, the AI DJ got me listening to Single Mothers and Death Grips finally, so I guess it all works out in the end. This is the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’ve been watching, producing, listening to, and reading.
New from me
This week I released some new episodes of Fruitless.
I was trying to do a bit of a movie focus for February on Fruitless, but scheduling made that a bit weird, so it looks less like a “movie month” and more like “a month with mostly movies, but also some other stuff”. Nevertheless, I started out the week by releasing an episode with my old co-host from Mammonburg, Finch, discussing Society of the Snow (2023).
It was an interesting conversation about the film, about the real life story the film is based on, and about the way the film has exploded into a cultural phenomenon the Spanish-speaking world while mostly just receiving tepid critical praise in the Anglosphere. You can check that episode out here.
Behind the paywall, my good friend, Francis Cooper, joined me to discuss his weird experience going to a Jimmy Dore without fully knowing who Jimmy Dore was. We talked about Dore’s stand up and slow decline into being a total crank. You can listen to that here.
Next week I will be recording some fun episodes, although they probably won’t be released until late in the week or the beginning of the week after. Keep your eyes out of them though.
Film
This was a pretty good week for watching movies.
Over the weekend, I watched Society of the Snow for the aforementioned podcast. I also watched The Outwaters (2022), which was an incredibly strange found footage film that I actually really enjoyed despite it bordering on nonsense at some point. It has a fun, weird time with the camera and it drifts into Lovecraftian and surreal horror, and ends with some genuinely decent gore. It’s a solid little horror flick.
Over the week, I finally broke into my Ormond Family box set. I mentioned this a few weeks back, so I won’t rehash who the Ormonds are too much. I decided to dive into the box set at the beginning, with the films made before Ron Ormond’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.
These were two baffling movies that I did enjoy. They are exploitation movies through-and-through, from an era of exploitation films I’m less familiar with (the 50s and early 60s).
Untamed Mistress (1956) isn’t nearly as tantalizing as the title makes it seem, although it probably was a lot edgier at the time. Now, it’s mostly just racist. A woman gets raised by gorillas, and two men ‘rescue’ her and eventually have to fight some gorillas. There’s a lot of shots of the group staring off into the distance while the film cuts to some documentary footage of giraffes or whatever in Africa. What really makes the film enjoyable, though, is that the aforementioned gorillas are dudes in gorilla suits. God, what a lost art. I love a gorilla suit.
The more interesting, but also a little more distasteful, movie was Please Don’t Touch Me! (1963). As the title suggests, content warning for some sexual violence in the next three paragraphs. Skip those if you want to avoid that.
The film reflects something I love about exploitation films, which is that they do sometimes end up having decent politics or values, but they also present them in a hamfisted and offensive way. Please Don’t Touch Me is, on one hand, a rather sexist film and, on the other hand, a movie that takes a the female protagonist’s emotions and trauma semi-seriously. At least, more so than a lot of films from this era do. It doesn’t hand-wave or call it hysteria. In a weird way, it’s a psychological thriller.
Okay, here’s the flow of the movie which will, I think, communicate how bizarre an artifact it is. The film begins with the protagonist, Viki, being sexually assaulted while in the woods. It isn’t graphic and it’s a bit ambiguous what actually took place, but your mind fills in the gaps. From there, the film abruptly becomes a documentary about hypnosis—yes, you read that right. It uses this as an excuse to show some footage of self-flagellation and strange or violent religious rituals around the world and eventually some footage of an actual surgery (despite how awful this all sounds, it’s not as shocking as it sounds, although I would advise against watching it if you’re sensitive to this stuff). The hypnosis finally connects to the story: many years after the assault, Viki is now a married woman struggling with the fact that she wants to have sex with her husband, but becomes deeply disgusted and afraid whenever they are about to. Visiting a psychologist who eventually calls in aid from a hypnotist, the doctors use hypnosis to revisit her repressed memories and find the source of the panic. From here, it’s like a mystery story but about finding the source for repressed trauma. I think the ultimate answer is a little sexist, as ultimately we find that Viki wasn’t ever raped, that the man who attacked her got chased off and she passed out, but that her mother has insisted this happened to her to a point Viki has come to believe it. Yes, ultimately it’s a woman’s fault. Don’t love that.
Despite all this, I did genuinely find myself getting invested in the characters in a way I often don’t with exploitation films. There’s a story here. There’s a genuine mystery. And the film is deeply sympathetic to Viki and sees her inability to have sex as a genuine hurt. It doesn’t just tell her to suck it up or power through to satisfy her husband. It does actually need resolved and processed. I don’t know. I’ll need to think more on the film, but ultimately I do like it.
Moving away from the Ormond box set, I watched two poverty row noirs with Kelli (my girlfriend) over the week. Lightning Strikes Twice (1951) and My Name is Julia Ross (1945).
Both of these are excellent little noirs. Lightning Strikes Twice (directed by King Vidor) follows a woman who drives out west due to her health—the doctor said the desert air will help her. As she road trips west, she eventually gets pulled into a complex situation surrounding a man who was recently acquitted for murdering his wife (although everyone still thinks he did it). The plot gets a little complicated, so I don’t want to lay out the whole web of relationships here, but it’s a great little mystery that I enjoyed a lot.
I was joking to Kelli that the film has weird parallels to Twilight. Originally, she thought it was a stretch. I was pointing to the fact that the main character is attracted to the alleged wife-murderer partially because of the darkness and intrigue around him. He consistently is terrified of scaring or hurting her. He acts weird and mysterious. He has a dark aspect of himself he doesn’t ever want to talk about. It’s a more grounded, realist version of the same basic romance. Kelli was skeptical, but then eventually burst out laughing: a scene replicated almost verbatim some dialogue from Twilight. I felt vindicated.
That’s a terrible way to sell this movie. It’s incredibly different. It’s worth a watch. We found it on Criterion, in the Gothic Noir collection. Which is also where we found the next one: My Name is Julia Ross.
This is also a fantastic film. Directed by Joseph Lewis (one of the gods of poverty row), the film is a snappy 65 minutes and delivers an awesome little thriller in that time. A woman named Julia Ross accepts a job with an employment agency where she’ll have to live at a wealthy widow’s home. However, she wakes up to find that two days have passed. She’s in new clothes and everyone in the home is calling her by a new name. The family has kidnapped her. They tell everyone that visits that she’s the insane wife of the rich widow’s son, meaning that everyone nods sadly and acts patiently as she tries to explain that she’s actually Julia Ross and has been kidnapped by this family. The film follows her desperate attempt to escape. It’s awesome.
Last up, I continued my journey through Noah Baumbach’s filmography. I finally watched two of his more recent films, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) and Marriage Story (2019). I liked both a lot. Meyerowitz Stories continues a lot of Baumbach’s usual themes about fatherhood and family and artists being dicks. But you can feel how much he’s softened compared to where he was at when he made his more prickly films like Margot at the Wedding or Greenberg. The same goes with Marriage Story, where everyone is flawed but no one is so impossible-to-like as in his previous films.
I wrote out a kind of long Letterboxd review about Marriage Story right after watching it, so I’ll just link that here rather than rehash all of it. I really connected to the film, and a part of me wishes I watched it when it came out, as I was going through and finalizing my own divorce at the time.
Music
As I talked about last week, I’ve been revisiting AJJ.
I’m not sure I have more to say about them than I did last week, but I’ve continued listening to them throughout the week. Something about the stream-of-consciousness, irritated and over-the-top “edginess” of their lyrics really resonate with me.
I slowed down on listening to AJJ around 2020. They also happened to release an album in 2020 called Good Luck Everybody that I wanted to like more than I actually did. In theory, I should like it. Sean Bonnette has always written a lot about his personal neuroses and how they interact with social issues or existential questions. In 2020, Bonnette clearly got sucked into politics in the same way I (and a lot of us) did around that time. He always had that interest, but by 2020, the state of politics in America was weighing on him a lot.
The track No Justice, No Peace, No Hope begins with the line, “The lake of dead black children that America created is getting fuller than the Founding Fathers even wanted. The ghost of great America was underestimated and now it rages like a cold sore on the lip of this dumb nation.”
In theory, then, Good Luck Everybody feels like an album I should love. It’s AJJ, who I love, applying his style to the current moment and talking about the same sense of despair I feel. The problem is that I just didn’t really enjoy the music or melodies on the album. AJJ always had a knack for writing tunes that get stuck in my head. Part of the appeal is those dark lyrics over something catchy. This album just didn’t really hit that musically, and so it just never connected with me and still hasn’t really.
But AJJ put out another record last year: Disposable Everything. Why I didn’t realize this had come out and why I didn’t listen to it is beyond me. Maybe I just assumed with Good Luck Everybody that AJJ and I had gone separate directions. Musically, at least.
No, I was wrong. They came back with some bite. The album has more of the energy of Christmas Island or The Bible 2. I actually get stuff stuck in my head, and he has continued thinking about politics and the state of the U.S. right now.
My favorite song on the album right now is Death Machine. It’s funny because the song is incredibly straightforward and repetitive about the phrase “Death machine”, but that’s also what I find appealing about it.
This is no exaggeration, we're living in a death machine
And no, it's not just your imagination
You've been living in a death machine
Some of us are passengers, and some of us are driving
Almost everybody's getting bled to death to keep the motor runningI'm not being hyperbolic, this place is a death machine
Literally and symbolic in the belly of the death machine
Doesn't matter who is steering, it's just gonna keep on killing
'Til we find a way to finally break the routineYou might as well face the music
You're living in a death machine
I like how the central conceit of the song is calling everything—America, capitalism, “the system,” whatever—a death machine, but also going “no, literally, like I’m not exaggerating. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a literal, giant death machine.”
On that note, I think that’s it for me this week. See you next week.