It’s snowing heavily outside right now. We have basically no snow this winter, and this last week it has come all at once.
I like snow. It puts me in a good mood, at least initially. I think there’s some neurochemical explanation for that. The snow reflects sunlight during the day, so it’s probably like a happy lamp for me. The lack of snow probably contributed to my piss-poor mood the last few months that you could probably see in my writing on here. Winter without snow is awful.
I always start with the weather. I don’t know why. Since I don’t edit these media round-ups, and since they border on stream-of-consciousness writing at times, I think looking out the window is how I start getting in the mood to write. I usually just begin by writing about whatever it at the top of my mind. If I don’t wake up anxious about an atrocity or depressed about the news, my mind usually defaults to the weather.
Anyway. This the weekly media round-up where I (Josiah) talk about all the media I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
Starting off, The Good Apples is taking a month long hiatus so we can build up a backlog again. We’ll be back in February or March. The show isn’t dead, we just got busy.
Fruitless is back for the New Year. At the beginning of this week, I released the first episode of 2024, featuring
. With both of us writing Substacks reflecting about the films/media we watch, I asked him to come on and discuss 2023 in personal media consumption. However, the episode did what a lot of these newsletters do. They end up being about atrocity playing out in the background of our daily lives, especially since 10/7. You can find that episode here.This also marks me switching to doing podcast recordings over Zoom. This is probably not an interesting detail to most of you reading, but up until this point I’ve done all podcasts over Discord using a bot called Craig. My good friend Craig, who has been with me since 2020 when I recorded the first episode of my defunct podcast, Very Legal, Very Cool, has some serious issues at times. It’s manageable, but if your internet connection is weak for a minute, it can really mess with the auto quality in a way that Zoom just doesn’t. On top of that, more people know how to join a Zoom call than a Discord voice channel, I’ve noticed. The only thing that prevented me from taking the leap was that Zoom costs money for recordings over 40+ minutes, and Craig is free. So here’s my advice if you are someone considering making a podcast: Get over to Zoom as soon as you can.
If you can’t afford the subscription, then start with Craig, or maybe record your episode in increments over Zoom (that always sounded like a pain to me, but if you’re prompt and you can work with having to launch a new session every 40 minutes, go for it). But as soon as you can afford it, just switch to recording over Zoom. I could have done this years ago and didn’t, and now some of my favorite episodes of the shows I’ve done also have irritating audio glitches that will forever bother me. Just do yourself the favor and switch to it as soon as you can.
I’m really excited for some of the stuff I have planned for Fruitless, so keep your eyes on the show in the next few months. Last night I recorded the first Patreon exclusive episode for this year which should be out in the next few days (EDIT: it’s here now). I was joined by a good friend of mine, James Eric, to discuss Idiocracy (2006). Which leads us into the film section.
Film
The first “film” I want to discuss doesn’t really count. It’s a stand up special.
I did stand up comedy really briefly in 2019 or so. I started in the summer of 2019, and did it really regularly until the pandemic hit around the beginning of 2020. I’ll usually just say I did it for a year, but technically it was less than that. I wasn’t particularly good at it, although I was on track to getting better before I stopped and kind of replaced it with podcasting. This is all to say, it was an artform I used to engage with a lot more than I do now.
Comedy was going through a weird time at that point. There was a tension between a liberal wing that was moving away from telling jokes and starting to feel more like TED talks with a few chuckles and a loud, conservative wing that was all about being super edgy and controversial and talking about how no one can take a joke anymore instead of telling jokes. The grand majority of comedians didn’t fully land in either camp, but those were the two tugs from either side that grew especially tiresome. 2018-2020 was a period where you were supposed to have an opinion about “cancel culture.” It sucked.
This was the context that James Acaster’s 4-part special, Repertoire, entered the scene. Looking back on that special, I think it was a revelation for me. In part because I had never seen a comedian so effectively use callback jokes to build an absurdist narrative. I don’t want to spoil the joke, but the first episode begins with him doing comedy on his knees for a good while, and the pay-off made me immediately fall in love with his comedy.
What really struck me about Repertoire on this revisit was that Acaster is good at jokes. Classic jokes. This is something I think more and more people have craved as the whole liberal TED talk vs. Super edgy comic dichotomy grew tiresome. Neither really tell any traditional, well-structured jokes. While Acaster does break conventions constantly—it always feels like the special is falling apart as his nonsense narrative gets more ridiculous—his comedy is fundamentally observational comedy. He is doing “what’s the deal with airline food?” jokes at the core, but the way he sets those jokes up to pay off later distracts from their simplicity. For me, returning to Acaster makes me believe in the power of jokes again. He’s able to make simple observational comedy feel new. Even now, almost six years later, I think the special is an inspiration.
He did another one in 2020 that I haven’t seen yet. I’ve seen chunks of it on YouTube that have been funny, but you haven’t really experience an Acaster special until you watch the whole thing, as the jokes all build off each other. It’s hard to cut chunks out and let them stand alone without missing something.
Moving away from comedy, I continued my journey into Noah Baumbach’s filmography with Mr. Jealousy (1997). I liked this one a lot more than Kicking and Screaming (1995), in part because it had more of an actual story. It genuinely got a lot of laughs out of me.
The film is about an incredibly jealous man, Lester, played by Eric Stoltz, begins dating Ramona Ray, played by Annabella Sciorra. He’s incredibly jealous of her past boyfriends, and he discovers that she briefly dated an acclaimed writer. He ends up stalking her writer ex-boyfriend and follows him to group therapy, where he takes on a fake identity and begins to accidentally develop a unique relationship with this writer. Anything past this would spoil it, but it’s definitely a fun time.
The last two films I watched the last week are kind of a nightmare double feature. Benny’s Video (1992) and Idiocracy (2006).
Benny’s Video is a deeply upsetting film, and I don’t recommend it for those who can’t stomach witnessing animal cruelty. This is a Michael Haneke film, and it’s definitely unpleasant and uncompromising like a Haneke film. That being said, I think it also identifies a lot about modern life, and I think it was prophetic of the internet age despite being a film about video.
The theme throughout the film, one that comes out also in Funny Games and The Seventh Continent, is the overstimulating tedium of modern life. Everything is oversaturated with violence and noise, and yet everything is boring. There will be shots of Benny silently doing homework while aggressive music is played at full volume. A family has a casual conversation while footage of Sarajevo plays on the television in the background. Benny watches a video of a pig getting shot and thinks nothing of it. Eventually video and reality merge, and Benny tapes himself killing someone. He’s troubled by his actions, but also numb to them.
I call this a nightmare double feature, although, to be clear, I didn’t watch both of them completely back to back. I watched Benny’s Video on Wednesday evening, and then Idiocracy on Thursday afternoon, but it was enough to still give me a sour taste in my mouth. A lot has been said about Idiocracy. There’s the cliché observation that it’s actually “more of a documentary now, if you think about it,” followed by the slightly less cliché “it’s a film endorsing eugenics,” to the most common consensus view now that’s becoming cliché, “It’s a film showing the worldview of pompous white, upper middle class liberals looking down on the hoi polloi.”
Watching both of these movies together, though, there’s a different angle, and this is the one I explore with James on Fruitless. In the context of today, the film seems to capture the worldview that being online constantly seems to produce in you. There’s this deep contempt for everyone. It’s a misanthropic movie that absolutely hates most people and thinks they should not be allowed to govern anything. It’s an anti-democratic film trying to build a political critique out of cultural and aesthetic annoyances. To me, the film is the worldview of the “creep” fascism described by John Ganz in his jock/creep dichotomy of fascism.
What I’m saying is that I think the overstimulation of our media-saturated life, the non-stop consumption, and the erosion of empathy that comes with seeing people as content—the stuff that Benny’s Video is critiquing—produces a perspective like the one in Idiocracy. I think this is especially apparent when you see online reactionaries refer to normal people as “normies” or, even more disturbingly, “NPCs.”
For instance, here’s a brief interaction between Blaire White and Scott Adams on Twitter in December:
This is the worldview of Idiocracy, and it’s also the worldview of Benny in Benny’s Video. Most people are worthless and stupid. They are disposable. They don’t know what’s in their best interests. Unlike me, of course, who deserves to be part of the technocratic class. The problem with the world is that people like me, who read books and have an “internal monologue,” aren’t running it.
I think it’s maybe a bit harsh to call it a “fascist” film, since I don’t think that’s what Mike Judge was going for. I like Mike Judge. But I think that’s what the film communicates whether he intended it or not, and I think that’s what the film’s reputation is in most people’s minds. It was reflective of liberal condescension at one point, but now it feels to resonate primarily with this reflexive, anti-democratic misanthropy common in a lot of online far right communities.
All that said, there’s also some pretty funny jokes in it. You win some, you lose some.
Reading
I’ve actually been reading this year. That’s a habit I lost last year, and I want to bring it back. Specifically, I want to read more fiction. Over the years, my reading has been more and more nonfiction. I want more prose in my life, rather than just functional writing communicating information or an argument.
I started reading The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai. No, I can’t pronounce that. If you’re familiar with him, it will likely be because of his collaboration with the filmmaker, Béla Tarr. He wrote the novel, Sátántangó, which was adapted into the nearly eight-hour epic that film nerds are always “meaning to get around to” (myself included).
Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies is based loosely on The Melancholy of Resistance. I love the film, so I decided to read the book. It is not an easy read. There are no paragraph breaks and sentences can be up to a page long. Nevertheless, if you stick with it, as I’ve been trying to, it does eventually pull you in. You have to tune in to his style a bit, and then it begins to flow naturally.
I’m not far enough in to say much about it, but the anxieties and emotions of the late Soviet era (the book was written in 1989) are very apparent: the sense that everything is falling apart, but it’s difficult to point to exactly how they will fall apart and why. I’m interested in late Soviet art (I’m using that as a broad term to include the Eastern bloc in general, since Krasznahorkai is Hungarian) because a lot of the emotions and anxieties resonate with the current moment in the U.S. Not all, of course. We don’t live under state communism. But we do live in a period with an increasing sense that the current order is failing, but also that it’s impossible to image anything outside of it. As the title for a fantastic book about this sentiment in the U.S.S.R. puts it, “Everything was forever, until it was no more.”
It comes out strong in those first two chapters of The Melancholy of Resistance. A rich woman spends a whole train ride anxious at the disgusting and evil people she perceives around herself before hiding within her home again, where she can feel protected from the apocalypse outside (an apocalypse that seems to be mostly in her head, and yet it may be real). This apocalypse is described as a resurrection, but with horror. A giant circus brings a huge, rotting whale corpse into the Hungarian town. It seems that there are omens everywhere, but what are they omens of? Nothing is happening, and yet everything is filled with dread. A depressed Hungarian author is watching an entire society and economic order collapse, with no idea what comes next. A depressed Hungarian filmmaker will adapt it several decades later, and it will somehow still feel in tune with the current moment.
Music
I don’t have anything thoughtful to say about my music consumption over the last week. In the last few months, I’ve had a restored interest in hardcore. I’m still listening to hardcore, but I’ve slowed down and started returning to some softer music, especially moving toward more post-punk, early shoegaze, etc. Right now, I’ve been enjoying returning to my bloody valentine’s classic record, Loveless. I’ve also really been enjoying the song Leather by Talk Show, which my brother introduced to me.
On that note, I think that’s it for me this week. I’ll see you next week.
Bye!