Podcast rebrand courtesy of Kipp Paulsen
Fruitless rebrand and some Baumbach films
I’m really tired this morning. I couldn’t fall asleep last night for whatever reason, and then I woke up naturally about an hour before my alarm went off.
It’s been a pretty decent week, all things considered. I’ve been lining up the next month or so’s schedule for Fruitless and I’m really excited about what’s in store for the show.
I also want to give a quick shout out to my friend
who has decided to launch a similar newsletter to this one over the week. You can check out that first post here.Welcome to the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m watching, listening to, reading, or producing.
New from me
Let’s start with Fruitless. Up until now this has been the logo for the show:
I’ve had this logo since I launched the show in 2022 (although this span includes a 6 month hiatus in the first half of 2023). It’s been just long enough that I’ve started to get annoyed by it, partially because the color scheme means a lot of my branding was green to match it. I default to and prefer darker colors usually, and I also wanted to change the tone of the logo about.
On top of that, when I made this logo in 2022, I meant it to be more of a placeholder until I could get something better. I’m pretty sure that I got this image by googling “painting of fruit” or “painting of pear” and pulling it from images. I might have added “impressionist,” because that’s the painting style I tend to prefer, and it is a Paul Cézanne painting. This all means that I absolutely don’t have the copyright to be using this image. Which was probably fine (or, at least, I could continue getting away with it), up until I launched a Patreon and started actually trying to grow the show. Now I’m on shakier territory.
Impressionist painting is one art style I like. Another one I really like is street photography. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that my Twitter avatar is a kid pointing a gun at the camera.
This is a photo by one of the “fathers of street photography,” William Klein. It’s probably his most famous photo out of his book Life is Good and Good For You in New York. I think it’s a fun avatar, although it did weirdly get me suspended this last week out of nowhere for “graphic or violent content,” despite having it for at least three years. This accusation is kind of rich since the site has basically been nonstop atrocity footage since the war/genocide in Gaza broke out in October. I waited an hour and then just added the avatar back and now it’s fine. Weird. Anyway.
I like street photography, and I was considering trying to build a new Fruitless logo using some street photography. I was messing with some William Klein photos, some Joel Meyerowitz photos, and some Robert Frank photos trying to make a new logo when I realized that would likely put me in the same situations that the pear painting did.
Then I remembered that one of the reasons I got into street photography in the first place was that I lived with a street photographer for a summer and a winter break during college. My good friend, Kipp Paulsen, is a street photographers with years and years worth of photos on his computer, always interested in an excuse to go spelunking into his hard drive and find an interesting image. So I reached out to him and was really happy with the results.
He sent me 33 photos. I produced 10 logos. I chiseled that down to 6 logos. I consulted the Fruitless Discord server, and they helped me bring it down to 3 logos. Lastly, I put up a Twitter poll and a Patreon poll of the 3 logos. This was the winner.
I love how weird this photo is. A few people in the Discord said it matched the “vibe” of the show best. The other two contenders were also cool, but this one was definitely the weirdest photo. And apparently people preferred weird.
Here are the other two, which I will still use in various promotional stuff.
Long term, I want to keep working with Kipp as the artist behind the show. I think it will add some intentionality behind the “branding” to consistently be working with one artist whose work I’ve respected for a long time. I’m really honored he’s letting me use all these photos. And you absolutely should go follow him on Instagram.
I didn’t release any new episodes of Fruitless this week, although I have a lot lined up for the next month or so that I’m really excited about. This week I did “unlock” a paywalled episode from December since it seemed to have been a useful resource for some people. This is an episode with Keanu Heydari about Christian Zionism that you can listen to here.
Film
This last week I’ve been continuing my journey through Noah Baumbach’s filmography. He’s been a bit of a glaring blindspot for me, and I wanted to aquiant myself with his bigger films for a project I’ve got scheduled for next month.
After going through his early films the last week or so (Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy), I finally got to the era when he moves away from being a whiny, mid-20s filmmaker to a genuinely powerful filmmaker. That switch happens with one of his most well-known films, The Squid and the Whale (2005).
This thing deserves the hype it has. What a fantastic movie. I think it’s hard to say anything about the film that hasn’t already been said, but I found it’s ability to explore the way atrocious behavior from parents (especially the father in this film) filters into their children. The sequences of Jesse Eisenberg’s character trying to date and have normal teenage romantic experiences, but consistently sabotaging himself with the pretentious and misogynistic behavior he’s emulating from his father, absolutely gutted me.
This is something that I think distinguishes Baumbach from a lot of the “Mumblecore” filmmakers he gets lumped in with. The intelligence or wittiness of his characters is never actually an endearing quality about them. It’s their fundamental flaw, usually. The desire to be perceived as someone with good taste who is knowledgable and critical destroys these characters. In that sense, these movies also hurt, because I sense that aspects of myself are in a lot of his caustic characters. Certainly not to the same amplitude, but it’s there. That narcissism and desire to be perceived as intelligent or interesting, to a point of alienating others, is definitely in me.
This theme is present in his two following films as well, Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg (2010). Both didn’t hit me as hard as The Squid and the Whale, but both still pack a punch. It’s interesting putting Baumbach in comparison to his collaborator, Wes Anderson. They both deal in similar themes—rich losers, pretentious narcissists, and broken families navigating a chaotic world. But while Wes Anderson does this with a whimsical backdrop, Baumbach is the cold realist. Same themes, drastically different deliveries.
Which approach is better? It depends. I don’t think Wes Anderson could do something that hits the way The Squid and the Whale does. On the other hand, Margot at the Wedding came out the same year as Anderson’s film The Darjeeling Limited and deals in the same familial turmoil and sibling rivalry, but I think The Darjeeling Limited did more for me. I don’t have a good metric for deciding when realism is preferable over formalism, and vice versa, but at the end of the day, I think it’s about the emotions you want to communicate.
Darjeeling leaves you with a family that is absolutely broken, but there is potential for some repair between the siblings, and we see some of that growth happen throughout the film. This being complimented with nice, overt visual metaphors and vibrant colors, helps deliver that message of reconciliation to me. On the other hand, Margot is a mean movie. This family shouldn’t reconcile. It is irreparably broken, and the cool color palet and shaky camera and following screaming family members communicates this perfectly. Everyone is too narcissistic, and they aren’t showing any signs of change.
Moving away from Baumbach, I also watched a Joe Swanberg film this week to re-aquiant myself with Mumblecore for some future projects. Alexander the Last (2009) was the film. As always, it was an unpleasant experience and I hate Swanberg. It being his fifth feature length film is ridiculous, since it feels like his first. Like almost all of his movies do.
I watched a more recent film this week, Leave the World Behind (2023). This film has infuriating non-politics, an infuriating non-ending, and was produced by the Obamas. I don’t want to bog this newsletter down by ranting about everything wrong with it since a lot of it was discussed heavily upon its release last year, but if you want me profanity ridden review, it’s on Letterboxd. What I think is frustrating is I actually enjoyed watching the film for good chunks of it, while I was thinking it was going somewhere interesting. And then it doesn’t go anywhere interesting.
Lastly, I watched Dina Hashem’s stand up special, Dark Little Whispers. I’ve been following Hashem on social media for probably five years or so and was so happy to see she finally had gotten to the point to have a special. There’s a lot of complaints in the Letterboxd reviews about her being boring or dull, which I find strange because her deadpan delivery is why I like her so much. Hopefully she’ll find a way to reach those people that don’t quite get the deadpan better. But I had a good time with the special, and I hope it will lead to more from her.
Reading and music
I don’t have much to say about either of these this week. I haven’t made any progress on The Melancholy of Resistance yet, and I’ve mostly just been listening to the same stuff as usual. Next week, I’ll try to come with something more interesting.
On that note, I think that’s about it.
See you next week!