Small Joys: That's Goodman. And Patterson (and penises)

Two things in The Righteous Gemstones that gave me joy this week.

The first, and Gemstones is not alone in this, is that major league comedy has learned that naked penises are funnier than toplessness. When I became fully enamored with boobs (mid-1980s), they were a mainstay of comedy. Everything from the Tex Avery-ish ogling in PG movies to the generous helpings of bare breasts in R-rated ones. The last decade has shifted this trend. Four episodes in, and penises have spent more time on-screen than boobs, and the episodes are much funnier for it.

Two is the incredible performances from Edi Patterson and John Goodman. There have been a few scenes I’ve found they’ve acted the hell out of even when they don’t have lines. There’s a scene, 20 minutes or so into Episode 3, where Walton Goggins is talking to a featured extra, and John Goodman (with one line) is completely engrossing. He is not stealing any focus, but is so present in the scene that it caught me off-guard.

Now John Goodman is a goddamn treasure and I’ve felt this for decades. Familiar with him from Roseanne, I saw him in The Big Easy (1988) and Barton Fink (1991) in my video-renting heyday and it blew my mind how he could be so good in such different roles.

Edi Patterson is new to me on-screen. She makes me giggle like crazy as Bean Dip on Comedy Bang Bang, and her and Tim Baltz (also a huge draw for me on CBB) are half the reason I’m watching Gemstones right now. I find myself waiting for her scenes, but noticed that she is always in character, always focused on the scene around her, but rarely stealing any scenes by going bigger, which she could kill with. I get the feeling that she’s going to eventually get some star turns, and I can’t wait.

A promotional picture from the Righteous Gemstones. Seated is John Goodman, standing behind him is Adam Devine, Danny McBride, and Edi Patterson

Sixteen Questions (and one directive) For My Kids

I had a birthday recently, and one of the things I planned was a leisurely lunch with my kids. We had about ninety minutes to sit together and eat a delicious meal.

I have spoiled myself my whole life in many different ways. My birthday weekend I decided that I would simply spend my time doing what I wanted and when it came to the time the kids spent with me, I would insist on some things I wanted to do. I picked the restaurant, and after some chit chat, I dug into what I had planned to talk about.

A few years ago there was a semi-viral NYT article with a series of questions they suggested two people could ask one another to fall in love. I started with that list and edited it down and reworded them somewhat to come up with questions to ask my kids to hopefully learn more about how they thought about things in their lives. I asked the questions in the order listed below.

My kids are seventeen and eighteen, but I wish I’d thought of this a few years ago, and I can see asking these again in a few years, and every few years after. It was a good exercise to force myself to shut up and listen, and as a consequence I managed to learn a little. They did ask a few of these for my answer in return.

I’d encourage you to try this for yourself.

• Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

• Would you like to be famous? In what way?

• Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say?

• What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?

• For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

• If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? [My kids took the fifth.]

• If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

• Everything you own is in a house that catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be?

• If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself or anything else, what would you want to know?

• What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

• What do you value most in a friendship? [I think I accidentally skipped this one.]

• What is your most treasured memory?

• What is your most terrible memory?

• When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

• Is there anything too serious to be joked about?

• If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? [My kids really didn’t like the questions that involved dying. I think this has to do with the natural assumption of immortality that teenagers possess.]

• Alternate sharing something you consider to be a positive characteristic of your sibling. Share three each.

A Message To My Children

Authors Note: I am reposting this in March 2024, with additional post-scripts below.

A Message To My Children About D — T —

I am a what you might call a moderate liberal in an area of the country that is anything but moderate. If the nomenclature “all and neither party” existed I would choose that. There are liberals and there are conservatives, and rarely the twain shall meet.

I frequently hear from my children (4th and 5th grade) some opinions on the world as filtered to them through friends. I also make sure to make some of my more critical opinions are present in the conversation. One that they have heard a few times is: Speak up for those who can’t speak up for themselves. So here I want to speak up on behalf of all the children in the country who can’t yet communicate the idea that our country has considered a disreputable human being worthy of our election to President.

I have kept silent on political conversation, as was the tradition in my family when I was young. To this day, I have no idea how three of my grandparents would have voted. The current election results encouraged one of those grandparents make clear their distaste for the elected, but I’m still not sure a consistent line can be drawn. I can make assumptions based on their world views, but no firm conclusions, even though I spent a lot of time growing up with them. My mother is a clear liberal Democrat and my father claims to be an anarchist, so it’s hard to know his voting habit, if any.

This election, however, has caused me to speak up about the candidates. Any view of their politics aside, I decided that I needed to make clear to my kids what a scumbag D — T — is. I told them that I will vote for Hillary Clinton, explaining that the main reason is that he is clearly a terrible choice for president. I also look forward to being able to say to my grandchildren someday that I cast a vote for the first woman president in U.S. History.

I explained to my kids that D — T — is a person who speaks with anger and caprice, and that his approach should not be encouraged in any way. I reminded them that in most cases, anger is the front for some other emotion, commonly fear. I explained that he is using the language of anger to strike fear into the minds of voters who question whether women or minorities are qualified to lead or live in our country. He speaks to those of us Americans (I will not be moving to Canada or anywhere else if Trump is miraculously elected) who fear that as we get older we do not understand our newest citizens, the youth and the immigrants who continue to be the future of the country.

I explained that every single time I have come in contact, through the media, with T — , not just in the last terrifying months, but in the last 30 years, he has appeared to be vain and narcissistic, deceitful and dishonest, hateful and dismissive, greedy, ruthless and heartless. He seemed like a harmless douchebag in 1985 on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Today he seems like a dangerous douchebag. Today he shows no regret of treating everyone — women or men, immigrants or citizens, smart or dumb, enemies or friends(!) — like pieces of meat put here for his gratification and elevation.

I explained to them that this language of anger most likely covers T — ’s great fear, and encouraged them to hit him where it hurts. His greatest fear is being ignored. For that reason, I don’t even want to use his name in this brief missive, I don’t want that name appearing in the world even just one more time because of me. Even just to explain to my kids that he is a dirty, dangerous, douchebag who doesn’t deserve a moment of our attention.

February 2017 Edit*/Update

My definition of 45’s election as miraculous (see above) was short-sighted. In early November I made the comment: “The good news and bad news is that our country always gets exactly the president it deserves,” and by extension, that I deserve as an American. I could ramble worthlessly about 45 and the damage he is doing to our country, but that’s not productive. I choose to learn from this experience and take away the good I can from it. Another thing I learned from my mom and taught my daughters is that there is good and bad in everything and everyone, and I believe this about every president and their presidencies, including the current leader.

*I made a few updates in a few lines above, but I remain proud of the message I sent in the original version so most of it remains intact, if a little outdated.

2024 update:

This was originally posted in October 2016, (with edits noted in 2017 at the bottom) when conventional thought was that Donald Trump didn’t have a shot at getting elected. The only significant change in my voting habits is that I am much less moderate, thanks to the moderates moving further right and my continued age adding to my slide toward progressive thought. Left might even be too far right for me these days. I will likely never again for president at all. I will focus on local elections. I am tired of choosing the least worst option. I do stand by my social media post from November 2016. The only changes this time were editing for clarity.

America's One Party System

The common rhetoric is that the two major parties are too divided. Democrats are left and Republicans are right. Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal. The truth is moderates are all over the place.

Optimists are viewed by pessimists as naifs. Pessimists are viewed by optimists as angry depressives. I view moderates as optimistic pessimists on a good day and pessimistic optomists on a bad day. Weak beliefs, weakly held.

My political ideology has always been built on the one concept that I build my entire intellectual life around. There is no truth. There is experience, and evidence, and faith, and everything else that people use to build their own truth. (I recognize that it must be untrue that there is no truth. If there is an objective truth, the statement itself would be a fallacy.) This leaves me with strong beliefs, weakly held.

Here’s my conclusion (currently) about politics in our country, and it’s not remotely original either: There is only one party, the Capitalist Party.

Broadly, conservatives believe in capitalism as defined by freedoms for businesses and individuals; liberals believe in capitalism as defined by equal opportunities for all people; progressives believe in capitalism as defined by the shared opportunities for all people; libertarians believe in capitalism as defined by survival of the fittest; the green party believe in capitalism as defined by the method by which we will pay for peaceful coexistence.

“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” — Anon, via Winston Churchill.

They all believe in capitalism, and our country is and has always been designed to support that system. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter what party you choose, you are still casting your vote for capitalism. The invasion of money into politics didn’t happen in the last fifty years with lobbyists and PACs. It has always been here, from before the Continental Congress. Every American that chose this country was seeking their own share of money.

It is a sad reality, of course, that so many Americans of the last three hundred years didn’t choose it at all. They were brought, or sent to America. Those of us that are born here are just indoctrinated into the system. Even today, with the uproar about immigration from both sides, the conversation is routinely turned to the effects immigrants have on capitalism.

All the parties want government involvement in the areas that they like. Even libertarians believe in a government bureaucracy, they would just like it to be much smaller than it already is. And they, more than any party, love capitalism.

I love America and I love democracy. I am very happy living in my bubble of self-delusion, so I offer no solution to this political challenge that faces America. In fact, I’m not convinced America will solve it. It is probably already being solved in a country so rich that they no longer need capitalism and can bleed their national income from the capitalist giants that love international trade. Or it will be solved in a future that actually learns from its history and adjusts the American experiment to work around capitalism as we know it.

Photo of polling station doors by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Small Joys: Dead Girl Blues, by Lawrence Block

It may be odd to take joy from such a dark books, but it was such a joy to read for a cynical optimist like me. I only consider it to be a small joy rather than an outsized masterpiece because it reads as quickly as it does.

It propels you through its story, as all Block novels do, and ends up in a place I’d never expected. It is somehow a thriller and a meditation on the philosophy of its lead character at the same time. Block writes a first person narrative and manages to remove all sense of authorship, and I eventually engaged with it as an act of voyuerism. I am innocent of nothing in the fate of the dead girl.

Artistic Instinct and Artificial Intelligence

I recently posted a PDF to the store for this five thousand word essay I’ve written over the last six months. It came out as I spent more time reading and thinking about Chat GPT and Midjourney and other such image- and word- generating computing models. I included Artificial Intelligence in the title because that’s the term getting all the press.

I’d be grateful if you read the thing. I put a price on it, but if you want to read it and would benefit from a free copy, send me an email and I’ll send you a copy. I printed a hundred copies, mostly so I could put some out in the real world at a few stores that might be willing to waste a little shelf space on it, and a printed copy is included in the price of the PDF if you want one.

Here are a few sentences from the essay, purposely out of order and free from context:

I think Chat AI could actually be an interesting step in the workflow for fiction writers. Let it kick out a bad idea and begin to iterate.

The reality is that humans aren’t that precise either; we mentally cover gaps in grammar and syntax when communicating.

[F]orty years ago a meme was an idea or a static image (What, me worry?) but today is used to refer to an image, or chart, or even a video.

I am trying to reckon with AI art in its most hopeful expression, knowing that it will continue to improve.

Is this the end for artists and craftspeople?[…]I don’t see it.

If that interests you, either get some help, or click on the Shop page.

A Walk Through Hell by Ennis and Sudzuka

A Walk Through Hell 1-5 by Garth Ennis and Goran Sudžuka

Originally published online in January 2019

One thing I appreciate about Garth Ennis is that he tends to swing for the fences, which, of course, usually results exclusively in home runs or strikeouts. I’ve read Preacher all the way through a few times, and that series exemplifies this approach. There are Wows! (“Until the End of the World” or “Saint of Killers”) and Ughs! (“Dixie Fried” or “The Legend of You Know Who”), but rarely a meh. A Walk Through Hell is a mystery, and I mean that as more than genre. After rereading and digesting everything that happens, I trust that Ennis has a vision for where the series is going and a knowledge of how he’ll get there, but patience is required to see if he can pull it off.

Monsters are not my favorite thing. I have never been particularly interested in horror stories, mostly because they had to have monsters. Growing up in the ‘80s, it was normal for kids to love slasher films, while I always thought them silly, their jump scares creating laughter rather than fear. Like many voracious teenaged readers, I dug into Stephen King; most of his books disappointed me when the supernatural aspects arrived. A fellow movie lover once accidentally persuaded me not to bother with The Exorcist by telling me why it scared him so much—it was too believable for him. This is not to say that a movie, or a comic, can’t unsettle me. Joshua Hall Simmons and Al Columbia have both unnerved me greatly, sometimes with a single image, and Karyn Kusama, Lynne Ramsey, and Michael Haneke have all satisfyingly upset me.

A Walk Through Hell is a color comics series by Garth Ennis and Goran Sudžuka that appears to be a horror story. “Appears to be” because it appears to be other things as well. It performs as a detective story, a serial killer story, a dialectic, offers a little shock and gore, and is somewhat of an “odd couple” story. It is also is likely an investigation of faith’s role in navigating the world. Ennis has examined faith in many of his titles, not just in Preacher and Hellblazer, where he made his name, but in other series as well. This is a man who loves God, at least as a character. In fact, unless you only read Marvel Comics, where you may conclude Ennis is an author focused on war stories, it is difficult to avoid religion in his books. Even in his superhero-parody opus The Boys he punishes Starlight, a Christian character, with repeated humiliations.

My lack of interest in monsters meant that I missed some clear signs in the first issue that there were supernatural forces at play. The Hell of the title is not just metaphor, as I first hoped. When I bought the first issue, I scanned it quickly to make sure there were no literal devils. Early in the first issue, our narrator refers to “ghosts” and the story appears to be heading toward the undead having some kind of agency. At the beginning of issue two, our leads, Shaw and McGregor, black out and wake up to find that they have no pulse.

For the mystery, Ennis focuses primarily on hints and delayed gratification. In the first issue, Shaw is having a nightmare with unknown origin. We don’t learn specifically what she may be dreaming about until issue five. The monster in this series isn’t introduced by appearance until the last page of issue three, and by the end of issue five, “the first arc,” it still isn’t entirely known what this monster is about or interested in or capable of. This does mean, however, that Ennis is wisely using our imaginations to fill in the gaps, a technique known to all masters of psychological horror.

Ennis partners with Goran Sudžuka, a Croatian artist who established himself on the U.S. comics scene as a fill-in for Pia Guerra on Y The Last Man. The artwork is steady and sturdy, with few structural mistakes, but also few standout flourishes. Stylistically, Sudžuka reminds me of his Croatian cohort, such as Goran Parlov and Edvin Biuković. All these artists produce workmanlike draftsmanship on efficient layouts. The downside is that many characters look similar and emotional surprises in the script are rarely amplified by visual surprises. I’m not familiar with Sudžuka’s Croatian work, so I wonder how much influence his years spent at DC, where building on José Luis Garcia-López’s house style can produce this sameness.

I don’t want to discount how valuable I find the consistency of structure here, as I frequently fall out of stories when the anatomy, or perspective, or readability is weak. I’ll take the dependability of Garcia-López’s structure over any number of comics artists who push the bounds of in-context believability with their belief that they can avoid realism like Kirby while still maintaining full readability.

There is another likely culprit for this lack of flourish, and that is Ennis’s scripts. Issue one of this series has a script-to-page feature that shows how much information Ennis conveys. It may also be that this is a style of artist that Ennis appreciates. Steve Dillon and Darick Robertson are his lengthiest collaborators, and they share a focus on structure over style.

While discussing the art team, let me take a moment to point out the supportive sturdiness of Ive Svorcina’s colors. He and Sudžuka had worked together once before, on a Wonder Woman story, and they are both Croatian. I don’t know if these are coincidences, or if they lead them to work well together. To my eye, even respected colorists these days are too heavy handed, adding lens flares and bokeh that are completely unnecessary to the storytelling. Coloring is an area where I want temperature and context, and no further distractions, and Svorcina handles this well.

Letterer Rob Steen is similarly without flourish, due in no small part to a hallmark of Ennis’s scripts: there are no sound effects present—ever. This is a highlight of Ennis’s scripting, as the WHAMs and KABOOMs are almost always one of my least favorite things about comics, regardless of context. They haven’t even worked as parody since 1966.

As far as whether the series will end up as a home run or a strikeout, unfortunately it’s too soon to tell. There is just not enough closure to leave anyone satisfied with the story. I’m torn as to whether that’s successful or not. On the one hand, I want to know what happens next. On the other, I’m a little frustrated that no one told me what I was signing up for. I eventually become exhausted by all ongoing series that don’t know when to quit, but that is rarely a mistake that Ennis makes. He knows when a story needs to have an ending—such as Preacher or The Boys, or even his run on Hellblazer. When I pick up a novel, I don’t expect a cliffhanger, and if it does, I better have some semblance of closure in the meantime.

Our slugger, Ennis, has a good team of journeymen behind him, I hope he knows when to swing.

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SUPPORTING LINKS

Garth Ennis wiki and bibliography

Goran Sudžuka wiki

Ive Svorcina

Goran Parlov wiki

Do We Want Fake News?

Even in the title to this brief essay, I found myself challenged to come up with a headline that struck a proper balance between interesting, descriptive, and philosophically honest. The best I could come up with was one that is semantically honest. In an effort to be philosophically honest and to subvert Betteridge’s Law: I do not want fake news, I just don’t think most people really consider the effects of feeding the algorithms that provide their news choices.

I read this tweet yesterday:

“.@Google killed its Reader in 2013 because RSS as a format doesn’t track browsing to sell ads, and lets the user chose what they want to read. As opposed to algorithmic personalization which siloes us into increasingly homogenous demographics for advertisers” @LucLewitanski (www.twitter.com, 7/2/18)

When I read this, it triggered these thoughts: I still use RSS as a news source. And, dammit, this is probably true.

I consider myself moderately aware of my own cognitive dissonance, and I try to combat it proactively when reading the news. For example, in my Apple news feed, which is the most algorithmically personalized source that I regularly use, I have added NPR, Fox News, The New York Times, and Breitbart as favored sources. Even with such ideologically different sources, I find the articles I tap on end up defining my reading preferences in ways that I want to avoid. Based only on my experience, I expect that most people’s Fox News online reading is loaded not with right-wing bolstering, but with crime stories. To test this, I navigated to foxnews.com using a VPN browser extension that said I was in the U.K. (As I write this, I live in Texas, but am visiting California.) I then clicked on “U.S.” on the homepage and was treated to a list of mostly political news stories, but check out this screenshot of the link to “Trending in US”:

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

The top three links are the types of story that usually show up in my Apple News feed, the fourth is nominally political. If I were to believe the perception that my Twitter stream offers about Fox, it would be that they are more focused on feeding me right-wing propaganda than anything, but they seem happy to follow the mainstream news maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads,” but this is self-fulfilling. There is likely a preference among readers and viewers for these stories. I certainly fall victim (pun intended?) to at least reading the headlines, even if I don’t click on most of the stories. And when I do resist the temptation to read the ones I’m most curious about, it’s at least partly because I don’t want to feed the algorithm.

I am a proud skeptic. When I describe myself as such, I don’t mean in the sense of leftist politics and fake-news-fighting. I even try to avoid cynicism, though I am frequently unsuccessful. I believe in skepticism in terms of lack of belief in objective facts. I believe all facts are subjective because I believe humans are unavoidably subjective.

When it comes to media and my skepticism, I recognized the opportunity for easy media silo building as a teen. I grew up in California in the pre-internet era and loved reading the L.A. Weekly and O.C. Weekly, mostly for the movie reviews and concert listings, but as a voracious reader I was so hungry for material that I read most of the cover stories, which frequently highlighted local political and social issues. It seemed to me that they trended strongly leftist and they seemed to sell me a different perspective than the Orange County Register, which seemed strongly right-leaning. I realized that if I read about an issue in both, I could feel confident that the information that was presented the same in both sources could be a reasonable simulation of a “fact.” I still take a version of this approach in my media reading in an effort to avoid the silos.

Which brings me back to RSS. Frankly I use it to largely avoid mainstream headlines. The most mainstream is NPR’s news headlines, which provides me with the closest thing I’ve found to bi-partisan summaries of national news and capsule views of international stories. I mostly use RSS for fairly niche art blogs or webcomic postings or “indie” music news or “alternative” comics news or the handful of online writers I like who offer RSS feeds. None of which I can reliably get from Apple News.

I know that I have created my own silo of information with my RSS feed, but at least it’s not an international company’s algorithm creating it.

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Having presented my personal perspective, I see little example (anecdotally) of people who resent this algorithmic consolidation. I think that most people are happy with the news that is packaged and delivered to them in a way that doesn’t test their mindset to strenuously. I say this not with disdain, but with envy. I occasionally wish that my head were not filled with skepticism, but that I could unselfconsciously enjoy the world around me. And I could write another five thousand words on why I don’t wish that to be the case.

I am happy in the silo I create by following non-homogenous sources, self-selecting for people like me. People who don’t buy the mainstream American approach to systemic homogenization. My family is filled with people I love who are very happy with their Facebook feeds and Apple News headlines. I have tweens and I can’t decide on which side of the fence I want them to end up. Do I want them to suffer my continuous dissatisfaction, or do I want them to be mostly comfortable with whichever biased (“fake”) news source they like the best? That is a question I don’t have an answer for, Betteridge be damned.

<<<Originally published on Medium in 2014>>>

Forget Me Not

At some point in the late ’80’s I was riding with my grandfather in his Toyota in downtown Los Angeles. I have no idea where we were heading, but it must have been the weekend because the streets were fairly empty. At some point, he made a turn, and we headed down a wide street. A few blocks away, all lanes of traffic were heading toward us. We were on a one way street. He quickly noticed and turned around and changed course.

When, a decade later, his brain function had clearly faltered, I conflated the two. Now that I am middle-aged, as he was then, I think it’s likely it was just a normal accidental turn that I, to my own kids’ chagrin, could have made. We don’t always talk about diseases and illnesses of loved ones in ways that help me understand what they are going through. I watch it happen and understand that it is involuntary.

My maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather declined in health in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and while hers felt much quicker than his, they both were clear and definitive. No surprises, just a clear progression toward death. Nearly twenty years later, their spouses now talk to me about their own impending demise with a clearheadedness that is, for me, both scary and wonderful. They find no need to obfuscate the fact that it will arrive sooner rather than later. They just appreciate the time we have, whether it’s ten years away or somewhat less.

My own medical experiences have brought me to a place where death feels both inevitable and far away, and while I find some complacency with the fact that my life will end, I feel no rush to meet it. It will get here in time, and I hope that I use the time well.

When I spend time with my grandparents, there is a common theme among the experience: repeated words, stories, and questions.

My Grandpa tells me precisely the same story in 90% of our conversations, and for a while, I tried to gently point this out. “You love this story.” “You enjoy telling this.” “This is your favorite.” And so on. After a while, I realized that I was trying to change his behavior and stopped. Now I sit and smile and nod, or over the phone, provide the verbal prompts to let him continue.

With Grandma, it’s more often just the same question again and again. “Are you visiting soon?” every few minutes over the phone; or, “Are you staying the night?” when it’s in person. I just gently answer the same question repeatedly. (Typing this, I just now realized that years in retail gave me the experience of repeating an answer to a question as though it were the first time even when it’s the fiftieth that day.)

It helps my patience that my own memory is not reliable. The amount of information I take in on a given day, via humans and media, factual and fictive, is significant. And the access I have to information is inconceivable to my child-of-the-70s brain. If I need information, it is at my fingertips in seconds. On top of that, I’ve never felt strongly that I am remembering factual information accurately. If you say, “that’s not how it happened,” to a shared experience, I believe you and am happy to accept my own memories and allow for yours.

Without being very factual, things can be very true.

The fallibility of memory is well documented, and my own skepticism is widespread, so I don’t expect any story that anyone tells me is fact. Without being very factual, things can be very true. Rather than grimace when I get to hear a story for the third or thirtieth time, I ask for new information about it, or about another aspect of their lives. I find that I’m still getting new information if I pay attention..

When thinking about life, it becomes impossible to avoid thinking about the end, comparing it to the beginning. Acumen falters, then coordination, then speech, then bodily functions, then the failure of autonomic controls. We are dependent on others for complex functions, then basic functions, then…

It is a hell of a thing to experience, and for the loved ones witnessing to feel. It forces me to ask, What can I do?

I can offer the same unconditional love that I got from them. I can recognize that when I was a child, barely in control of my body and brain, learning to navigate the world and frequently failing, they were the ones who watched and patiently said, “That’s ok.”

Now that they are the ones who are repeating themselves, and forgetting things, and having difficulty with daily physical activity, it is my time to sit there patiently, watch carefully, be ready to help, and when they fail, to say, Thank you, I love you.

This was written in honor of Barbara Harris and Frank Leto, who died before I was capable of properly thanking them for everything. They knew I loved them, and due to their, and so many others’, love for me, I eventually learned to say it.

Algorithm Nation

I am a recommendations outlier.

Recommendations often fail to impress me, even when they are from someone I trust. There are people who I trust with my life. I trust their opinions and their taste, and yet, their recommendations frequently aren’t good for me. All media seems equally specific and yet obtuse.

I don’t only love obscure bands, and I don’t hate big bands or their records. I love Johnny Cash, Run The Jewels, and Appetite for Destruction; and I love Mudhoney, Kenny Hoopla, and Open Door Policy. What record do you recommend for someone who counts Rocket From The Crypt, Ghostface Killah, and PJ Harvey as three of their favorite recording artists? Would you have guessed it was Tierra Whack or John Darnielle that I was enjoying the most this month? I wouldn’t have guessed that I listened to Lifter Puller more than any band last year, and I like them more than The Hold Steady, with whom I started. Even I don’t know how to predict it.

There is no fault with these human recommendations, they simply can’t calculate all the factors that I automatically and unconsciously calculate when I consider something. And any algorithm you could write that recognized it would really only work for me (or for such a small number of people that it wouldn’t be worth your time to write it).

My best friend thought I might like American Horror Story. And you know what…I might. His recommendation just can’t override my own hesitation to dig into a horror story. But, you say, “You’ve watched so many other horror movies in the meantime.” You’re right, but that’s a show, and each episode is an hour long. ”But, you’ve watched a lot of crap that is certainly of lower quality than AHS that is an hour long. I mean, Jack Ryan? Come on.” You’re right, but that is mindless and I didn’t have to pay that close attention. “Yeah, but what about…”

Anyway, my point is that I really did watch many, many shows after I got the recommendation for AHS. There were many others that fulfilled or escaped some minuscule condition that I formulated on the spot, remote in hand, as I scoured Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and HBOMax deciding what to watch. [I finally watched a couple episodes of AHS because my daughter mentioned her interest in it. Holy shit! is it gnarly for basic cable.]

I watch a lot of TV — too much, according to the viewing history I researched to maintain verisimilitude in that imaginary conversation — and yet, streaming services constantly recommend stuff to me that I have zero interest in watching. Not only that, but Netflix specifically made it harder on themselves to find something for me. The “like” button keeps a watched program in my recommendations. It is bonkers to me that they don’t know that I rarely watch things again. They even have a list for things I might like to watch again.

And yet, right now, on my Netflix homepage online there exists…hold on…let me count…twenty-one shows or movies that I have watched every bit of, most in the last three years, many in the last year. And this is just scrolling down to see the first five, not the total of each category. (And I didn’t count “Watch it Again.”)

I’ve already watched two of the first four choices here. I watched trailers for the other two and did not add them to my queue. Not a strong recommendation algorithm. (This photo is also proof that I wrote this a while ago. It was lightly edited and updated in February 2021.)

I have been using Netflix since the DVD days, and I don’t want to take the time to download and count, but I imagine I’ve watched at least 1000 hours streaming, plus another 200–300 DVDs in that time. How can they not know that recommending reality* shows to me is futile? I have watched exactly two, and both of them were ones that I looked up to watch. To be fair, I still share an account (separate profiles) with my ex-wife, and her watch history has reality* shows, but for me, the algorithm is a failure.

I once got riled about this and messaged with Netflix support. I was in a cantankerous mood and must have had time to kill, because this is a quote from the transcript:

Jill (Netflix): Not a problem, basically you don’t want that Netflix offer you titles that you already watched.

Me: That is correct. I don’t want Netflix to keep offering shows or movies that I have completed.

Me: I thought we had established that this is not possible…My question is:

Me: Why is this not possible?

Jill (Netflix): I got it know, thanks for the heads up :)

Jill (Netflix): This is not possible at the time because Netflix has a matching system that link the movies and shows based on genres.

Me: I can’t keep asking the same question too many more times…It is starting to get frustrating. One last time: Why can’t I remove individual titles from recommendations?

Jill (Netflix): You can use the thumbs down options to hide those tiles at the moment, in that way, Netflix will not recommend them to you anymore. I’m sorry that we don’t have a way to hide individual titles from recommendations at the moment, but I will note your feedback so we can improve our service into our platform.

Note that my only way to stop the recommendations of things I’ve already seen is that I have is to rate the things I liked as though I dislike them. How much more broken could that recommendation system be? Or do they not even care what I click? It may be that everything is based on my viewing patterns and how much time I spend hovering on a link or reading about a show.

I sat and spent some time thinking about the recommendations that work and don’t work, and why. And then I thought about why they might work for others but not me. Then I thought about how they could work, and why they probably never will.

[Update: Upon re-reading this months after the original publication, and additional consideration has been bubbling up in my thoughts. I think that Netflix might be re-recommending so many shows because it signals that they have a lot of shows and that I enjoy those shows, making it more likely that I will continue my subscription.]

Why algorithmic recommendations don’t work for me personally.

I mean, very personally. Not why they don’t work for me in the philosophical sense, but in the actual, real-world, what-does-Josh-want sense. I think recommendations don’t work for me for several reasons.

I am very specific and particular about my entertainment.

I have a deep viewing history, and have cultivated a sense of expectation about what I want to watch. I was one of the few in Gen X who was raised without a daily diet of TV. I got my fair share of viewing in, but it was limited by the fact that from ages two to twelve there was no TV in the house I grew up in. And in the households that I visited that had a television, I had to share, or was limited in viewing time. This lack of freedom meant that each choice to watch something had more weight. When I was at my grandparents house, where I spent a good amount of time, I was limited to choosing one, or maybe two, shows per day to watch, which is plenty, but as a kid, during the summer, in the 1980s, it wasn’t much. When I was young, Dukes of Hazzard or Gilligan’s Island would suffice, but eventually, my taste developed.

I frequently make decisions based on what I know in advance of a particular piece of entertainment.

If I am interested in something, I commit to lowering my knowledge. I know whether or not I want to see John Wick or Get Out, so I don’t need a trailer or article.

There is no incentive for a media company to ever point you to any content other than what it has financial incentive to point at.

Entertainment Weekly*, for example, may maintain some respectable journalistic integrity in their reviews, but reviews are a relatively small part of the financial success of most media. Reviews, for me, can be a helpful guide to find what I want to spend my time on. Generally, not to find what I know I want to watch, but to find what I may have overlooked. Netflix recently debuted a movie called Triple Frontier (what a terrible name). I watched it the weekend it came out. If I’m doing something non-writing (paying bills, designing, posting, etc.), I like movies on that I can follow without too much attention paid. This movie is a fine example. I watched half the trailer, saw guns, fast vehicles, and unearned masculine arrogance, and knew that I would make it to the end of the movie. I still haven’t watched Bird Box or any of the top twenty movies on Vulture’s list of the best Netflix original movies. (Wait, I did watch The Apostle, #16. I liked it a lot. Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes: 54%.) I will watch several others, but none have moved ahead of what was already clogging up “My List” before they came out. Some of this is aspirational, but Roma, The Kindergarten Teacher, and Private Life, all deserve more attention than the half-assed time I gave to Triple Frontier, so I save them for uninterrupted movie watching time, which is rare. My point is that Netflix doesn’t seem to know the difference, because they keep suggesting Bird Box, even though I’ve never even paused on it for a second’s attention since watching the trailer.

I follow a distinct set of creators. Musicians, authors, writers, artists, actors, directors, even occasionally producers or publishers. I will give a shot to something that I might otherwise pass on if a specific person is involved. And they don’t have to be the star. If Melanie Lynskey, Regina King, Toby Huss, or Karyn Kusama are involved in any capacity, it will make my list. Yasiin Bey, John Brandon, Dave Chappelle, Dan Clowes, Dave Cooper, Craig Finn, Sage Francis, Zach Galifianakis, Ghostface Killah, Mike Patton, John Reis, Liz Suburbia, Jim Woodring, and on and on. They all get first looks. I will spend time with otherwise uninteresting art if they contribute. I have never watched a full Freddy, Jason, or Michael Meyers movie before, but I will probably watch the latest Halloween because Toby Huss appears.

In theory “Offbeat TV Shows” would be a great category for me, but these are all busts.

Following creators is the lowest context way to get involved in an entertainment. Familiarity doesn’t make something good, or even enjoyable. I find new creators through association with familiar creators. I wanted to like an album named after my (our) hometown, Anderson .Paak’s Oxnard, but two run-throughs didn’t hook me. Maybe after some time I’ll be ready for it. I’m hearing that Ventura is better, but if that doesn’t hook me, .Paak will get a pass in the future.

This brings up a key point for music algorithms. The last time I tried Pandora (maybe 2013/2014) I got burnt out because it’s focused on individual songs. I rarely listen to individual songs. I like albums and playlists of individual artists/bands. I tend to even avoid greatest hits albums and soundtracks. There are few algorithms that focus on albums, and therefore they all overlook me. I get way more value out of the lists at the bottom that include common songwriters or performers than of anything on Apple Music’s “For You” tab. For example, I just looked at the “For You” and scrolled down to “Thursday’s Albums.” There are four recommended “since you’re into Raekwon,” and three of four are already in my library. The only album they came up with that’s not already in my library is Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, which I listened to several times two years ago, but it didn’t hook me. At least they didn’t recommend DAMN. since it’s already in my library.

The things I watch tend to be things I’m sure I want to watch.

This creates media “silos” like the news silos we find ourselves in, but having tightened my attention budget, I don’t take big risks often. Unless I intend to watch passively, like with Triple Frontier, I simply quit watching, or listening, or reading, if something can’t hold my attention. I discussed some reasons for this tangentially in “The Writer’s Age of a Visual Medium”. I listened to every minute of about 200 consecutive episodes of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, but only listen to the interviews of about 60% now, and only about 10% of the front matter. The remaining interviews either are deleted immediately or get deleted if the first ten minutes don’t engage me. My attention has become more selective.

I actively play against algorithms.

The biggest challenge tech company’s algorithms have with me is that I am cautious about how I share information online, and often work against the tracking devices put in place. 90% of my searches take place via Duck Duck Go, I don’t sign in to Google or use Google Docs unless a collaborator wants to, I don’t post very often on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, and when I sign on, I sometimes purposely counter program, “liking” both right- and left-wing political opinions that I disagree with, following many websites by traveling directly to the url, or using RSS, and not “liking” their posts on social media. My Apple News feed includes the Washington Post and Fox News, and I distrust their narratives equally. I should say, rather, that I trust their bias equally. And I never, ever, “like” or “heart” or “share” an article via Apple News or Facebook, lest they give it more weight somehow. I will occasionally “dislike” or “hide” things so that I see fewer headlines about celebrities and murders, but it doesn’t seem to work because I still find too many to tap on. That’s my own fault — they can still track my attention, as I am certainly susceptible to confirmation bias as well as hate- or shame-clicking. This is why I find Apple the lesser of two evils between them and Android; they seem to protect my information slightly better.

Why recommendations may work better for others.

Most folks consume entertainment without much thought.

I don’t intend this as a criticism. My dear sister, who I would never begrudge her media habits, consumes books, magazines, podcasts, and music. Why she likes them is rarely important to her; she likes them, that is what is important. I am simply much more obsessive about what these things mean, what the value of art and entertainment is, and why it’s important to choose based on even a capricious system of merit. I know I am in a small minority of the world population. And I don’t mean only because I am incredibly privileged. That is a factor, but additionally, I just think about this stuff more, which is neither good nor bad.

It can be very difficult to tell high from low quality.

I think of my own ability to judge, especially when I was younger. There are areas where I don’t have the experience to judge whether something is worth my time. There are albums I listened to fervently five or six years ago that now sound boring and dated. There are artists I loved to pore over who now bore me terribly. There are books I dug into and read series of that I couldn’t bear fifty pages of today. Considering that entertainment’s biggest consumer group is younger than I am in my mid-40s, at best their taste is less developed. And I’m reaching the point where I care less about good from bad. I feel less judgment today toward entertainment than I did even ten years ago. I spend plenty of time looking at Instagram, which outside of personal acquaintances consists mostly of skateboard videos and comics artists’ work-in-progress. I just want a diversion sometimes.

Most consumers have to be told what is available.

The way they are told is in the silo they, or the algorithm, have created for themselves. I aggressively curate my recommendation engines. This does create something a silo, but like I said, I want some connection with the recommendation. Today I find myself searching viewpoints that I don’t have a deep knowledge of, particularly the historically marginalized, and seeing what strikes me. My Twitter feed is loaded with people of color, queer people, women, and marginalized cultures, because I am always interested in underground artists.

The Sopranos Season One is mostly junk.

My taste is my taste, and I find that being told what to watch doesn’t often work.

I need to have some type of qualitative reference point or instinct that the media is of reasonable quality. Some media are easily identified as such. Substandard quality in comics is easy to tell at a glance. If a compelling trailer can’t be cut for even the most boring movie, then either no one cared enough so I don’t care to watch it, or the film is junk. Music is the most taste-specific in my consumption pattern, and I find it easy to tell if something is of interest to me within a vaguely attendant listening of an album.

Television is the hardest, because even my favorite shows have weak first seasons. Personally, I think The Sopranos Season One is mostly junk, and that Mad Men, Veep, Breaking Bad, and even The Wire start off on the wrong foot. Deadwood seems to be the exception that tests the rule. Maybe it’s just that these shows get so much better as they hit their stride, but I’m sure there are good shows that I don’t watch because I lose interest during the first season. Conversely, there are a handful of shows that start so strong, I sometimes wish I stopped after two seasons. Hannibal being my strongest argument.

I acknowledge that free will is much rarer than I’d like to think.

I am a product of my conditioning and my brain function in ways I definitely do not control.

For most media, the talent are the main consideration. 

Pop culture is defined by what’s popular. I don’t understand why I seek new creators, but I also don’t understand why others don’t. I already explained that I am obsessive about the people who make the movies, TV, comics, and music that I like, but I speak to people about things all the time and they can’t tell me who made it. I recently had a conversation with someone I trust to recommend quality. While we discussed the Amy Adams, I admitted I hadn’t seen The Fighter, and they said it was great. I mentioned that it was also Darren Aronofsky, and they said, “Oh, I don’t really pay attention to directors.”

No, smart ass, that’s not a picture of me. That’s Sorrel Booke (and yes I am ashamed that I knew the actor’s name, when I frequently forget the names of my children’s teachers).

Nostalgia seems to be a strong draw.

I have little interest in nostalgia content. I loved The Dukes of Hazzard and Gilligan’s Island, but that doesn’t mean I have any interest in revisiting them to see if my nine-year-old taste holds up. I don’t understand why anyone is happy when they are watching a movie simply because it makes a reference to an older movie. That’s cool that you found an easter egg, but if it doesn’t deepen the meaning or doesn’t support an actual joke, I don’t know why anyone cares that Tobias Funke appears in Avengers: Infinity War? That may be fun, but is there an actual joke there? Did we cheer because the Millennium Falcon showed up in a Star Wars sequel? I don’t get the excitement. I think that there may be some actual value in setting the tone for Episode VII, but what exactly are we cheering? “Yeah! I see that thing I know!” They’re talking down to us and we’re celebrating it.

Celebrity is the same type of bullshit. Dana Carvey (I think, I couldn’t find the source) once gave an analogy in an interview that I’m paraphrasing here:

If they put a cantaloupe on television for five minutes every night for a week, then they took that cantaloupe to the mall and set it on a pedestal, people would walk by and say, “Hey, that’s the cantaloupe from TV.”

I’ve never heard a more cogent criticism for how powerful familiarity is in entertainment. Whether we think about celebrity, nostalgia, memes, or fan service, we are not talking about quality.

Sometimes we just want to feel good about our decisions.

Having worked in retail for decades, there are numerous times when people have already made a decision about what they are buying and at the point of being rung up they ask, “What do you think about this?” It is simply an opportunity to confirm that they made a good decision. Saying, “That’s a great choice,” is always a successful approach.

How recommendations could work for me, but likely never will.

Recommendations need to be divorced from sales incentives.

Netflix is a new kind of media company in a key sense. They use cold, hard, data to determine what to buy, what to create, what to present to whom, and how to advertise. They are missing the art of it all, but that’s not what their business is built on. To make a recommendation truly worthwhile it has to separate itself from financial incentives, especially short term incentives. HBO seems to be a strong case for this. They gambled that they could make a hit out of the most expensive television show ever, Game of Thrones, and it paid off.

Major props, by the way, to Netflix for this tweet. This is the kind of thing that builds long term customer appreciation from me.

Ask the customer what’s important, then reprogram the algorithm.

Very successful companies traditionally focus on things that most companies would sacrifice for increased revenue or profit.

Hobby Lobby is still closed on Sundays, even when most retail businesses find it to be one of the biggest days of the week. When I take my kids to Michaels on Sunday, it is packed (and I live in suburban Texas, where church attendance is high).

In-N-Out keeps selling those terrible french fries—when people would enjoy the taste of frozen re-fried fries better—because they are “never frozen.”

When it comes to algorithms, they need to ask better questions. When I signed up for Apple Music (which thankfully makes it easy to listen to full albums), they started with a recommendation engine in which I had to choose artists I like. The problem with this is that not one of my favorites was on there. Sure I like Guns ’n’ Roses and Metallica better than Def Leppard and Avenged Sevenfold, and I like Jay-Z and Kanye better than Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, but I like Conor Oberst and Anthrax and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien better than all of them. So, all Apple could find out was what bands rank 50–100 instead of 1–50. I know I am an outlier, but wouldn’t a system that takes that into account make everyone’s algorithm better?

I already have three of these four albums in my Music files. Is Apple just recommending albums I should listen to out of my own collection?

Free recommendations from advertising.

Co-op is co-opted. It’s not a coincidence that Heinz is at eye level on the ketchup/catsup shelves. It’s no coincidence which television you see first at Best Buy or Walmart; which result comes first on Google or Amazon; that Zynga apps get recommended on Android and the Apple App Store. That Medium posts focus on recommending “member-only” content. I once paid for advertising (membership) on Medium, I am not overly anti-capitalist, but advertising does not make an algorithm better.

Tie criteria from one medium/platform into another.

Caveat: I know that privacy concerns make this nearly impossible, and that even if I could consent to this, I frequently wouldn’t.

It seems to me that Netflix would benefit from knowing what music I like. And Apple Music would benefit from knowing what movies I watch. I do not want content silos to get stronger and more siloed. But it could make the recommendations better.

So why did I even write this article?

I don’t really care to help a multi-billion dollar company make their algorithm better. I spent all this time thinking and writing about this because I love small businesses. The best recommendations came from the times I walked into a record store or comic shop or video store and they knew me personally. I like working with these retailers to make their business stronger, and their brains are the algorithm that builds their business. It’s something tech companies could learn from.

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Footnotes

• ”Reality” is a misnomer for me. Without an extended tangent about the philosophical impossibility of objective truth, suffice it to say that there is nothing real about anything that anyone publishes in any format. “History is just a lie you read about.” — David Milch

• Entertainment Weekly is owned by Time Warner (or whatever name they currently use). Even if we exclude direct financial benefit — covers featuring Game of Thrones or Harry Potter; articles on advertiser’s content; studio support with “exclusive” previews and cover photos; etc. — there is little arguing that having 59 covers for 22 movies is focused on financial gain. Stars sell magazines. There is a reason that EW doesn’t feature Ta-Nehisi Coates or Roxanne Gay as their cover articles. And it’s not racism, because Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers don’t make it either. A quick, lazy internet search reveals Rowling, King, and Grisham as those who made the cut. I have no beef with any of them, but you can’t tell me it’s focused on anything but sales. And to be clear, I’m not making the case that a magazine should focus on anything but sales, if that’s what they want. Just that financial incentive is the motivation, not making quality recommendations.

Cutting Room Floor

• I am patient in deciding, to the point that deciding is often enough time spent on entertainment and I don’t continue past the deciding. I spend a lot of time thinking about why I consume what I do. I am skeptical of popular media, and skeptical of ignoring popular media. I was excited to see Star Wars The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson helped), and have never seen Avatar, even though I love Aliens and enjoyed T2 and True Lies quite a bit. I was recently thinking I may give Waterworld a try when I need a brainless background movie. At least Dennis Hopper is in it, and he’s interesting. [for the record, I made it 30 minutes into Waterworld, then gave up.]