I follow very few Bravolebrities on Instagram, mostly because their off-show content doesn’t interest me. Very few have crossed over into personalities I wish to see every day on my phone. Which is to say, I did not learn about Amanda Batula and West Wilson’s secret romance via their shared IG story press releases. I learned about it on Threads.

You could say that a bomb went off in the Bravosphere with the way fans, podcasters, accounts that disseminate Bravo news, and curious bystanders all jumped to post their opinions on the romance. Was it an affair that began while West was still courting his ex, and Batula’s “best friend” (we’ll get to that), Ciara Miller? Did it begin last summer, before Batula and then-husband Kyle Cooke announced their divorce?

The news arrived, after weeks of speculation and many deluded fans believing it was an April Fool’s joke, along with a photo of Ciara in a white, being consoled by a friend while she sits on the sidewalk outside the Hermès store. How chic to see a glamorous woman having a nervous breakdown! How Sex and the City1! It was the photo that launched an endless amount of opinions that this drama was “bigger than Scandoval.” My friends, Scandoval was covered on CNN. This is a big drama, but it’s not that big.

There’s an insistence amongst Bravo viewers to compare everything to Scandoval these days, which is unnecessary, because there’s been no shortage of scandals on the network! Just today, Jen Shah sat down with People to discuss going to prison for scamming old people. Remember when she got arrested by the feds ON CAMERA? Remember Vicki Gunvalson’s ex, Brooks Ayers, faking cancer? Phaedra Parks spreading malicious rumors about Kandi Burrus? Hell, Summer House has its own bed-swapping scandals to refer to. How easily we forget that this show has basically been Melrose Place from the jump, and Carl Radke has been run through by his castmates like Tomb Raider.

There have also been calls to fire Batula and Wilson from the series. This happens often with Real Housewives, where fans would rather their faves experience no conflict whatsoever (I saw someone online wish for a spin-off series about Miller fixing up her grandparents’ house in North Carolina?? Taking a xanax would be easier!). They also want the people they dislike, the antagonists, to vanish. A lot of people watch television now to feel comforted by their own morals. Zadie Smith wrote an essay for The New York Review on how people do this with fiction, but I believe the quote applies to Bravo as well: “In my capacity as a writing teacher, I’ve noticed, in the classroom, the emergence of a belief that fiction can or should be the product of an absolute form of ‘correctness.’ As if fiction could argue itself into a reader’s belief system! As if, armed with our collection of facts about what an X type of person feels, is, and does, always and everywhere, a writer could hope to bypass the intimate judgment of a reader, which happens sentence by sentence, moment by moment. Is it this judgment we fear? It’s so uncertain, so risky. You can’t quantify it—it’s not data. It happens between one reader and one writer. It’s a meeting—or sometimes a clash—of sensibilities, which often takes the form, as Dickinson understood, of griefs compared.”

Second, let’s address the “best friend” elephant in the room. Sure, some white Bravo fans have diminished Batula and Miller’s friendship in order to make excuses for Batula and Wilson. But that doesn’t mean that they were best friends. At least, not in Batula’s mind. On a recent episode of Bitch Sesh, comedian Rae Sanni points out that both women shared a friend in Paige DeSorbo, but they never gave besties to each other. If anything, Miller had a closer relationship with Radke and Batula’s ex Cooke. Batula herself seemed more of a guy’s girl on the show, as well. Which is nothing to say of how they both, along with DeSorbo, used to treat Lindsay Hubbard on the show. But I digress. On a recent Watch What Happens Live, Batula said of her recent divorce, “It would have been a very difficult summer to get through without Ciara. She is one of the kindest, most loving, loyal friends I’ve ever had.” She said this while knowing she was hooking up with West. Ciara may be loyal, but these Batulas ain’t!

As a person who has moved within all-white spaces, I have learned the hard way that some white people tend to view their relationships with Black people with less care. Sure, they love their Black friends, but they don’t often take the time to consider what it’s like for their Black friend to be the only Black person in those spaces. Or, in turn, the comments they receive from others for operating in these spaces. Unlearning a deference to whiteness is a very hard thing to kick that I would not wish on anyone. It began with attending an all-white Jesuit school in my adolescence, and for me, it continued until my thirties, when I had a very real realization of the white people in my inner circle considered me, or rather didn’t consider me.

For myself, moving back to New York, living in Brooklyn, and surrounding myself with a new, more Black and diverse group of creatives did wonders for my psyche. Reading Black authors that weren’t taught to me in school as part of the literary canon did the same. Reading philosophy and theory by Black writers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde did wonders in decolonizing my mind. It will always be a work in progress for anyone who’s been conditioned in all-white spaces; by no means can I open up a Black Panther chapter tomorrow. Chile, my last boyfriend was white.

So, why do I bring this up? It’s because I’m reminded of this every time we have a discussion about Black Bravolebs on all-white shows. Ciara Miller. Venita Aspen. Garcelle Beauvais.

Each woman has put their trust in a white woman, or pursued a relationship with a white man on the show, only for it to end in toxicity. And yet, aside from Beauvais, who cut her former friend Sutton Stracke out of her life, the other women have persisted. It’s been depressing watching Aspen treated poorly on Southern Charm this season. It’s been equally depressing watching Miller entertain the notion of dating Jesse Solomon or rekindling her romance with Wilson. I still remember when she fought with Hubbard over Austen Kroll! A man who called her a jezebel on camera. Jezebel, being the term used by slave owners to refer to the Black female slaves who “manipulated” them into having sex. Which of his slave owning forefathers possessed him at the moment and shared some American Plantation Vernacular English with him?

Miller laughs it off, and I’m not sure she knew the historical connotations of this word, but that is where being in community with other Black people will teach you. There’s no judgment whatsoever in this post toward Miller, a gorgeous woman who was treated horribly by someone she thought was her friend. This is, instead, me hoping that this situation is a moment that makes Miller think about who’s in her circle and what changing it could do for her mental health. Far be it from me to project onto a reality television star (and right after I told people not to a few paragraphs earlier, but also, there’s a difference in critique and repudation), but as a person who watches reality television for their narrative arcs, Miller’s has been one that would even fascinate African-American film historian Donald Bogle. Fans have suggested that Miller be the next Bachelorette. Why, so she can be disrespected by even more white men?

None of this is to excuse Batula and Wilson, but at the end of the day, Summer House is a television show, and Miller is, of course, there to do her job. I can see why it would be easy to spark a romance with a co-worker. First of all, just like The Nanny, they’re there. Second, that’s an immediate storyline. But at a certain point, you have to stop taking your work home with you if you want to have your own life.

On Monday, I went to the launch of the art book Fire Island: 100 Years. I was one of two Black people in attendance. But was that my own fault for attending? Have I given up the right to complain by placing myself in that situation? Does that mean that everyone else there was absolved of having no Black people to bring with them or invite? Is the onus on me? Normally, I would observe the situation with a joke. But I didn’t this time. I was just attending a book launch. I personally know the book’s editor. This wasn’t my birthday party or an event where I was going to share anything else from my body except my presence. As a writer myself, attending it was tantamount to work. And when I went home, I didn’t take it with me.

I had the opportunity to participate in Quad Cinema’s March Melodrama series, which included the films A Place in the Sun, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Written on the Wind, and All About My Mother.

I gave an introduction to A Place in the Sun, my first time doing this for a film, and I was truly rushing to get through it. I felt like people just wanted to watch the damn movie and not hear me talk, because despite a career of public speaking, it still gives me anxiety. Afterward, in the restroom, a patron told me, “We wanted to hear you talk more!”

I was asked to do another introduction, so this time I wrote out a mini-essay on my favorite Pedro Almodóvar film, All About My Mother. This time went much better, except I still have not perfected the art of not sweating profusely under bright lights. Maybe I need some damn forehead botox.

For those not in attendance at the sold-out screening, here is the introduction:

(The speech has been edited and expanded to include full quotes.)

This is a film I am always reranking in my mind. Each of Almodóvar’s films has a piece of my heart. Still, I’m always swapping out the Almodóvar in my Letterboxd top four with the hilarious Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or the toxically romantic Law of Desire. But I always come back to All About My Mother because it feels so perfectly realised.

The story’s construction, its vibrant colors, its emotional resonance that’s carried all the way to its closing dedication (“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.”). When I first saw this film, it felt more “adult’ than his previous screwball films of the ‘90s or his ‘80s punk films. But the more I’ve watched, I find that this, in a way, works as a memory play.

It was around this time that Almodóvar said he had to stop his lifestyle of drugs and late nights. In a 2024 interview with The Guardian, he said: “I’d love to go back to those insane nights of the 80s, but I’d need a week to recover,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like it’s all about integrity or some priestly act – I did it because I wanted to. It was for the pleasure of writing and the enormous pleasure of making films.” He even evokes this personal resolution in one of his short stories, “The Mirror Ceremony,” from his collection The Last Dream, where a vampire abandons his nighttime revelry for life in a monastery1. Though are monasteries bastions of sobriety? Nunneries aren’t in his films, as we saw in Dark Habits! Notably, Nina is “hooked on junk,” and Huma is “hooked on Nina.” The film wrestles with addictions.

But Almodóvar doesn’t look back on his younger days with regret. If anything, it has inspired so much of the emotional resonance in his work. In a 1999 interview with Filmmaker, he describes why so much of the film’s action takes place backstage, in Huma’s dressing room: “The dressing room for me is like a center of the female universe. I very much like to see the actresses when they are making up or getting dressed. It’s very intimate. They talk. It seems to me that women can’t lie in a dressing room or in the toilet or in the kitchen. These are spaces in which you can only say the truth. I don’t know why. Like at a party, where women are usually in the kitchen talking about their husbands because they are more drunk than usual and are a little more sincere. And also in the bathroom in many situations, you are more sincere, talking about desires, like ‘I want to do that if possible,’ or ‘I want to sniff that if you invite me,’ or just talk in the bathroom about very important and serious matters. These are places that invite you to talk.”

I think that many of us know what people “sniff” in bathrooms or in kitchens at parties. If not from personal experience, then from witnessing it in an Almodóvar film! It’s how you form, in the words of Quadd Webb, “love, bonding, trust — real friendship.”

This film is about mothers, but it’s also about friendships forged among women and the ones that forged Almodóvar’s gifts as an artist. All About My Mother teaches you how to trust, how to love.

Recent updates:

I interviewed Charles Melton for L’Officiel Homme.

I wrote about the “singular” connection between Joni Mitchell and Princess Peach for Them.

Peyton Dix interviewed me for Them’s new web series, Privacy Please.

@them.usAre “the girls” talking too much? This week, @PEYTON DIX, is joined by @Ira Madison III and the spirit of #ToniMorrison in the Cubbyhole bathroom for a new episode of Privacy Please. #queertiktok #heatedrivalry #substackwriter #buzzfeed

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• Frank is back to bi-weekly posts. Paid subscriptions will be turned back on, so feel free to manage yours if need be.

• For Them, I participated in a Queer TV March Madness bracket (Lafayette was not included, who would be my winner, btw). I tackled Smithers from The Simpsons versus Willow from Buffy. Also, fuck Hulu for canceling the Buffy reboot.

• Stay tuned for some professional updates… something exciting is coming in May! Unrelated to my forthcoming debut novel, of which I’m currently rewriting the first draft.

Notes on adaptation and colorblind casting

I will always remember Diahann Carroll as the grand dame Dominique Deveraux on the 1980s soap opera Dynasty, a series I’ve rewatched at least twice via DVD, since I wasn’t alive for its original ABC run. Dominique was the first Black cast member to join the all-white cast of Dynasty, which was Carroll’s intention. In a 1984 interview from her first day on set, she said, “I wanted to be the first black bitch on TV.” She called her manager and told him to get her a role on the soap. Caroll was known for her historical firsts. In 1968, she was the first African American to lead a TV show that didn’t portray a slave or servant. The show was Julia and Caroll played Nurse Julia Baker.

Despite the landmark nature of the series, it was critiqued for its “evacuation of cultural specificity for racialized characters, also known as racial colorblindness,” according to Kristen J. Warner in her book The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. Warner shares insights from Emory University Professor Beretta E. Smith-Shomade on how Julia’s sanitized view of the 1960s ignored the systemic racism of post-Jim Crow America: “Julia never alluded explicitly to this phenomenon or to the civil and social unrest raging on American streets. This became one of the most potent criticisms leveled at the show from both the media and outside advocates. The show implied that… harmony could be achieved if we could all just get along.”

Racial equity, rather than harmony, is the main reason colorblind casting exists in the first place, particularly on series like Julia, more recently on Shonda Rhimes fare like Bridgerton, and also in the theatre. In 1965, Sidney Poitier told The New York Times, “I’d hate for my gift–or whatever to be circumscribed by color. I’d like to explore King Lear, for instance. I don’t want to be just an Othello or always linked with A Raisin in the Sun.”

I have to imagine actor Calvin Leon Smith feels similarly, as he currently stars as Haemon in Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) at the Public. In an adaptation for The Public Theatre, Smith gets to portray the doomed fiancé of Antigone. He is the only Black cast member. (Not the only non-white lead, however, Tony Shalhoub portrays newly minted king Creon). I’m not anti-colorblind casting, or at least, I didn’t think I was until I saw this production. Ziegler’s play adapts Sophocles’ 440 BC tragedy into a modern setting, as told by a white woman named Chorus (Celia Keenan-Bolger). In Sophocles’ version, Antigone defies Creon’s laws to bury her brother Polynices, a Traitor to Thebes. In Ziegler’s version, Antigone (portrayed excellently by Susannah Perkins, for whom I’d recommend seeing the play despite my distaste for the adaptation) defies Creon’s laws in order to have an abortion, which he has just outlawed in Thebes.

Within the play are modern pop culture references, technology, and arguments about reproductive rights in place. Ziegler doesn’t refer to it as a “modern adaptation,” however. In an interview with Town & Country, she says, “The language is modern, but the concerns are evergreen. That ambiguity is intentional. It’s not a modern update, so much as a conversation across time, allowing ancient voices to speak directly to us now.”

If this were a production of Sophocles’ play, I wouldn’t have been left so wanting by Smith as Haemon. After all, the Greeks performed with masks so that men could portray the roles of women. Race and gender aren’t particularly important when presenting the classics, but adapting the classics? Race should kinda matter. For an adaptation that has so much to say about our current world and its politics, it’s glaring that race is evacuated from the text. Smith’s Haemon is also presented as queer, which is barely touched upon aside from a single monologue, so strong is his devotion to Antigone, who is secretly plotting to abort his child. At one point, someone says the unborn child would be a “spitting image of Antigone.” Actually, the child would be Black as well. I can suspend my disbelief in the theatre. Recent interest in a stage adaptation of Sinners has centered around solving the “problem” of two twins on stage, as if theatregoers care about that kinda of thing. Lupita Nyong’o and her younger brother, Junior, most recently played twins in The Public’s Twelfth Night. But somehow, we’re only supposed to suspend our disbelief that in a post-racial world, every other societal issue still manages to exist.

I know the IP is centuries old, even older than Wuthering Heights (which is in the public domain, so who cares if Emerald’s movie is bad? It is, but you could make your own version literally today). But I do think that Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) misses the mark as a modern adaptation of a classic. Smith is fantastic in the role, by the way. But it reminded me of what Viola Davis said recently on Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy podcast about how Juilliard trained her to be a “perfect white actress.” Davis said, “It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics — in order to deal with the Strindbergs, and the O’Neills, and the Chekhovs, and the Shakespeares. I totally understand that, to get your voice … but what it denies is the human being behind all of that.”

According to Ziegler, this adaptation is about “what happens when governing collapses because the body of the state is pitted too bluntly against individual bodies. The play is also interested in how hard governing actually is. In that sense, it’s about competing truths. Antigone isn’t simply right, and Creon isn’t simply wrong—they’re both acting from convictions that cannot coexist.” Perhaps that’s where I’m left in the instance of colorblind casting. It’s not simply the answer, but it’s not always the answer either. When Antigone says “my body is fate” in the closing moments of the play and shows off all of the parts of her body that have been with her since she was born, all I could think about was the body of the Black person behind her, whose race we were supposed to ignore. Yet, there’s no place on this planet where your race is not your fate.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading this year, which has been great. Here are the books I enjoyed reading in January:

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

Sula, Toni Morrison

Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, bell hooks

Saint, Sierra Simone

The Trees, Percival Everett

Football, Chuck Klosterman

My fave was Sula. I wrote a bit about it in Monday’s newsletter:

I won’t claim to be a Morrison scholar. Before this year, I was only familiar with The Bluest Eye and the film Beloved. I resolved to read all of Morrison’s works this year, beginning with Sula, when I visited New Orleans for a weeks-long writing retreat in January. It took me a week to get through the book at first, rereading passages and notating the book, and consulting The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. I don’t recall ever being moved by a book so much. When I reached the ending, and Nel realized that the love she most missed in her older age was not her husband’s, it was her friendship with Sula. When Nel sees leaves stirring in nearby trees, she calls out, “Sula? All that time, all that time I thought I was missing Jude. We was girls together. O Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

I lost a best friend in October. A few years ago, Ted was in a surfing accident that paralyzed him. He was walking again within a year, defying the odds of doctors. We became even closer after that accident. He made me realize how important it is to cherish the time you have with the people in your life. To tell them you love them. I’m sad that I won’t have any more time with Teddy, but I have no regrets about the time we spent together. I always told him how much I cared about him. He always did the same. In the final moments of Sula, Nel regrets that she never told Sula how much she loved her before she died. But at Sula’s death, we, the readers, know that Sula’s final thoughts are of Nel. Upon dying, Sula thinks: “Well, I’ll be damned. It didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” Knowing that my friend’s final moments weren’t painful, that they ended on his own terms after five years of pain he couldn’t control, brought me peace in his loss. It brought peace to many of us, his family and friends, at his memorial in January, where many of the eulogies wrestled with Ted’s choice.

When I read the final page of Sula, I put the book down and cried. My intention for my trip to New Orleans was to finish the novel I’d begun after my apartment burned down in September. But I learned that the real reason I’d ended up in New Orleans was to grieve. Serendipitously, Sula opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, a play written for his lover Frank Melo, who lived with him in New Orleans. Sorry for being into woo woo shit, but it felt as if I was meant to read this book at this particular time in my life. I read the book again the next day. Every time I mentioned reading it at a party, there was always someone excited to discuss how much it moved them, also. In a moment when illiteracy is the weapon of our oppressors, how inspiring it is to be able to discuss literature! At parties!

A personal goal of mine is to read all of Morrison’s works this year. I began the year with Playing in the Dark: Whitness and the Literary Imagination. I’m currently reading a first edition of Tar Baby that I tracked down at a used bookstore.

Here are the books I read in February:

Oreo, Fran Ross

Flat Earth, Anika Jade Levy

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño

Jazz, Toni Morrison

A Good Person, Kirsten King

So Old, So Young, Grant Ginder

Kirsten and Grant are both friends, and I highly recommend their books!

I am introducing screenings of two favorite films this month at Quad Cinema, for their March Melodrama series.

Tickets available here.

Tickets available here.

When Viola Davis shouted, “You are shining, Harold Loomis!” upon seeing that Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at the SAG Awards (Idk what the fuck the Actor Awards are, I’m not calling it that) on Sunday, it sent many people to the internet to search for the meaning.

For the uninitiated, this was a reference to the 1984 August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. If you’re Black and you’ve done theatre, you’re very likely aware of Wilson, one of the greatest American playwrights to ever do it. And you’ve probably been involved in one of his plays. Davis’ first professional acting gig was Mattie in Joe Turner. Jordan’s Sinners co-star Delroy Lindo earned a Tony nomination for the role of Loomis in the 1988 Broadway production. Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer star in a new Broadway revival that opens on March 30. We produced Joe Turner at my undergraduate alma mater, Loyola Chicago, directed by Professor Jonathan Wilson. Professor Wilson was a personal friend of Wilson’s, having produced many of his works, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, and Fences. Sadly, Wilson passed away a month before our 2005 production, and I never got the chance to meet one of my favorite playwrights.

In the play, Loomis arrives at a boardinghouse in 1911 Pittsburgh with his daughter, in search of his missing wife. Loomis was kidnapped by Joe Turner and enslaved on a chain gang for nearly a decade. Due to his enslavement, he’s lost his “song,” and needs to find it again to start life anew. One’s song is a metaphor for their spiritual essence and personal identity, something that the descendants of enslaved Africans all possess, according to the play’s conjure man, Bynum. According to Bynum, African Americans’ embrace of a conservative, white Christianity is responsible for the loss of their songs.

In bell hooks’ 2004 essay collection, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, she addressed this phenomenon: “Using the Bible as a source for self-esteem, Black folks were able to counter the white supremacist insistence that they were less than human … since the intent of colonization and slavery was to strip the slave of all agency, religious experience that enabled Black people to identify with enduring the suffering of bondage while mainting one’s hope was life-sustaining.” hooks followed this with a warning: “In the world beyond slavery the radical relgiion of the slave began to change. As the Black church became in time an organized corporate institution, the religion of African Americans shifted from the liberation theology that had been so necessary for survival and settled in a conservative faith, one that relied on more fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.” In his 1954 sermon, “Transformed Noncomformist,” Martin Luther King Jr. said of then-African American religious experience: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in church, an institution which has often served to crystallize, conserve, and even bless the patterns of majority opinion. The erstwhile sanction by the church of slavery, racial segregation, war, and economic exploitation is testimony to the fact that the church has hearkened more to the authority of the world than to the authority of God.”

At the conclusion of Joe Turner, Loomis renounces the Christianity he embraced in enslavement and finds his song. Wilson’s stage directions of this moment read: “Having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.” As he exits the stage, Bynum calls out to him, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!”

Davis’s reference to Joe Turner appeared more instinctive than intentional, but that doesn’t strip away its meaning. A week after the word “nigger” was hurled at Jordan and Lindo during the BAFTA Awards. The slur, uttered by John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome activist, launched a week of intense debates online and in the media, which I am not going to wade into, except to note that the BAFTA Awards were not televised live, and while Davidson was placed in the back so his uncontrollable outbursts could not be heard, the BAFTAs chose to place a mic near him. He uttered a homophobic slur during the show that was edited out of the aired broadcast. Akinola Davies Jr.’s cry of “Free Palestine” was also edited out. The slur against Jordan and Lindo was left in. Clearly, somebody felt that niggas say nigga all the time, so why bother editing it out? Never mind the context in which Black people have reclaimed the word involves artistic use and colloquial speech, not when you’re some of the only Black people standing on stage surrounded by the OG colonizers. I’m used to seeing white people use rap music as a defense of why Black people shouldn’t care when non-Black people use the n-word, but it was surreal to see people suddenly claim that because the word was used in the film Sinners, then Jordan and Lindo should’ve kept calm and carried on.

It’s why the existence of award shows like the NAACP Impact Awards matters, because it’s a celebration of Black art and artists in a space where they can exist without the spectre of racial abuse. The BAFTAs’ choice to air the slur unedited is why so many people are protective of Black creatives, from championing Sinners all awards season — after Variety published a critical headline about the film’s box office in April (”profitability remains a ways away”) that garnered backlash, even from white actors like Ben Stiller: “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” — to criticism of our lionized artists like Toni Morrison.

This week, The New York Times podcast Cannonball with Wesley Morris elicited backlash from an episode titled, “Don’t Make a Saint Out of Toni Morrison.”

The majority of the criticism lobbied was at the exclusion of a Black woman’s POV in the conversation, which included Morris, Parul Sehgal, and their editor, Sasha Weiss. Would Morrison herself be upset with this? In Claudia Tate’s 1985 book Black Women Writers at Work, Morrison says of white critics, “A woman wrote a book on women writers, and she has an apology in the preface in which she explains why the book doesn’t include any Black women writers. She says she doesn’t feel qualified to criticize their work. I think that’s dishonest scholarship. I may be wrong, but I think so, and I took the trouble to tell her that. I feel perfectly qualified to discuss Emily Dickinson, anybody for that matter, because I assume what Jane Austen and all those people have to say has something to do with life and being human in the world.” In theory, no, Morrison wouldn’t be upset with the idea of a Black woman not being involved. If the criticism itself was good, it wouldn’t particularly matter who gave it.

Unfortunately, the criticism in the podcast is poor and at times, vexing. From jump, Morris compares Beloved to the work of two white male writers: “It’s a hard book! Like James Joyce hard, like William Faulkner hard.” In that same Tate interview where Morrison encourages white critics to engage with her work, she also tells them to step their game up. She says, “It’s not a question of my not liking white criticism. I don’t like most of Black criticism either. Most criticism by Blacks only respond to the impetus of the criticism we were all taught in college. It justifies itself by identifying Black writers with some already accepted white writer. If someone says I write like Joyce, that’s giving me a sense of credibility I find offensive. It has nothing to do with my liking Joyce. I do, but the comparison has to do with nothing out of which I write. The criticism may read well, in fact very well, but it’s not about the book at hand. It’s merely trying to place the book into an already established literary tradition.”

The inclusion of a Black woman’s POV would’ve probably elicited some Black writers to compare Morrison to, instead of Joyce. I know it’s The NY Times, but is any potential new reader of Morrison gonna pick up Beloved because it reads like Joyce? Finnegan is no longer awake; he’s gone to bed. What else is going on!

Where the criticism of the alleged “sainthood” that has been heaped on Morrison offends is that it doesn’t engage with where the recent criticism of Morrison arose from. It came from people calling her “mean,” which led to defenses of a Black woman’s right to be prickly with her readers. It felt less like a bestowment of sainthood and instinct to protect a Black woman whose lionization feels long overdue, given the disrespect she endured in her lifetime. In January 1988, an open letter was published in The NY Times protesting that Morrison had yet to receive a major literary award. Months later, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved. A novel, by the way, that Black critic Stanley Crouch referred to as “a blackface holocaust novel” in The New Republic. He continued: “It seems to have been written in order to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest, a contest usually won by references to, and works about, the experience of Jews at the hands of Nazis.”

Crouch is referenced in the podcast episode for his critiques of Morrison, but there’s no mention of the fact that Crouch is generally regarded as a hater. He had incredibly conservative views in regard to Black art and also loathed Miles Davis’ fusion records (Bitches Brew is a masterpiece; he was tripping), gangsta rap music, and jazz’s shift to the avant-garde post Coltrane. Mentioning Crouch’s critique of Beloved, completely devoid of context, felt like cherry-picking criticism to support the podcast’s ultimate thesis.

The thesis being that Morrison’s books are traumatic and hard to read, apparently. When Weiss discusses Sula, she focuses on the fact that Eva burns her son Plum alive in the novel. Weiss says, “It’s not at all clear why, and it’s perplexing.” But Morrison explains Plum’s affliction clearly: “He began to steal from them then, take trips to Cincinnati and sleep for days in his room with the record player going. He got even thinner, since he ate only snatches of things at beginnings, or endings of meals. It was Hannah who found the bent spoon black from steady cooking.” Plum returned from the war deeply traumatized, much like Shadrack earlier in the novel, and had become addicted to heroin. Eva’s actions are out of love, yes, but they’re also selfish. The thin line between selfless and horrid, selfish love is what Sula explores.

I won’t claim to be a Morrison scholar. Before this year, I was only familiar with The Bluest Eye and the film Beloved. I resolved to read all of Morrison’s works this year, beginning with Sula, when I visited New Orleans for a weeks-long writing retreat in January. It took me a week to get through the book at first, rereading passages and notating the book, and consulting The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. I don’t recall ever being moved by a book so much. When I reached the ending, and Nel realized that the love she most missed in her older age was not her husband’s, it was her friendship with Sula. When Nel sees leaves stirring in nearby trees, she calls out, “Sula? All that time, all that time I thought I was missing Jude. We was girls together. O Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

I lost a best friend in October. A few years ago, Ted was in a surfing accident that paralyzed him. He was walking again within a year, defying the odds of doctors. We became even closer after that accident. He made me realize how important it is to cherish the time you have with the people in your life. To tell them you love them. I’m sad that I won’t have any more time with Teddy, but I have no regrets about the time we spent together. I always told him how much I cared about him. He always did the same. In the final moments of Sula, Nel regrets that she never told Sula how much she loved her before she died. But at Sula’s death, we, the readers, know that Sula’s final thoughts are of Nel. Upon dying, Sula thinks: “Well, I’ll be damned. It didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” Knowing that my friend’s final moments weren’t painful, that they ended on his own terms after five years of pain he couldn’t control, brought me peace in his loss. It brought peace to many of us, his family and friends, at his memorial in January, where many of the eulogies wrestled with Ted’s choice.

When I read the final page of Sula, I put the book down and cried. My intention for my trip to New Orleans was to finish the novel I’d begun after my apartment burned down in September. But I learned that the real reason I’d ended up in New Orleans was to grieve. Serendipitously, Sula opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, a play written for his lover Frank Melo, who lived with him in New Orleans. Sorry for being into woo woo shit, but it felt as if I was meant to read this book at this particular time in my life. I read the book again the next day. Every time I mentioned reading it at a party, there was always someone excited to discuss how much it moved them, also. In a moment when illiteracy is the weapon of our oppressors, how inspiring it is to be able to discuss literature! At parties!

That kind of emotional reaction to Morrison’s novels is what champions of her work want to protect. Morrison, like Wilson, took their duty as Black artists very seriously. Morrison in how she depicted African American life from slavery to the present, and Wilson in how his Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicles the African-American life in the 20th century. They cared very deeply about Black people, and it’s why Black people care very deeply about them. It’s why their work is used to uplift the work of other Black artists, like celebrating Michael B. Jordan’s award win on the road to the Oscars, when he’d just endured a very public and embarrassing moment of racism. The alternate title of the Cannonball episode is, “If We Worship Morrison, What Do We Lose?” My question is, if you seek to discredit people’s relationship with her, what do you gain?

In early December, my friend Shahmir recently sent me a WhatsApp voice message from London: “Trying my very hardest to organize a group thing of The Artist’s Way where we go through a chapter every week. I thought of you.” I, like most of you, have been inundated with TAW recently. Peyton Dix is the TAW Supreme if you are queer and live in Brooklyn. Seeing as I was already committing myself to a renewed focus on my writing in 2026 (This week, I begin a solo writers’ retreat and will remain there until I finish the first draft of Ski Trip).

I said yes to Shahmir without giving myself reasons to decline. I asked Frank subscribers if they’d be interested in following along with my journey, and many of you said yes. One of my group chats of LA friends was also interested in how I’d fare. “I’d love to know your experience,” my friend Carder said. “Bc if it works for u…” Which, fair! I certainly wouldn’t finish it on my own.

I purchased the book and had our first meeting on Sunday, 12/28. The group is filled with writers, musicians, painters, and other artists across New York, Los Angeles, London, Brazil, and Pakistan. The energy in the group was very much “let’s give a real try,” and many of the participants have either finished it before or attempted it and quit.

The process of The Artist’s Way involves writing your Morning Pages every day. Three pages in a journal by hand. Free flow, whatever’s on your mind. This proved a problem for me early on, given that we began the week of New Year’s Eve and I was in the club. I abandoned my Morning Pages by 1/1 and felt incredibly guilty about it. But as it turns out, several other people in the group did too! I felt like less of a failure and resumed my morning pages this morning, confident that I will have fewer late nights that turn into me sleeping in and forgetting to do my pages because I will be nowhere near New York for the next few weeks.

You are also supposed to take yourself on a solo date each week. My date last week was dinner at Cafe Chelsea, where I read Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. I did not enjoy the novel (good thing I’m not on the Book Prize jury), and the room was too dark and noisy for it to be truly relaxing. Dinners are not a good solo date idea!

There are also tasks you’re supposed to complete each week. I did not complete those. They are lost to the world with my post-New Year’s Morning Pages. But I will forge ahead with the second week’s tasks!

Along with my writers’ retreat, this week I also begin an online course in short story writing via the Center for Fiction. I’ve found myself missing the structure that my MFA Dramatic Writing program gave me, and I’ve never properly taken a Creative Writing course. I’ve been self-taught through reading books, writing for television, working in theatre, and vibes. I’m intrigued by what I’ll take from the class and this entire next few weeks of immersing myself in nothing but cultivating my creative side.

📚 Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I began this before New Year’s, and I’m reading along with two other friends. This book was one of the first added to my Ski Trip reading list pile, as my novel is also a thriller involving a group of college friends.

🎧 Ella and Louis. I’ve been listening to this (and follow-up, Ella and Louis Again) while writing and reading the past month. Recently, after a mention in The Secret History, I’ve added some Josephine Baker albums to the mix. I’ve enjoyed the break from modern pop music for the moment.

📺 Industry; in anticipation of the new season. I previously watched with an ex-boyfriend and stopped around mid-season 2.

🎥 The films of Ira Sachs. Aside from Heated Rivalry, the sexiest depiction of a gay relationship in recent memory is Passages. I plan to rewatch it and also fill in my Sachs’ blind spots. I’m beginning with Keep the Lights On, which depicts Sachs’ former relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg. Clegg was recently the subject of a gaggy Substack post from Helen DeWitt, who describes her tumultuous 20-year journey to publishing Your Name Here.

I published my first book this year. The thing about selling a good before you write it is that it feels like you have a gun pointed at your head until you finish it. Those first few months of excitement from friends and strangers will soon turn into “how’s the book going?” questions that you don’t want to answer and shady insinuations that you might never finish it. Well, I did. Behind schedule, but I’ve learned that book deadlines are quite malleable. My release date was pushed back even without my procrastinating, due to 2024 being an election year. Non-fiction that’s not a political book in an election cycle is a death wish, I was told. I’d never get booked on any late-night shows! I didn’t get booked on any late-night shows regardless, lol. I thought I might return to the Colbert Show, where I once promoted Keep It in 2019, but those e-mails to my publicists went unanswered after a few correspondences.

At times, I wondered if I should have shelled out several thousand dollars a month for a celebrity publicist. I'm glad I did not waste the money. James Faccinto, my publicist, was a fantastic partner on my book release, and he kept me sane when I learned that a big advance from one of the big publishers does not mean they will be spending a lot of money to promote it. In fact, because you got a big advance, you will be expected to use all your “connections” to promote the book yourself, or to hire an outside publicist. At any rate, I enjoyed my book tour! And I loved my editor, Jamia Wilson. She helped shape my book into something incredibly meaningful to me.

I wish I had read my book aloud more to catch some of the typos that copyediting didn’t catch. I discovered those typos while recording my audiobook, when it was too late.

I’m incredibly happy with what I put out into the world this year. These are my own insecurities, but I’d never felt like a “real” writer until this book was published. Sure, I’d had a few pieces in print before, like celebrity profiles, but it wasn’t until this book that I’d even had an essay published in a U.S. print magazine! A piece (“What I Found on the Dance Floor”) for Harper’s Bazaar1. The rest of my writing has been for websites that no longer exist. I don’t foresee a collection of my previous work being published anytime soon.

I pitched a 2010s follow-up to Pure Innocent Fun that Random House declined to buy. (I should’ve been a NYT best-seller instead of merely a USA Today national best-seller!) I could’ve taken it elsewhere, but I decided that I’m no longer interested in being solely an essayist. I wrote a short story after the rejection, which was published in Volume 0. That story is also the most popular on their Substack.

My apartment burned down in the fall, and I retreated to Connecticut to stay at a friend’s family home. Invigorated by selling my first short story, I dove into an idea for a book that had been banging around in my brain for years. In 2022, I was a writer and producer on the Netflix series Uncoupled. We shot my episode in the Catskills at a ski lodge. One night after shooting, I looked around at the snow and said aloud, “I wonder what a Friday the 13th would look like set here.” I conceived of that idea as a screenplay initially. I had some interest, but I would have to write it on spec first. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work beyond “slasher set in the snow.”

Years later, in Connecticut, the story finally fell into place. The characters clicked. And it became a lot more than “Friday the 13th in the snow.” And I dove into writing it as a novel. I was reminded of when I first fell in love with Goosebumps and Christopher Pike novels. When I told my Grandad I was working on a horror novel, he excitedly said, “You’ve wanted to do that since you were a kid.” To be honest, it was an ordeal writing my first book. I just wanted it done. But writing this novel, which I have tentatively titled Ski Trip, has been the most fun writing I’ve ever had in my life. I am going on a writing retreat in January, where I plan to finish the final third of the novel. I’ll return to New York once it’s done.

According to one of my favorite astrologers, Chani Nicholas, next year is supposed to be a big year for Leos. I also turn 40 next year. I used to be anxious about the fact that I hadn’t achieved the career success I’ve always wanted. But sometimes, you have to spend a little time in the woods to figure out your actual destination. I’m proud of the culture writing, podcasting, television writing, and everything else I’ve accomplished till now. But I’m even more excited about what’s next.

I also rediscovered my love of reading this year. I read 33 books this year. Here they are in order of finish date:

• Frankie by Graham Norton

• Good Girl by Aria Arber

• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman (re-read)

• No Fault by Haley Mlotek

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

• Matriarch by Tina Knowles

• Ecstasy by Alex Dimitrov

• Universality by Natasha Brown

• There Are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt

• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

• Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White

• Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline

• Love in Exile by Shon Faye

• Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbey

• I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire by Samantha Hurley

• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

• Audition by Katie Kitamura

• Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

• Better Living Through Criticism by A.O. Scott

• Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

• Luster by Raven Leilani

• Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück

• Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

• Game Changer by Rachel Reid

• Perverts by Kay Gabriel

• Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

• Best Woman by Rose Dommu

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed

• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

My favorite books this year were Audition and Jack the Modernist. Both taught me new things about how to structure a novel. I began and ended the year with two fantastic debut novels from Afghan writers who also wrote exceptionally about nightlife — Good Girl and No God But Us. My most unexpected fave of the year was my first read, Frankie. I read it because we were interviewing Graham Norton on Keep It. And it ended up being a beautiful story about love, friendship, the art world of ‘60s New York, and the AIDS crisis. I remember Graham being shocked that I actually read the damn thing; most interviewers don’t. He surprised me by leaving a voicemail for my final episode of Keep It, congratulating me on an eight-year run. I read many friends’ debut books — Rose Dommu, Haley Mlotek, Bobuq Sayed, Stephanie Wambugu — and enjoyed them immensely. Love in Exile is a must-read for anyone who has ever fallen in love, thought they’d fallen in love, or hopes to fall in love.

I have other friends’ books in my to-read pile that I will get to in 2026. My 2026 pile has already started to grow. My friend Brendon Holder and I are starting the year with The Secret History. I just got the rest of the Heated Rivalry books in the mail. I resolve to read more Toni Morrison. I hope to tackle Divine Days and The Brothers Karamazov. I hope to read more philosophy. I hope to expand my short story, “Try the Priest,” later in the year, and so I will be reading Sierra Simone’s Saint and Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase.

I went shopping with my best friend, Blair, in Manhattan today and needed a book to read on the subway. I grabbed John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat from the pile, since it seemed short enough to finish in a day. I didn’t expect to read a book about a house burning down, and friendship being born from the ashes. I was reminded of how my friends have made this year, despite being one of my hardest, an incredibly hopeful one as well. If you saw me reading Tortilla Flat and sniffling on the 5 train this afternoon, I’m sorry about that! At least I remembered to bring tissues with me, thanks to the cold weather.

Thank you all for reading this year, through all its ups and downs. For now and always, this newsletter will be Frank2.

For my final piece of writing for the year, I wrote about Heated Rivalry, masculinity, and fantasy for Them.

Are Men “So Back?”: Notes on Masculinity’s Return to Gay TV

In 2025, men were the word on the street. The need to “center men” became a talking point after Kamala Harris didn’t go on a bunch of podcasts to win the election and losers like JD Vance aired grievances about how white men have to apologize for being white and men these days. Just this week, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, sounding like a ‘90s infomercial from a lawyer that will definitely screw you out of money, wrote on X this week, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.”

But lest you think we’re harkening back to an era of “the forgotten man” nonsense, the concept of man has also been embraced by the cultural conversation at large. Gays willingly watched a show about the military that wasn’t an adaptation of Private Benjamin. Everyone is horny for closeted hockey players. On the GQ Men of the Year red carpet, Wet Leg frontwoman Rhian Teasdale wore a “Men Are So Back” shirt. Vanity Fair‘s 2025 Hollywood issue featured an all-male cover shoot that included Michael B. Jordan, Paul Mescal, Glen Powell, Jonathan Bailey, and other current leading men.

It appears masculinity is back, but it’s not the kind that conservatives are clamoring for. “The Internet Boyfriends were a phenomenon in part because of their gender. (Consider that we don’t talk about Internet Girlfriends),” says Global Editorial Director of Vanity Fair Mark Guiducci about the cover in a comment over email. “We expected — even intended — for it to stir up conversation, but ultimately our message was that masculinity does not need to be toxic.” The last time men covered the Hollywood Issue, it included Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Jack Nicholson, and Harrison Ford. Not exactly the men you want to drink matcha and discuss Booker Prize finalists with. This year’s Hollywood Issue cover also includes Jonathan Bailey, the first out gay man to land People‘s Sexiest Man Alive and the year’s top-grossing actor. It seems like leading men these days should be kind, genuine, and also rock slutty little glasses.

Read more on Them.

I’m not sure where this piece will lead in the future, but here it is (slightly edited), as read at Limousine Readings on 12/4.

Try the Priest

It’s Bushwick, and it’s winter, but no one is discontent.

It’s 8 AM on Sunday, and the afters is only getting started. I haven’t been to this house before, but it’s shared by one person I’ve seen out before and three other roommates I’ve never heard of in my life. “Oh, you know Heathcliff,” my friends insisted in our Uber ride from Basement, referring to one of the roommates. We file into the two-story house with other people I recognize from tonight at Basement to find the house nearly one-third full already, while a doll who used to live in Bushwick but has since moved to Berlin, or maybe it’s Amsterdam, spins a Toni Braxton remix on the decks. Actually, I think she lives in Madrid now, but she’s selling ketamine from Turkey, which sends me into space with Gayle King and Katy Perry. Now I’m on the floor in the living room, nestled between my best friend Tony and some guy named Hopkins that he met ten minutes ago, who sit on the couch rubbing one another’s legs.

I, however, am in a fierce k-hole. The last one this strong was the night Biden was declared victor in the Presidential race against Trump, and my friends and I did nearly every snortable drug in Bushwick, which left me at one point trapped in a bathroom giving myself a pep talk in a mirror. You can leave the bathroom whenever you want, you just need to believe in yourself! The door, as it turns out, was unlocked, as I discovered when I finally left the bathroom thirty minutes later. For my latest k-hole, I instead opt to scroll Letterboxd. My narcissism always leads me to read the comments on my own reviews, which tend to be popular thanks to my former career as a film critic for Paper and current alleged career as an author, with a recently published, terminally underselling essay collection titled Try the Priest, about my gay coming-of-age, juxtaposed with the pop culture moments that became my religion, juxtaposed with my actual religious upbringing which became my cause for agnosticism.

My ADD-addled friend Justin, who nevertheless finds the time to sit with quiet arthouse pieces and obscure foreign films, gave five stars to Todo modo, a 1976 Italian political satire that was banned and largely disposed of until it was restored by the National Museum of Cinema in 2014. The original print has been missing for decades. I make a mental note to ask Justin where he even found a copy of the film, most likely a bootleg found in a film Discord while he shopped for Adderall and FDA-unapproved GLPs. The Adderall often leads Justin to write reviews longer than a text message from a passive-aggressive Cancer you’ve finally pissed off enough times.

“Dude, that’s a long ass Letterboxd review,” Hopkins says, peering over my shoulder.

I’m startled and vexed by the interruption, but when I turn to look at his face, he ceases to be the annoying stranger who’s trying to fuck my friend. The morning light seeping through the home’s stained-glass windows bathes him in bright yellow light. I normally hate a yellow tint in films, an overused sepia filter known as the Mexican filter for short, which began innocuously enough in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic, before it turned up in every episode of TV set in Mexico. Fuck, like why was it on The O.C.? But this warm lighting, combined with Hopkins’ piercing blue eyes, wry smile, and either the ketamine or a sudden possession by the spirit of Pocahontas, begat an attraction to him strong enough to make me reconsider a decade of agnosticism.

“No, it’s my friend’s review of this obscure Italian film,” I say, stumbling through my words. That was definitely the ketamine. When I speak, it feels like molasses is dripping out my mouth. “You probably haven’t heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Todo modo.”

“Gave it five stars a year ago when it screened at the Metograph,” Hopkins says.

“Oh. You’re… a film gay.”

“You’re shocked?” He asks.

I consider this for a moment. No, I’m not truly shocked. I’d found that I often interacted with the hottest guys at parties when I lulled them into a conversation about films. Guys usually approached on a dance floor because of their six-packs and huge biceps were often caught off-guard when you engaged them about the latest Joachim Trier film. “No,” I respond. “Just pleasantly surprised.”

Hopkins slides off the couch, plopping next to me, much to my best friend’s irritation. I can’t compete with Tony when it came to abs, but movies are my combat skill. “Let’s trade accounts?”

I hand over my phone for Hopkins to follow himself, which prompts an even wider grin from him. “You just watched one of my favorite movies,” he says. “The Sandpiper.”

“Oh. An Elizabeth Taylor classic,” I say of the melodrama I’d watched the previous night about Elizabeth Taylor falling in love with a priest played by her real-life husband, Richard Burton. “I kinda hate that I went on an Elizabeth Taylor binge after that Taylor Swift song came out, but also, I don’t think she’s ever seen a single Elizabeth Taylor film.”

“I’m sure she’s seen… The Flintstones,” Hopkins says sardonically. “What did you love about The Sandpiper? Wait, lemme read your review first.” He taps on my review of the film, then frowns at my one-line review: “the lost Big Little Lies pilot.”

“You hate my review.”

“You’re one of those pithy, one-line review gays who always clog the top reviews on every film,” he says.

“First of all, not all of my reviews are one-liners. I used to be a film critic, btw.”

“I know,” he says. “I’ve read your work. I keep meaning to get around to your book, I’m sorry about that.”

“Please, don’t be sorry,” I say. In that moment, I could have forgiven him for leaking the location of the Underground Railroad, so much so that I was overcome with euphoria from the fact that he knew who I was. There was nothing hotter than a man who’d not only read my writing, but also enjoyed it. “I mean, you’ve done enough community service reading my work.”

“Stop, you’re a great writer,” Hopkins says. “But I’m a firm believer that jokes have no place in film criticism.”

I laugh. “Yes, Letterboxd is serious film criticism.”

“It can be,” Hopkins says. “I mean, if they got rid of that fucking five-star rating system. Do you know, I find five-star ratings useless. Leonard Maltin, author of my second Bible — Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide — used a four-star rating system for a reason. A five-star movie rating allows too much equivocation in reviewing a film. Either you like it, or you don’t.”

I nod, not sure if I agreed with him, but stunned by the amount of conviction he has at 8 AM at an afters after snorting lines of mind-altering drugs only minutes prior. “Wait,” I say. “Second Bible? What’s the first?”

“Uh… the Bible?” He looks at me as if I’d just asked if the Earth was flat.

“Oh, you read that thing? I don’t usually find people into God at Bushwick parties. God is whichever dealer can get here with mephedrone in under half an hour.”

“I’ll share a secret with you. I trained to be a Jesuit for two years,” Hopkins says, then, in response to my bewitched, bothered, and wide-open mouth: “I’m not one now, obviously.”

“No shit,” I say. “Okay, this is getting surreal. I just finished this new book about a black guy falling in love with a former Jesuit.”

“I think I know the one. I’ve been meaning to read that.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “I love a story about a forbidden romance with a priest. But I think the book’s lead falls in love with the Jesuit just because he looks like Joe Alwyn, not because he’s turned on by clerical collars. He could’ve been a barista.”

“Wow, did not realize I was talking to an expert on Catholophilia.”

“I’m not a religious person. Years of Jesuit school cured me of that. But, and maybe it’s a little Lady Gaga of me, I do have this fascination with religious aesthetics. It’s all theatre.”

“I had the same thing, perhaps.”

“That’s what led you to become a Jesuit.”

“Among many things.”

“And what led you to being an ex-Jesuit?”

“The aforementioned many things,” Hopkins says, taking my hand. “But I find you infinitely more interesting.” He leans in and kisses me. A brief makeout that feels longer than waiting for Jesus to get the fuck out of that cave. “Tell me more about this priest fetish you have.”

I scoff, but his expression tells me he’s being flippant. “Well, I actually cover it in my book — ”

“I get it, I suck,” Hopkins cuts in. “I’ll order it now.”

“I’ll send you a copy,” I say. “I only mention it because I did write an essay about a crush I had on my English teacher in high school. He was a Jesuit. He was probably about 25 and from Texas. He had this sexy twang in his voice that felt like tasting top-shelf bourbon. And he wore cowboy boots every day. To my dismay, we did not have one of those epic, headline news romances. But I would have welcomed it. Been his willing Vili Fualaau.”

“Okay, that’s wild, bro,” Hopkins says, laughing. “But he must have had some other effect on you besides just being hot. I mean, for you to write about him.”

“Well, yeah, it was that… among other things,” I say, volleying his furtiveness back at him. “Julian Tomasetti was the first love of my life.”

Hopkins’s eyes enlarged in apparent shock.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I know Julian Tomasetti. From my novitiate.”

“I… absolutely need to know more about this,” I say.

“I might need ketamine for that,” Hopkins responds, his tone of voice not indicating the nature of his history with the Jesuit I’d fallen for as a teenager and immortalized in print. “If you don’t mind?”

“I don’t.”

The doll on the decks spins a Nine Inch Nails song, “Head Like a Hole,” and I cut this former Jesuit and myself lines as Trent Reznor’s voice intones, “Bow down before the one you serve.”

I lost a second one this week. A friend of nearly ten years. I’m resharing the words I wrote about him on Instagram. He was one of the first subscribers to my newsletter, one of the first people I told about starting a podcast nine years ago. I want you all to know how genuinely wonderful he was and not just what I lost last week, but what the world lost last week. A few years ago, my friend Ted Ripple was in a surfing accident that paralyzed him. He was walking again within a year, defying the odds of doctors. We became even closer after that accident. He made me realize how important it is to cherish the time you have with the people in your life. To tell them you love them. I’m sad that I won’t have any more time with Teddy, but I have no regrets about the time we spent together. I always told him how much I cared about him. He always did the same.

Teddy,

Every day I looked forward to what song you’d send me to listen to: new songs, newly discovered classics, goofy J Lo songs that were stuck in our heads... I’ll always remember when we used to drive around LA listening to Jeremih, how we met during a gay poker game, how much we both loved Clipse, how much we both loved Nicki despite everything, every text you’d send me after a date that made you imagine a new future, how you always saw the best in me and were honest about when I fell short of that, how you loved me even when I annoyed you (we’re both Leos so that was often), when you discovered Mariah Carey’s discography last year, how excited you were to tell me you started Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, how you gave us one last amazing trip together in Fire Island this summer, how you happened to be in town during my apartment fire and knew exactly what to say to make me feel better, our last night out together being a Charlie Puth concert and the last time I saw you being the next day when you came to get the t-shirt you left in my bag and we listened to our favorite songs for an hour, the last text you sent me of your favorite Erykah Badu song that I now realize was you saying goodbye to me, how much joy you brought into the past decade of my life. Every time I listen to a new song, I’ll wonder what you’d think of it. And I’ll wish I could send it to you. And I’ll always wonder what music I’ll never discover because you aren’t here to text it to me. I love you, Teddy. You’re gone for now, till I see you on the other side, you’re in my heart forever.

For those who’ve followed along since my apartment fire two months ago, I moved into a new apartment in Crown Heights this week. Excited to be living in Brooklyn again.

And now, some more exciting news: last night at The Chelsea Hotel, I celebrated the launch of literary magazine Volume 0’s latest issue. It features my first-ever published fiction piece, a short horror story, “Selling Vermont.”

Selling Vermont

“Black people like to ski?”

My boss, Bret DuMonde, asks me this on the deck of the La Mirage Ski Resort. He sips a hot toddy and wears a pair of matte silver MYKITA sunglasses, which he’s reminded me at least three times is a Berlin-based brand with a store on Crosby Street. Sarah Jessica Parker has several pairs, and she once complimented him on them in the store. I glance to my right, playing off my annoyance as if it’s from catching sunlight in my eyes. I’d bought a new pair of Ray-Bans for the weekend, but they accidentally broke in my years-old North Face jacket when the Delta stewardess forced me to stick it in an overhead bin. No bags, no jackets in the front row of a cabin during take-off always pisses me off. I lock eyes to commiserate with a gorgeous woman across the aisle in Comfort+, whom I know as a former actress in a string of Kevin Hart comedies, now mostly known for The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She smiles at me for a second as if she remembers me. “Kevin?” she mouths. I get that a lot. We look alike. But I’m not that fucking short. Realizing her mistake quickly, she grimaces and puts her headphones in. We don’t make eye contact the rest of the flight, and now I’m here at the La Mirage, being asked if black people ski by my boss.

“We do,” I say. “I come here every year with a group of college friends from Princeton.”

“Well, of course, black people from Princeton ski. I meant regular black people.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.” I’m 100% sure what he means.

Shook white folks have been the theme of the day. The taxi driver at the airport who immediately said “no credit cards” — I have plenty of cash bruh, you’re the one driving a taxi, not me—and refused to connect me to the aux via Bluetooth, so I blared Drake from my phone in the backseat and rapped along with every “nigga” extra hard to annoy. Miriam, the pressed blonde at the concierge desk, who double checked my ID twice to see if I was really the reservation under Clifton Wilson. Her attitude switched up quickly when DuMonde’s wife, Hannah, showed up at the same time and gave me a country club kiss on both cheeks. Miriam definitely knows the DuMondes; they own La Mirage, and when I insinuate that Miriam is having trouble finding the reservation, she whips out my room key real quick. Hannah wanders away when someone loud and drunk calls her name from across the lobby. I smirk and snatch my room key from Miriam.

I neglect to mention to my boss that the weekend my friends have chosen for their yearly trip is this very weekend, and I’m pulling a double duty of working and also turning up with my college besties. In my group chat, I referenced the episode of The Flintstones where Fred tries to be in two places at once: his bowling league and the drive-in with Wilma for their anniversary. No one got the reference, not even Ethan, the gay TV writer.

A song from The Weekend about doing lines of blow blares on the deck. She cut that ivory into skinny pieces, then she clean it with her face. I wonder how long I’m going to have to sit and listen to DuMonde talk to me like we’re friends before I can get back to my room and crush the five grams I bought from my Manhattan dealer, and get my weekend started. The blow in Manhattan is significantly better than the blow in Brooklyn. Rich white people still do blow in Manhattan restaurant bathrooms at parties. Brooklyn is where you get offered drugs with numbers in their names, prefaced by, “It’s big in Berlin right now.” White people are crazy. I’m not snorting any shit with a name that sounds like a password.

“I have an assignment for you,” DuMonde says.

My heart sinks. Work. I thought I was going to be on networking duty this weekend, smiling like a good DEI hire while DuMonde woos hotel guests. I let out a chummy laugh. “Is that assignment hitting the slopes?”

“No. We’ve hit a snag with the resort expansion. There’s a buyer in particular who won’t budge. The old motherfucker.”

La Mirage is big, but not big enough that DuMonde doesn’t want to keep expanding it. I know he’s been looking to add on to the resort to make Vermont an even bigger ski destination than it already is.

“I need you to convince him. He’s some old black guy, living out in a cabin on the outskirts of the property like he’s fucking Uncle Tom.” That’s not what that term means…

Purchase Volume 0 to keep reading.

Copyright © 2025 by Ira Madison III. Published by Volume 0, Visible Rails LLC. All rights reserved.

“I was in LA a few years ago, and for some reason, we’d taken mushrooms. I was coked up as well, and a friend was driving us around LA in this old sedan. He was playing the Bee Gees, and it had the most profound emotional effect. I’m getting butterflies just thinking about it. I was listening to ‘Staying Alive’, a song I’ve heard all my life. At that moment, it had this really emotive, melancholy feel to it. The beat felt overwhelmingly strong and, at that moment, it sounded pretty psychedelic. It moved me, and that’s what I always want out of psych music. I want it to transport me.” - Kevin Parker, NME (2015)

I.

On March 10, 2020, days before the pandemic shuttered live music, I saw Tame Impala, the music project of Kevin Parker, at The Forum in Los Angeles. It was obvious that this was probably a bad idea. The television series I was writing on at the time had already moved to a virtual room. Every conversation I had with friends involved either canceling plans or forging ahead with plans, knowing that this was the last time we’d be gathering. At least, for a while (oh, the days when we thought this shit was gonna last a few weeks at most). But I’d already attended my sister’s wedding in Florida the previous weekend and hadn’t gotten sick, so I decided to chance attending.

The Slow Rush, released a month prior, had quickly become one of my favorite albums of the year. It had the same Tame Impala sound, but it was funkier, it was groovier. Whereas you might listen to Parker’s previous albums by smoking a blunt or doing some shrooms, The Slow Rush said, take a lick of molly and dance. I did just that in the Uber en route to The Forum with a friend, only to realize that my StubHub-purchased tickets were not digital and I had no way of retrieving them from home (I’d recently moved; if they were mailed to me, they were at my former apartment). My friend and I were already high as hell, and we’d done blow in the car too, so leaving the venue was not an option. We found last-minute tickets online, nearly twice what we’d originally paid during the concert presale, and hustled into the venue minutes before the show started. Our original seats were on the floor, but the only ones left were in seats far from the stage. As it turns out, that was probably our saving grace; other friends who attended and were on the floor got COVID that night.

When the pandemic forced a lockdown, I danced alone to “Borderline” and “Breathe Deeper” in my apartment before we started creating “pods” and hanging out with the same small groups of friends. The album was in regular rotation, alongside Lady Gaga’s Chromatica and Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, at our late-night dance parties that lasted through the next morning. Dance parties fueled by “ketamine, coke, and molly,” to quote Amaarae’s “Starkilla.”

Deadbeat, Parker’s latest album, is a return to the dancefloor that eluded The Slow Rush. The pandemic prevented Parker from having his dance floor moment, so now he’s leaned into being a DJ and making club tracks. No shit. Who hasn’t had at least 10 friends become DJs since the pandemic? Every friend who’s sent me a text about how much they love this album has been in the club with me before.

Pitchfork’s review references the NME interview where Parker describes falling in love with “Stayin’ Alive” all over again on shrooms. It leaves out the fact that Parker was not just on shrooms. He was also doing blow! He’s not just making music to listen to while high on the couch. As Whitney Houston once said, “It’s about the clubs. Clubs are happening. Like you know, people, the gay community keeps them happening. It’s where they go to release.”

“Ethereal Connection,” my fave track on the album, sounds like you might hear it in the studio at Basement or a multitude of underground dance parties in Brooklyn. The propulsive eight-minute track takes you on a journey from ordering doing bumps in a bathroom, ordering drinks at the bar, joining your friends at the front left speaker, making out with a stranger, offering them a bump, then locating your friends to do it all over again. “Afterthought” is reminiscent of disco tracks like Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” something the DJ might drop to reinvigorate the crowd at 6 AM. “Piece of Heaven” is the song that plays when you have a heart-to-heart with your best friend or the person you’re falling in love with, where you come away reassured that the mess you’ve made out of your life will soon pass. And even if it doesn’t, “there is much pain in the world, but not in this room.”

II.

The critical consensus has not been kind to Deadbeat. A lot of people think the album sucks. That Parker has moved too far from his indie rock roots. I saw a (presumably straight) man post online that Parker hasn’t made a listenable tune since Currents. It reminds me of Parker’s last major release, which was his Dua Lipa collab Radical Optimism. The critical and online gay consensus was not kind to that album.

The debut single “Houdini” was well-received. “Training Season” less so. But “Illusion” was a certifiable banger. Fans thought the rest of the album was going to sound like that. And why wouldn’t they? Lipa claimed the album was inspired by Massive Attack, Primal Scream, and UK rave culture. Plus, she gave us the definitive pandemic dance album Future Nostalgia, another record thwarted from its place on the dance floor thanks to COVID. I think everyone expected a similar-sounding follow-up.

The thing is, the album might not sound like Future Nostalgia, but it does sound like a Dua Lipa album. As a pop star, she’s not the best dancer. She was famously mocked for her dancing early on, which she clearly corrected by taking dance lessons. When she debuted “Don’t Stop Now” at the 2019 MTV EMAs, her dancing was a huge improvement over what I’d seen at the tour for her 2017 self-titled debut.

Lipa is also a good singer, but she’s not Ariana Grande. The thing about her is that she's just cool. She is forever on vacation. She reads books. Like, legitimately reads books and interviews authors like Percival Everett, Helen Garner, and David Szalay for her Service95 Book Club. These are legit books, mostly literary fiction, not Oprah and Reese Witherspoon fare. And did I mention that she’s always on vacation??

Most of the critiques of her album were some form of, “she probably recorded this damn album on vacation.” But to me, that’s a positive, because it sounds like a vacation. People were expecting another club banger nation album, but Radical Optimism is the kind of album you make when you’re drinking Aperol spritzes on yachts and dancing on the beach with Jacquemus. I am doing neither of these things, but it sounds perfectly lovely while doing prescription ketamine spray in a pool on Fire Island.

III.

Last week, Kevin Parker attended Vanity Fair’s party at Le Dive for Charli XCX’s November 2025 cover. He’s one of the cool kids now. I mean, he’s always been cool adjacent. Rihanna covered his song “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” as “Same ‘Ol Mistakes” on 2016’s Anti, but most people barely know the original. He produced Lady Gaga’s “Perfect Illusion,” but only diehard Gaga fans appreciate it (I love it).

But now that he’s embraced making music for the club, Parker is only going to get more famous. Since the beginning of time, fame erodes coolness to your core fan base. XCX fans are already annoyed at her soaring ticket prices, the neverendingness of Brat, and fears that she’s going to be overexposed with the 9,000 movies she has coming out soon.

It’s a natural backlash to poptimism, which operates under the assumption that music must be good if it’s popular. Kalefah Sanneh wrote, “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge,” for the New Yorker, which longs for an era when music critics used to be meaner. For the record, Sanneh is the one who wrote the infamous “The Solo Beyoncé: She’s No Ashanti,” so he’s to blame, too. But he’s also right. Rolling Stone and The New York Times dropped their glowing reviews of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl the second the album was released. Presumably, to get a bunch of clicks from Swifties who are used to critics trashing their faves’ albums. A phenomenon which began happening less and less, because they’d attack music critics for daring to dislike an album that sold millions! How could you hate a #1 album? IDK, do you like the Transformers movies?

When I was a teenager, before stan culture turned listening to music into a consumerist game, you had to defend your taste, not how many records your favorite album sold. It didn’t matter if critics liked it or not, either. So maybe it’s a good thing that Tame Impala’s album is a critical failure. I’m once again in the position to defend my taste. Which feels kind of cool.

I.

One Battle After Another is a cool ass movie.

I could reasonably end my critique there, because to me, if I had a good time, then it’s a good movie. I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie less than a week after I lost my apartment and belongings in a fire. And it made me feel alive. In an essay titled “Trash, Art, and the Movies” for Harper’s in 1969, film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty, and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, playing stoner ex-revolutionary Ghetto Pat, does some of his best work in years. Not just dramatic work, but comedic work. The days of his relentless hunt for an Oscar are over. This is not The Revanant or Revolutionary Road. This is the DiCaprio who first made me fall in love with him during Gangs of New York. A polarizing Scorsese film, but I watched it on Christmas Day, my junior year of high school. It was the best Christmas gift I received that year, watching DiCaprio go mano a mano with a staggering, scenery-guzzling Daniel Day-Lewis. I fucking love movies.

Teyana Taylor is electric. The first third of the film is centered around her character Perfidia Beverly Hills and her partner Ghetto Pat as they blow up shit, free detained immigrants, and rob banks with the revolutionary group the French 75. She holds an automatic rifle with ease, mandhandling it the same way she does Sean Penn’s dick in the movie’s opening scene. After garnering critical acclaim in One Thousand and One, she’ll likely catch even more and rack up some award nominations for this performance. The role hasn’t been without criticism, which, duh, she’s a black woman in a PTA film. Does he know how to write black women? Perfidia lacks some necessary depth, but also one of the best roles in PTA’s Magnolia is black journalist Gwenovier (April Grace). There’s also the cool as fuck cadre of gun-toting black nun revolutionaries in One Battle. This movie even has some nunsploitation! I’d love to see an entire film about them. PTA probably shouldn’t direct it.

In the opening scenes of One Battle, the camera leers at Taylor’s ass in tight jeans. But this is Penn’s character, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw’s POV, and he’s a sleaze who stomps around in scenes like he’s Vince McMahon. Taylor and Penn have a kinky sex scene where she shoves a gun up his ass. Is it the sexual exploitation of a black woman or just the sexual exploitation of a woman? PTA is a horny motherfucker. If you haven’t seen him eat pizza and talk about how watching porn all day inspired Boogie Nights. He likes sex, and he likes to fuck. If no one wanted to fuck Taylor in One Battle, it would not be a PTA film. One of the HAIM sisters is in the film. She’s not sexualized, sure. But I don’t think PTA wants to fuck one of the HAIM sisters. Heather Graham turns him on. Julianne Moore turns him on. All a HAIM sister can do for PTA is play the drums.

It’s been argued that the film exploits black women and Taylor’s character in general. This should not come as a surprise. PTA makes exploitation films! Boogie Nights is a whitesploitation film. One Battle is his first foray into blaxploitation, before it abandons Taylor’s character to return to whitesploitation, which is what PTA does best. The film uses the backdrop of ‘70s revolutionaries, white supremacy, and westerns to tell a story about DiCaprio attempting to save his daughter’s life from Penn’s evil military man, Lockjaw. It’s not an accurate representation of “the revolution,” but Gil Scott-Heron said the revolution wouldn’t be televised anyway. bell hooks lobbied the same critique at Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in Art Forum: “As Michele Wallace warns, there is no place in Hollywood movies for the ‘seriousness of black liberation.’ Lee’s film is no exception. It does not compel us to confront, challenge, and change. It encourages us to weep but not to fight.” One Battle After Another is not a documentary. It’s not a call to arms. I never expected it to be; it’s a melodrama. As one of the great melodrama directors, Douglas Sirk, said, “I’ve always been trusting my audience to have imagination, otherwise they should stay out of the cinema. The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you’re making a bad film.”

II.

When Fiona Apple released Fetch the Boltcutters, she spoke to The New Yorker about her tumultuous three-year relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson. He threw a chair across a room after losing Best Original Screenplay in 1998 for Boogie Nights. During one fight in 2000, he shoved her out of a car. She says he never hit her, but at parties they blew through cocaine and ecstasy, and he’d quietly hiss to her that she was a bad partner.

PTA declined to comment for the interview, but he’s been commenting on his relationship with Apple for most of his career. Punch Drunk Love, a film I saw for the first time recently and did not love, sees PTA confront male rage and loneliness. Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, a salesman who calls phone sex lines and breaks shit when he’s frustrated. Throughout the film, he’s punished by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Dean Trumbell for his sexual predilections. In the end, Sandler is saved by the love of a woman. Phantom Thread sees Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, a domineering dressmaker. He’s punished by his lover Alma (Vicky Krieps) for his behavior when she slowly poisons him with mushrooms so she can nurse him back to health. When she seeks to poison him again, Woodcock willingly acquiesces.

One Battle sees Pat chastised by Perfidia’s mother for ruining her daughter’s life and causing her to stray from her lineage of real revolutionaries. His daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), hates him for being a shitty father. Pat is largely useless to everyone in this film. Willa saves herself in the end.

PTA was raised Catholic, but has said that he now finds religion “dull, which is too bad because it’s not dull. The stories they were telling were good stories… the music was kinda boring.” Who needs church when you can repent for your sins in your movies and include a bitching soundtrack with songs from Steely Dan, The Jackson 5, and Travis Scott?

III.

I love how highly Quentin Tarantino thinks of himself. He is an Aries, after all. When asked about David Fincher directing The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the sequel to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, he said, “I think me and David Fincher are the two best directors. So the idea that David Fincher actually wants to adapt my work, to me, shows a level of seriousness towards my work that I think needs to be taken into account.”

Tarantino is one of my favorite filmmakers, but let’s be honest here, his best friend has him beat in the filmmaking department. Tarantino films are cool; they’re bold and engrossing. I cannot wait to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair this December, finally. But often, Tarantino’s films are about their influences and just doing cool shit (except for Kill Bill, that one has a real emotional core). In the aforementioned New Yorker interview, Fiona Apple described the night that made her quit cocaine: “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again.” Tarantino and PTA are both movie nerds who’ve done a bunch of blow and watched a shit ton of movies and incorporated all the cool shit they’ve seen in those movies into their movies.

Tarantino’s influences are westerns, Hong Kong action flicks, and ‘70s horror. PTA’s influences are the same shit, and ‘90s porn (apparently), but he also has an affinity for romance and melodrama that Tarantino does not possess. Tarantino does not have the patience to make a movie like Phantom Thread. PTA, on the other hand, made a sumptuous psychological thriller inspired by movies like The Passionate Friends, Brief Encounter, The Earrings of Madame de…, Vertigo, and Rebecca. That’s some real faggot shit right there, okay? You expect gay film nerds to love Jonathan Demme films. But not a film bro. PTA believes in love. He’s a romantic.

PTA has been in a relationship with Maya Rudolph since 2001. Her mother, Minnie Riperton, wrote the song “Lovin’ You” in 1974 for Rudolph about her husband, but also as a way to distract Rudolph as a baby. It’s a song about making love and growing old together, and it’s also a wistful lullaby. DiCaprio’s relationship with his biracial daughter in One Battle After Another is likely inspired by PTA’s relationship with his own biracial children. It’s a love letter. And love is messy. You don’t always get it right. But you can see his soul in it.

“She’s not your average showgirl. Allow Miss Taylor to sing the blues.” - “WTP” (2018)

I.

Taylor Swift has always excelled at masking petulant defiance as an Alfred E. Neuman-esque “What, me worry?” attitude. Take, for instance, admitting on her fiancé’s podcast, New Heights, that she flew back and forth to Stockholm to record The Life of a Showgirl in between European Eras Tour stops. For someone who’s earned the nickname CO2 Barbie for frequent use of her private jets, it seems like an incredibly out-of-touch thing to admit on a podcast. But we know Swift is constantly aware of criticisms against her and loves to address them in her music. Which means she probably just doesn’t give a fuck.

And why wouldn’t she want to use the jet at her disposal to reunite with former collaborators Max Martin and Shellback to produce their first record since 2017’s Reputation? My favorite Swift record (Folklore is a close second), particularly because it was such a departure for her and it feels so messy and raw1. In addition to her relationship with Joe Alwyn and breakups with Tom Hiddleston and Cavin Harris, Reputation forayed into her feud with the media, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian. Tracks like “I Did Something Bad” embraced her new enfant terrible status.

Thematically, Showgirl addressed many of the themes in Reputation. Swift has once again gathered Martin and Shellback to whip up songs on her current relationship (Travis Kelce, rather than Alwyn), her enemies (this time Charli XCX, Scott Borchetta, and possibly Olivia Rodrigo), and the media. Unfortunately, none of the songs exceeds their last creative endeavor. If anything, the album feels like a collection of leftover songs from the Reputation era. On Reputation, Swift compared herself to actress Elizabeth Taylor’s tumultuous relationship with Richard Burton. “He can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor, every love I’ve known in comparison is a failure,” she quips on “…Ready for It?” On Showgirl, she makes an entire song out of the comparison “Elizabeth Taylor” and sings, “be my NY when Hollywood hates me.” This lyric would’ve made sense circa her relationship with Alwyn, but unless she’s talking about Hollywood hates me in the literal sense (her string of horrible films like Amsterdam and Cats), she’s fresh off her billion-dollar Eras Tour that had damn near every (white) celebrity in Hollywood in attendance. Hate where, sis?

Aside from references to Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship with Burton and her 1991 fragrance White Diamonds, Swift doesn’t have anything remotely interesting to say about the actress either. I remember enjoying Swift’s foray into directing with the “All Too Well” short film and a surprisingly interesting Directors on Directors interview with Martin McDonagh, where she cited some of his films as her faves. You’d think, then, that Swift might have anything of substance to say about Elizabeth Taylor’s work other than reducing her to a tabloid fodder relationship with Burton. You know, like she often chastises the media for doing to her. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Butterfield 8, and A Place in the Sun alone have a multitude of parallels to Swift’s life to draw upon. Hell, even The Sandpiper is as maudlin as Swift’s lyrics at times. It would be completely on brand for Swift to visit the Criterion Closet (they’re already letting just about anyone in there these days…) and gush over her favorite Elizabeth Taylor movies. Which is why I suspect that Swift has never seen a goddamn one.

II.

Sweden has made indelible contributions to the art world. August Strindberg, known as the father of modern Swedish literature, also ushered in expressionism to the theatre world. Expressionism largely involves a focus on characters’ inner turmoil and the use of melodrama and exaggerated dialogue to tell stories. This is Swift’s modus operandi. When she rails against the constraints that the media and the patriarchy put on her, she’s summoning the spirit of Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

Strindberg’s work largely influenced Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest modern film directors, and a huge influence on Swedish and European cinema. I recently watched Autumn Sonata for the first time, which features his signature emotional vulnerability and depiction of the contradictory personal obsessions of the bourgeois class. In the film, Ingrid Bergman plays a renowned pianist who reunites with the daughter she has a fraught relationship with, and the disabled daughter she has altogether ignored. Charli XCX reviewed it on her Letterboxd in August: “my most favourite Bergman film yet. emotionally devastating. highly triggering. i guess the apple’s rotten right to the core vibes. feels thematically ahead of its time (??) but maybe that’s just because people from Scandinavia know themselves far better than British people probably ever will. incredible performances all round. had to go for a massage after.”

The dissection of an artist who struggles with a work-life balance and fraught relationships clearly spoke to XCX, who dove into many of those themes on Brat, particularly “Sympathy is a Knife,” where she explores her insecurities with craving pop stardom but feeling as if she’ll never measure up to someone like Taylor Swift. When XCX sings, “I don’t wanna share this space, I don’t wanna force a smile, this one girl taps my insecurities, don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling,” it’s reminiscent of Liv Ullman in the film, lashing out at her mother. XCX gets even more raw when she prays that Swift and then-boyfriend Matty Healy break up. Healy is the frontman for The 1975, the band in which XCX’s husband, George Daniel, is the drummer and primary producer. “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show. Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”

Swift’s response to this song is “Actually Romantic,” a song which has been called a rip-off of The Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” and Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” On it, she calls out XCX for gossiping about her: “I heard you call me Boring Barbie, when the coke’s got you brave. High-fived my ex, and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me. Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face.” I would be a hypocrite if I argued that Swift is not allowed to respond to XCX on her own album. XCX wrote a song about her! My only issue is that it’s so… lame? And she takes the time to tease XCX, calling her a barking chihuahua, which doesn’t quite hit as hard as Cardi B calling Bia a “labrador” on the diss track “Pretty and Petty.” I’m not suggesting that Swift be nice to XCX, but it is a harsh response to a song where XCX muses, “Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?” If anything, Swift seems to be masking her real anger with phony bravado. In “Actually Romantic,” she claims to find XCX’s insults “sweet.” A cursory familiarity with XCX will tell you that she’s never been afraid of speaking her mind. “Boring Barbie” seems like too nice of an insult for someone you hate. So I’m left wondering what insults Swift really heard and sanitized to “Boring Barbie,” rather than putting something much nastier on wax.

And not for nothing, XCX also wrote about her fraught relationship with Lorde on Brat in “Girl, so confusing.” The only difference is that the song prompted Lorde to ring up XCX and work it out on a remix. It produced one of the best pop songs of last year. That’s because Lorde is cool. She spun a beef into something iconic. Swift responded with a catty song that sounds like two better songs. That’s a little boring, Barbie.

III.

The Swedish pop group ABBA won Eurovision in 1974 with their song “Waterloo.” They’re one of the best-selling pop acts in history, continuing a tradition of the Swedes being better at storytelling than the rest of us. ABBA Gold features a collection of the best pop songs ever created. Their 1979 album Voulez-Vouz is a masterpiece (and features my favorite song, “If It Wasn’t for the Nights,” a glaring omission from Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again).

Max Martin is one of the best songwriters of the 21st century. It’s no wonder Swift wanted to work with him on Red; she grew up listening to him craft hits for Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, and *NSYNC. Martin’s greatest contribution to pop music is “…Baby One More Time.” BSB’s “Shape of My Heart” is a song about romantic regret and forgiveness, which is Swift’s wheelhouse. “Tell Me, Tell Me... Baby” off *NSYNC’s 2001 album Celebrity is Reptuation’s mother. Listen to it and tell me I’m wrong.

When Swift announced that she was teaming up with Martin and Shellback again, most fans assumed we’d be getting pop anthems. Granted, Martin is also responsible for “Delicate,” a decidedly non-upbeat song more in line with the general vibe of Showgirl. But none of the songs on Swift’s latest take sonic left turns like the tracks on Reputation, and frankly, the songwriting doesn’t match it. “Wi$h Li$t” has my favorite chorus on the album2, but when you actually listen to the lyrics, you wonder what the hell Swift is talking about. “We’d tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do.” You announced this album — that no one was begging for after last year’s 21-track slog The Tortured Poets Department — on Kelce’s podcast. Kelce was on the cover of GQ. His mother is on the new season of The Traitors. I think it’s you all who won’t leave us alone, but the private jet isn’t gonna pay for itself.

Maybe my expectations were too high for Martin to match. With Swift in a creative rut on Showgirl, Martin was never going to be the producer to pull her out of it. Take this description of Martin from Swedish pop royalty Robyn in an interview with Pitchfork: “He has a very particular way of looking at songs. He is a hit machine. That’s his specialty. But that’s what he does. He writes songs. He’s not an artist.”

Edit: I originally referenced Ibsen’s A Doll’s House when I meant to reference Strindberg.

You can join only one mini-league, though, so make sure you join mine, THE THIRDS. You can begin drafting here. Sign up to get a reminder to submit a ballot before scoring starts on September 26.

Charlie Kirk and American myths

“Who doesn’t want to scam a bitch?” In a March interview with The Fader, Branden Miller, the man behind social media sensation Joanne the Scammer, explained why “scamming” had become so popular in 2016. “Everyone is getting scammed! Look at who the president can be! The fact that Donald Trump could win? The world is such a fucking messy place.” Pejoratives like scammer, fraud, and con artist have been lobbed Trump’s way for decades — but America has always loved a con artist. It's why the town of Ariel, Washington, annually celebrates the day D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane and disappeared with $200,000 in ransom money. It’s how Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts.” And it’s now how the right has swiftly mythologized the openly bigoted Charlie Kirk.

It was expected that Republicans and far-right conservatives would seize on the moment for vainglory. Rep. Nancy Mace made it her mission to find every camera possible to rail against Democrats. Vice President JD Vance took a break from his endless vacations (I think he’s been on more flights than Dua Lipa this year) to host Charlie Kirk’s podcast. But the most surprising, and perhaps the most chillingly effective attempt at redeeming Kirk’s image in the eyes of the American public belonged to his wife, Erika Kirk.

In the wake of his death, Kirk donned a white blazer and spoke from a podium in Kirk’s podcast studio: “No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it. Our campus tour this fall with continue. There will be even more tours to come. The radio and podcast show that he was so proud of will go on. And in a word filled with chaos, doubt, and uncertainty, my husband’s voice will remain. And it will ring out louder and more clearly than ever. And his wisdom will endure.” During this, she softly touched his chair to remind you that this is where Charlie once sat. The table was also littered with “47” hats, which are “limited edition” merch on Kirk’s website, celebrating Trump’s second Presidential term. I’m not here to police anyone’s grief, but hawking a podcast and a tour and merch in your first public statement on your husband’s death feels shameless and calculated. Later, Erika Kirk shared a photo of her kneeling beside her husband’s casket, kissing him. Today, she was announced as the new CEO of Turning Point USA, her husband’s youth organization that operates more like Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants.

It’s been established in the past week that there were two versions of Charlie Kirk online. Thanks to the algorithms that feed us what we want to see, some Americans only saw the clips where he talked about God and healing the nation (and a lot of celebrities, which is not shocking because they all seem to follow Jay Shetty-esque inspirational content on social media). Black people, trans people, and other people with liberal leaning social media algorithms saw the full dimensions of Charlie Kirk. They saw him discuss “black on black crime” and utter phrases like, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” Or that Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson did not have "the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." A fact that Vance lied about in his appearance on Kirk’s podcast.

Erika Kirk gingerly touching her husband’s empty podcast chair, called to mind Jackie Kennedy deciding to wear her blood-stained Chanel suit after the assassination of her husband. Kennedy wanted the nation to witness the carnage through their own eyes. According to historian Steve Gillon, "They actually had another dress laid out for her to put on, and she refused.” I recall a pivotal scene in Pablo Larraín’s 2016 film Jackie, where Natalie Portman’s Kennedy asks her driver if he remembers the name of any assassinated presidents. He can only recall Lincoln because he “freed the slaves.” This prompts Jackie to model her husband's funeral after Lincoln's and to craft a myth that would be their centuries-spanning legacy. During her interview with Life magazine's Theodore H. White, Jackie discusses how she and JFK used to listen to the Broadway cast recording of Camelot every night and how he was particularly moved by the concluding couplet, “Don’t ever let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was Camelot.” White knew this was untrue, but it was something he wanted to believe.

Charlie Kirk’s vision of America was nothing as beautiful as Camelot. Mordor, perhaps. But to conservatives who want to use his memory to further their own political agendas, he might as well have been JFK, slain on television for a nation to witness. I have no doubt that the Zapruder film capturing JFK’s motorcade would be shared as endlessly on social media as morbidly Kirk’s death was.

Jackie depicts Portman as Kennedy during three spectacularly public moments in her life: her 1962 tour of the White House, her raw grief in the hours after her husband’s assassination, and, finally, her interview a week after JFK's death. Larraín made the choice to portray the first widow as supernaturally self-aware. Portman may lack any type of social media presence. Still, her Jackie would have an Instagram as finely curated as Taylor Swift's — professionally photographed images filtered and Photoshopped to perfection to give the appearance of commonality while keeping the mundane aspects of pointing and clicking with your phone in the wild at arm's length.

Jackie shows a woman with an astute sense of how she's perceived by the world and who carefully cultivates an immaculate image for the American public. Jackie boasts to her Life magazine interviewer of her husband's devotion to the arts, the preserved room where Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment, and the heirlooms of presidents past that have been bought and bartered for their triumphant return to the White House.

The strain of Jackie's Stepford-esque demeanor only shows its cracks in moments of solitude or during quiet interactions with her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard). Portman's performance is a bit of a ghost sonata, a methodical dance with inscrutable motivations. Larraín chooses not to focus on Jackie's origins — why she married Kennedy, why she chose her affected voice. But con artists are most mythic when we don't know their motivations. D.B. Cooper is part of the American tapestry because he disappeared, never to be seen again, whereas the man behind Joanne the Scammer just wanted to be famous on the internet, and Trump just wanted to be the most powerful man in America. Knowing their motivations strips away the myth — it makes them human; it keeps them from being larger than life.

Was using JFK’s death to galvanize a country a good thing? Perhaps, yes. For the most part, he was a good man. Kirk, on the other hand, had far too much vitriol in his heart for non-white people. That is a legacy that should not be celebrated or whitewashed. But the problem is, when the media allows mythmaking, it’s a useful tool for any party. It’s how they hid Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. It’s how they allow Trump to lie daily.

But the student who has clearly analyzed Jackie the most carefully in this cycle isn't Larraín or his leading actress — it's Kellyanne Conway, Trump's tenacious, truth-bending campaign manager. Her poise and rigid attention to how she and Trump are perceived are strikingly similar to Portman's Jackie. Jackie's machinations end up most successful when the messiness of life gets in the way, when it spirals out of control due to a sniper's bullet and a piece of your husband’s brain matter in your pink Chanel lap. Her outmaneuvering of government officials to have the grand funeral she's envisioned and her selection of Kennedy's final resting place in Arlington while wandering in a rain-drenched cemetery are stirringly rendered by Larraín. Similarly, disasters like Trump's showing in the first presidential debate and his leaked audio describing sexual assault and grabbing women by their pussy — not to mention his countless Twitter meltdowns — were all inciting incidents to spring Conway into action.

Jackie begins her conversations with White by announcing that she will be editing his piece for him “in case I don't say exactly what I mean.” Conway had no such luxury. Tapped as a replacement for Paul Manafort, Trump's previous campaign manager, in the middle of August 2016, she quickly went to work building her own Camelot for her new candidate. Watching as Portman's Jackie blows cigarette smoke into White's face while simultaneously telling him, “I don't smoke,” called to mind the times Conway said of Trump, “he doesn't hurl personal insults” (a lie) and “nothing has changed as far as the [immigration] policies” (another lie, after Trump claimed he “softened” on deporting millions). In fact, his campaign was found to be 78 percent full of lies and falsehoods in July 2016 by PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet.

If it weren't for Portman's unsettling, real portrayal of Jackie's real-life grief, her interviews with White would make her seem like Moriarty taunting Sherlock Holmes when she wryly says things like, “People like to believe in fairy tales.” Much has been said about how Trump is gaslighting the American people by feeding them lies and misinformation, but victims of gaslighting have no idea someone is out to get them. Americans became familiar with the term when film stars Ingrid Bergman, Ashley Judd, and Ben Affleck were gaslighting victims in their respective films Gaslight, Double Jeopardy, and Gone Girl. And then had the phrase run into the ground during Trump's first presidency. But, can you gaslight someone who knows they're being lied to and willingly goes along with the lie anyway? That's not gaslighting; that's, as Jackie says, people believing in fairy tales.

Racism fostered Trump's lies about Obama's birth certificate. Misogyny fostered right-wing conspiracies about Hillary Clinton's failing health being kept a secret from the American public. And now, The Washington Post has fired Karen Attiah for reposting Kirk’s own words. Disney pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for calling out Kirk’s ideology. And yet again, the media allows Trump to lie and say Kimmel was “fired because he had bad ratings.”

As Wayne Koestenbaum described in Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, “Jackie was likable because she seemed a knockoff aristocrat, palpably ungenuine, and always in danger of being found out.” "Palpably ungenuine is exactly how I’d describe the conservatives falling over themselves to declare Kirk as their King Arthur. But no one is in “danger” of being found out. The media has allowed Trump and his ilk to lie so much with impunity that we already know the truth, but everyone’s afraid to say it unless they lose their jobs. And the people with nothing to lose, whether it's politicians or comedians who’ve claimed to support free speech but remain silent on Kimmel’s silencing, have everything to gain.

The III

I. Cameron Crowe in The New York Times

I watched Singles for the first time this year and revisited Vanilla Sky, so of course I loved this David Marchese interview with Cameron Crowe for The New York Times. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve read all year. More interviews with artists from real journalists, please, and not more nonsense like EE72 launching with Julia Roberts in conversation with… George Clooney. Snore. We all saw the Ticket to Paradise press tour. Did we need that?

I especially loved this bit from the interview on Tom Cruise.

Marchese: Tom Cruise was, of course, in your films “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky.” But I’m curious for your perspective on Tom Cruise’s career over the last 10 years or so. He’s really focused on these spectacular films, the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which are very different from the character-driven performances that he gave for you. Do you think his interests as a storyteller have just diverged from the kind of work that he was making with you?

Crowe: I see that there’s a time coming, and it might have already started, where he’s going to segue into character roles as strongly as he segued into doing action movies of the highest quality. That Paul Newman character phase is just around the corner and will fry people’s minds. I’ll tell you one little thing: I have the same lawyer as Clint Eastwood, and he invited me to a dinner party. He sat me next to Clint Eastwood, and I was so nervous. What do you say to Clint Eastwood? So I’m sitting there and Clint Eastwood leans over and says, “Tom Cruise.” And I go: “Oh, man, Tom Cruise. I love working with Tom Cruise.” And he goes, “In a hundred years, they’re gonna look back — that’s the career, Tom Cruise’s career.”

II. Joni Mitchell’s 1979 Rolling Stone Interview

Crowe began his career as a music writer for Rolling Stone in 1973. In his NYT profile, he mentioned one with Joni Mitchell: “She was my best interview at Rolling Stone. The ’79 interview that we did when she was putting out the “Mingus” album was, by far, the best interview I did there.”

The interview is great. And I would read an entire collected book of Crowe’s interviews with musicians from his Rolling Stones tenure. I’m always in favor of more books on music criticism. I loved this moment where Mitchell describes how she’s perceived by her peers.

Crowe: Would you like to shatter any preconceptions?
Mitchell: I do have this reputation for being a serious person. I’m a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that’s the nature of the work I do. But this is only one side of the coin, you know. I love to dance. I’m a rowdy. I’m a good-timer. Mind you, I haven’t seen too many good parties since I left my hometown. People go to parties here mostly to conduct business.

There’s a private club in Hollywood that usually is very empty, but on one crowded evening, I stumbled in there to this all-star cast. Linda Ronstadt was running through the parking lot being pursued by photographers, Jerry Brown was upstairs, Bob Dylan was full of his new Christian enthusiasm – “Hey Jerry, you ever thought of running this state with Christian government?” Lauren Hutton was there, Rod Stewart . . . . There were a lot of people and this little postage stamp of a dance floor, and nobody was dancing on it. These are all people who dance, in one way or another, in their acts.

So the renowned introvert comes in, and I just wanted to dance. I didn’t want to dance alone, so I asked a couple of people to dance with me and nobody would. They were all incredibly shy. So I went to the bathroom, and a girl came in and hollered to me from the sink over the wall, “Is that you? I’ll dance with you.” I said, “Great.” It was just like the Fifties, when none of the guys would dance. And it was at this moment that the girl confided to me, “You know, they all think of you as this very sad person.” That was the first time that it occurred to me that even among my peer group I had developed this reputation. I figured, these guys have been reading my press or something. [Laughs] But as far as shattering preconceptions, forget it. I feel that the art is there for people to bring to it whatever they choose.

III. Nala Sinephro

Someone on Substack posted a few jazz albums they’d been listening to recently. I’ve started listening to jazz in the mornings as a form of meditation (I don’t meditate, but I can disassociate by listening to music). Some of the suggestions included Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, both of whom I was already familiar with. But I hadn’t heard of Caribbean-Belgian jazz artist Nala Sinephro. As a result, her recent album Endlessness and her 2021 debut, Space 1.8, have been on constant repeat all week.

Ciao,

Ira the Third

Queer people have been accused of celebrating political violence in the past week in the aftermath of the former podcaster Charlie Kirk’s death. Still, I saw far more celebration of the return of reality television’s greatest gift since Lisa Rinna broke a wine glass in an Amsterdam restaurant. I’m talking about The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, a glorious Bravo franchise now entering its sixth season, which operates more like pro-wrestling than a Real Housewives franchise.

As I wrote during last season’s best episode, “Mazel, Meredith,” which featured an over-the-top bat mitzvah for grown adult Meredith Marks and Mary Cosby arriving late — peering through windows to find the entrance while everyone inside could witness her confusion — camp is the point on RHOSLC: The thing that makes RHOSLC work is that from the first episode, it felt like Housewives on steroids. And as pop culture continues to parody the franchise and fans quote the series endlessly, the fact that these women know they’re creating television and it does so in such operatic, diva-ish ways that you feel as if you’re watching Gena Rowlands in Opening Night or Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. The institution of Housewives feels like it’s crumbling! New York has trauma dumped its way to near cancellation. Orange County has spent an entire season bullying its only POC off the show, which resulted in viewer backlash.

The women of Salt Lake City are aware of this, however. They’re constantly aware they’re putting on a show. They play into it on social media, where they lip sync to their own iconic quotes. They rehash their fights for viewers in public at Bravo Con like Roman gladiators in a coliseum while the fall of Rome approaches. Only, this is a coliseum with sharks in it, like in the overtly ridiculous film Gladiator 2. Speaking of the fall of Rome, which has been on my mind since I reread Julius Caesar this summer to work on an adaptation, some historians and scientists suggest that the use of lead in water pipes, cookware, and wine sweeteners resulted in widespread lead poisoning in Ancient Rome, which basically poisoned the political and social elite, drove everyone crazy, and killed the empire. It would explain Caesar’s frequent "falling sickness” or epileptic fits as described by Shakespeare and the Greek historian Plutarch. Ironically, this morning, I came across a TikTok from Evan Lazarus theorizing that arsenic and lead poisoning are the reason why the ladies of RHOSLC are so damn wackadoo as well.

Like Jen Shah’s scams and her eventual arrest on camera by Homeland Security agents. Despite everything that’s happened in the previous five seasons of RHOSLC, that moment remains the series’ benchmark and, naturally, fans constantly reference it. However, I didn’t expect the show to reference it so damn much, which is why I found last night’s sixth season premiere, “Hot Dogs and Hearsay,” so disappointing.

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Never has the state of reality television in America been made more apparent than this week. Three of the old guard — Big Brother, The Bachelorette, and Survivor — lit up my group chats this week. In an act of political violence, Big Brother decided to abandon its entire narrative this season, introducing a twist that saw fan favorite Rachel Reilly unceremoniously ousted from the game. The Bachelorette abandoned its entire premise in favor of a cheap ratings grab when it cast Taylor Frankie Paul in its new season. And Parvati Shallow won Survivor: Australia versus the World, a perfect end to a near-flawless season of Survivor. The problem with this? It was a better season than anything we’ve seen on U.S. Survivor in years.

First, let’s talk about the ultimate betrayal. On CBS’ Big Brother, a show which was once one of my favorite competition shows and is now a chore to watch (the live feeds are still great, but only when CBS doesn’t bother to turn them off), came up with a dumbass twist last week that sent season 13 winner Reilly out the door. In a twist called The White Locust, the entire house had to compete in a challenge that left the loser eliminated. Meaning they weren’t nominated for eviction. They weren’t allowed to campaign to stay. They didn’t get to compete for veto. They didn’t get eliminated during a live show. No exit interview with Julie Chen. Sorry, Julie Chen MOONVES!!!!!! Frankly, treating a show legend like that is bullshit. And the ratings reflected it, because people have stopped watching.

Not that the show has ever seemed to care about what its viewers want in recent years. It spends most of its time ignoring actual drama that happens via the show’s live feeds (available on Paramount+) and crafting its own boring narrative for the show that airs on CBS. I’m not even particularly mad that Reilly is gone — the players this season largely suck compared to recent years, and it was embarrassing to watch her playing with these people. It was giving Boston Rob in Survivor’s most hated season, Redemption Island. But changing the rules of a game midway through the season not only makes no sense, it feels like cheating. Imagine whoever lost a challenge on The Traitors going home immediately before a roundtable. You’d be pissed. But The Traitors would never do that, because it’s an Emmy-winning competition show.

I’ve loved Big Brother for a long time, but the show is in dire need of a refresh. The show has slowly morphed into The Challenge, which relies less on social strategy and more on winning competitions. What’s the point in calling this show a “social experiment” when the social aspect of the game doesn’t even come into play? Unsurprisingly, the best seasons of Big Brother in recent years have come from Canada, where they hire people who favor gameplay over lying around the house all summer like it’s a vacation. It’s very easy to get to the end of Big Brother by doing absolutely nothing. That’s not fun for viewers, and it’s not how a game should work.

We need a shorter, more intense version of Big Brother. We need less lag time between competitions so people aren’t just sitting around the house doing nothing. It seems like some of these people really just sign up so they can sublet their apartments for the summer and make some cash. Maybe evictions should be twice a week!

Rachel’s return to television felt magical. I had longtime Big Brother fans returning to the show to watch her play. I had multiple group texts with people discussing the game each week. And now… who gives a fuck? Reilly’s return felt even more fun because it was happening simultaneously with Survivor Australia versus The World, where Survivor legends Parvati Shallow and Cirie Fields reunited to play the game together again, fifteen years later. If you don’t want Survivor Australia, you should know that the challenges are tough, the players are fierce, and you don’t have to play Jigsaw games that cost you your vote. Unlike the U.S. version!

Fans of Survivor have long been annoyed by the new era of the show, which favors superfans playing the game, as hosted by Jeff Probst, who then implores them to talk about how much the game means to them through heartfelt moments at tribal council. Girl, we came to watch blindsides and strategy, not therapy sessions. You are not Dr. Orna Guralnik! Obviously, I still watch and enjoy Survivor, but I want it to be better. One thing that would help is if Probst would stop being a stubborn Scorpio and bother to acknowledge the international versions of Survivor. It’s wild that Survivor Australia has hosted several iconic U.S. players, and Probst won’t even utter the show’s name. Maybe now that Shallow has been crowned as the winner and she’s on her victory lap1, he’ll be forced to? Maybe he’ll acknowledge the fact that Fields played in Versus the World when she appears on Survivor 50? His American isolationism isn’t doing the game any favors.

And as for The Bachelorette, I haven’t watched that show since Rachel Lindsay was on it, but isn’t the idea of this show supposed to be people finding love? LOL I’m kidding. But seriously, shouldn’t the show at least be populated with eligible bachelorettes and bachelors? Paul, star of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, debuted on television, getting arrested for beating up her baby daddy. And she still has ongoing drama with him. This feels like a desperate ratings grab. Like Disney hitching its long-in-the-tooth series to a runaway hit. Because you can’t tell me anyone is watching Paul on Mormon Wives and going, hell yeah, that’s who I wanna marry. More like, hell yeah, I wanna be MomTok famous too, or at least snatch a guest appearance on The Viall Files.

One thing I love about Mormon Wives is how it’s literally just about how these women work to be famous. There’s no pretext to their thirst for fame. Maybe The Bachelorette universe should stop the pretext, too. Why bother ending the season with a proposal anymore? The prize should be brand deals.

Bieber bopped about the room, going from the DJ to his table, vibing to his music. Hailey was planted at the table near us, while my friends and I slurped down espresso martinis and tried scanning the room to find other celebrities. I only spotted Lori Harvey and someone who looked like Lara from Katseye, but probably wasn't. It was a fun moment, but I wasn't trying to hear all that (I find the album kind of a retread), so I popped out onto the patio for a cigarette. I made it back to our table in time for the DJ to switch over to the superior Swag. "Yukon" is that girl. A random Australian girl popped by our table to ask if she could finish our espresso martinis, as the bar was no longer serving cocktails, only mixed well drinks. I turned her away, then she insisted she was going to tell Biber, "We're all tired of hearing the album." I don't know if she did, but the music did change over to Sean Paul thirty minutes later, and Bieber and his crew made their exit.

Members' clubs are all the rage in New York right now. I recently met someone designing one in Midtown for the theatre crowd. Kith just opened one with Erewhon smoothies. Chez Margaux and San Vicente Bungalow have taken up residence in the West Village. It's a place for the wealthiest New Yorkers, celebs, or new money wannabes to mingle and enjoy exclusivity. It used to be that you could spot celebs at the hottest clubs and restaurants in the city, but more and more they're choosing to cloister themselves from the general public.

Granted, there are still some chic clubs whose only entry requirement is passing a fierce doorperson — People's is my favorite — I spotted Maggie Rogers and Chace Crawford there the other night. Jean's is also fun; my friend Alex Chapman hosted a party there on Thursday with Zara Larsson and Tiffany Pollard, but the door and some of the staff at Jean's are so aggravating that it's a chore even to attend your own friends' events.

But for the most part, while social media has given us all more access to one another, celebrities and the rich are seeking more ways to remove themselves from public life. The divide has never been clearer in New York than in the ongoing war waging between ultra-wealthy New Yorkers and Zohran Mamdani. The bridge has never been more apparent than in Spike Lee's latest film, Highest 2 Lowest, where it finds Lee in his continued embrace of conservative values. Sure, Lee has endorsed Mamdani for mayor. And he's still very much pro blackity black. But the film reveals an embrace of Lee's position in society and the annals of filmmaking than it actually reveals anything about what it's like to be a New Yorker at this moment in time.

In the film, Denzel Washington portrays music producer David King, whose intentions of attaining majority ownership of Stackin' Hits, the record label he created, are halted when his son is seemingly kidnapped. Things go from bad to worse when it turns out the kidnapping victim is actually the son of his chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright). King is faced with a moral dilemma of handing over $17.5 million to a kidnapper for his friend's son and imagines the public backlash if he doesn't. Highest 2 Lowest is based on Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, which is a phenomenal piece of filmmaking. I'm not well-versed in Kurosawa enough to proclaim it his best — I've only seen Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Ran — but it's certainly my favorite.

In High and Low, Kurosawa offers a searing class critique that is absent from Lee's film. Washington's King turns vigilante when the police don't recover his lost money quickly enough. In Kurosawa's original, Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) mostly drops out of the film's action after the ransom dropoff. He also loses control of his shoe empire and has to start over with a new company. But the police continue the investigation to recover his money, devoting the resources of the full Osaka police force. Protecting a wealthy man like Kingo is their civic duty. And as for the chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada), he lashes out at his own kidnapped son for not being able to remember details of his kidnapper and grovels to his boss, embarrassed that his own son's kidnapping has cost his boss money. The way the film moves through the city shines a light on several aspects of Japanese culture in the early 60s: Kingo's lavish apartment is an envy-inducing eyesore, heroin dens are isolating and depraved, and gin joints are full of U.S. soldiers.

Highest 2 Lowest continues Lee's trend of making films that are love letters to New York — The 25th Hour, which recently screened at the Cherry Lane Theater on Monday, is a post 9/11 gift to New York and one of his best films, but fails to tell a real story of anyone living in the city. A Puerto Rican Day Parade scene appears for no other reason than to put Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos on screen dancing to Eddie Palmieri. The police racing to catch a kidnapper amidst the parade doesn't say anything thematically. Though it did make me think of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and his friends get trapped in parade traffic en route home from The Hamptons. So maybe it's about how parades in the city are kind of a nuisance.

The real themes of Highest 2 Lowest seem to be reckoning with the past. King wants to reclaim his legacy as the "best ears in the business," and comes up against drill rapper A$AP Rocky's Yung Felon, who accuses him of turning his back on his community and not embracing new forms of hip-hop. The film ends with a clear repudiation of Yung Felon's music and King signing an Alicia Keys-esque singer to his new label. In Do the Right Thing, Lee embraces the aesthetics of hip-hop, particularly Public Enemy's "Fight the Power." But perhaps Lee thinks that hip-hop actually meant something then and now, songs like Yung Felon's "Trunks" are beneath the culture. Maybe, but it's the only song I had on repeat after watching the film. "Pack out the trunk from the front to the back," is a catchy ass lyric.

A deeper exploration of the friction that exists between hip-hop's history and present could have made the film soar. In the '90s, Lee's films felt born from kitchen table and barbershop discussions. Police violence. Interracial dating. Black culture's exploitation in the media. But now, his films are increasingly more about Lee's current economic status. King has no real opinion on the society he lives in, aside from thinking the people on social media who talk about him are annoying. In a way, he's an avatar of Lee, who has approached a "get off my lawn" mentality in his filmmaking lately.

Recall his response when Boots Riley critiqued BlacKkKlansman's glorification of the police in the midst of Black Lives Matter. (He’d probably hate the sexy cops in Sabrina Carpenter’s VMA performance!)1 Lee said he was done engaging with other prominent voices in Hollywood on his own work (ironic, given his critiques of Tyler Perry): “I’m a young chap, a young man aged 61, but before I was even a younger chap. Now, when I get a hint that this stuff is maybe going to dilute the message of my film, I know it is not going to do me any good to comment.” According to Riley, he ran into Lee at an event some time later, and Lee shouted at him, "I'm Miles Davis and you're Chet Baker!" To Lee's credit, he did later approach Riley and tell him their beef was squashed.

The Miles Davis response says it all, however. Lee is the GOAT, he's the arbiter of cool, and Riley is not. In his eyes. It's why he can adapt Kurosawa films. It's why King's house is populated with work from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley. It's why he can make Highest 2 Lowest an ad for AirPods Max. Kidding. Sort of. But Highest 2 Lowest mostly references shit Lee finds cool. When it works, it's amazing — and his re-interpreation of the train scene in High and Low is truly thrilling. But when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. Like opening the film with "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin" from Oklahoma! Very puzzling.

Plenty of directors do shit just because it's cool. It's why we watch movies. Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of referencing movies he loves and skipping cultural commentary. But Lee has always positioned himself as a man in tune with culture. He's stayed vocal about this for years. Unfortunately, he's run out of things to say about culture. But he has a lot to say about himself, which is also incredibly fascinating, coming from a director (for instance, late-stage Pedro Almodóvar is all about embracing aging and the loss of body autonomy). If Lee's early era was righteous politics and exploring black culture, and his middle era was cool genre flicks like Inside Man, then his new era seems to be an exploration of his own life. King might as well be a stand-in for Lee, staking claim on his legacy while newer black voices populate the cinema. Let's just hope that in his next film, he goes a bit deeper into his own psyche. Highest 2 Lowest might be a fun remake of Kurosawa's film, but they are far from in conversation with one another.

The III-wind

My friend Tarell Alvin McCraney’s fantastic play The Brothers Size (I’ve read, but haven’t seen this production yet) is currently playing at The Shed till September 28. See it because it’s amazing and obviously because André Holland is in it. The last time I saw Holland on stage was in Jitney on Broadway in 2017, when I interviewed him for MTV News.

Since Viacom deleted all its MTV News archives, here’s that 2017 interview in its entirety:

André Holland is Changing the Future of Black Men in Hollywood

Originally published: February 3, 2017

André Holland isn't interested in how Hollywood sees black men. As a Southern boy who ended up attending New York University for his master's degree, he's incredibly measured when it comes to talking about his career. It's a drive I recognize: My own family is from the South and I, too, attended NYU for my master's. It's a hall that not many black men have passed through, but those who do come out with a drive to grab the world in their fists. It's why his résumé includes pivotal roles in the mesmerizing and emotional Oscar-nominated Moonlight, starring roles in The Knick and American Horror Story, and now a turn on Broadway in one of August Wilson's most powerful plays, Jitney.

Written in 1979, it took Jitney nearly four decades to have its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The production stars Holland, who previously starred in Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone during its 2009 Tony-winning Broadway revival. Both works are part of Wilson's 10-play cycle that chronicles the black experience in America over the course of the 20th century.

Jitney tackles racism, the effect of the prison-industrial complex on black men, and gentrification, among other topics; it feels just as powerful and as relevant in the black community today as it did in 1979. It’s fitting, then, that Holland, who has meticulously picked some of the best roles available to black men in Hollywood, plays Youngblood, a Vietnam veteran who's trying to build a life for himself in America but finds the deck stacked against him.

Jitney means a lot to me. One monologue in particular sticks with me: In the second act, Youngblood talks about how the world sees him one way and will never let him change. Years later, black men in America and in Hollywood are still seen one way. They're not allowed to be three-dimensional, to possess the type of empathy that Wilson's characters often exhibit — the kind of empathy Holland showcased in Moonlight, in what might've been the first time I'd ever seen an emotional relationship between two black men in a film. Holland brings that same compassion to Youngblood, making a character written in 1979 — one that I studied for a semester in school and only ever saw on the page — come alive as a bona fide metaphor for the black male experience in America. MTV News caught up with Holland in the midst of rehearsals for Jitney, just before its Broadway debut on January 19.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

Now that we're in the midst of awards season, how does the response to Moonlight feel to you?

André Holland: It feels great to me, man. This is a story that, obviously, needed to be told and that people have a thirst for. I feel really proud to have been a part of helping to get this story out there. The timing of it all — this movie coming out in this election year — is a great counterpoint to a lot of the ignorance and meanness that we see in the world. At the heart of the story, it's really about love — a love between people — but also about what that costs, and what that does when one is able to find an empathetic place. Kevin [Holland’s character in Moonlight] grows up to discover that empathy. He’s eventually willing to act on it and to reach out to Trevante's character, and that's where the healing begins. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need more and more examples of healing. We need to learn what it takes to heal.

I've always found that the best black art — so much of our art, in general — deals with that empathy and that healing aspect. Regarding the empathic nature of Moonlight, have you seen a change in the roles you're being offered? Or how black men in general are being represented onscreen?

Holland: It's really hard to say because, unfortunately, I'm only privy to the things that happen to come my way. You hear about other people reading certain scripts or whatnot, but in terms of the stuff that I see and I read, to be honest, I have not yet felt a palpable difference. I do hear a lot of people talking about it, and it does seem to be a conversation that more people are willing to have now, so I'm hopeful that more projects will be made that offer more three-dimensional characters. I want to work with stories that speak accurately to our experience. I hope that the success of Moonlight, of Hidden Figures, of Fences — all these films this year that show these alternate takes — will encourage people to make other films like them. I personally feel a responsibility to not just wait on those things to happen, but to be more active and to create these things. I've been writing, I've hired writers to work on some material, and I've auctioned some books. Basically, I'm also trying to do my part in ushering in this new wave.

You're starring in Jitney on Broadway now. August Wilson has always been someone who accurately represented the black community, and his stories contain conversations we're still having today. Can you walk me through the process of getting involved with Jitney?

Holland: The director Ruben Santiago-Hudson and I did a play two summers ago at Williamstown called Paradise Blue. We had a really great time working together, and he had mentioned that he was trying to get Jitney done on Broadway. About a year later, he called and said, "Finally got it together," and asked me if I'd like to do it. At the time, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to because of scheduling issues. But he and the Manhattan Theatre Club were patient, and my agents were diligent about working it out, so it all kind of fell into place.

I saw Fences recently and it felt so modern and immediate. Wilson’s characters and the issues he talks about in the black community are still really relevant now. We haven't even seen a lot of work that delves into the stuff he was doing in theater. Do you feel the same about Jitney?

Holland: Yeah, it does feel like a modern character to me. I mean, he's a guy who feels like he lives in a country that doesn't fully represent him, and isn't allowing him to fully participate. Even though he's gone and served his country in Vietnam, he comes back and simply wants to buy a house and make a life for himself — that's threatened [by] outside forces each and every time. That very much makes him a modern character. Politically, nowadays, as we know and feel, we are similarly underrepresented and not heard. It definitely feels like this play could have been written tomorrow.

Wilson obviously wrote it long before Obama became president, and during those eight years this might have seemed more like a period piece, but with Trump it seems like it's very relevant again.

Holland: Absolutely. I feel exactly the same way, man. Look at [the political narrative] about the rust belt, and the former factory workers whose jobs have been taken away. But then when you look at these people in Pittsburgh [where Jitney is set], for example, the steel industry really supported — buoyed — that community for a very long time. There are a number of black people who have been affected by the loss of these factory jobs, and we don't hear very much about that. I'm from Birmingham, [which] was also a huge steel town. I've seen U.S. Steel and U.S. Pipe, and Pullman, and these different steel factories go under, and affect people in my community and in my family. But, for some reason, the conversation about it has been about white voters, about white working-class people who feel like they've been underrepresented. I personally feel like black people in this country have contributed so much for so long, and haven't always gotten credit for it. So I agree with you: This political season I was taken aback to hear so much being said about those rust-belt workers, while the black workers who also were depending and relying on those same jobs were, in my opinion, largely ignored. But again, that's why it's so great to see this play right now. It reminds people that there is a whole other swath of people who are going through similar things. This is not just a white American problem, it's something that affects us all. This is an American problem.

Do you think theater offers more of an opportunity for black people to tell their stories? I mean, you've been in two August Wilson plays, you've also done the Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney [whose original script was adapted into Moonlight] ...

Holland: In some ways it does. There are a number of different platforms in theater. Broadway is its own ... [laughs] incredibly complicated thing, but there are a number of off-Broadway theaters that produce the work of new writers. There seems to be more of an opportunity to get work done [there] than there is in film and TV, especially when it comes to reading and workshopping the work of young talent. It takes so long to get a film or television show together, but in theater, you can say, "Hey, I've got this idea, let me get five or six friends together. We're going to put on a reading, invite a hundred people, get some Trader Joe's wine," and before you know it, you've got a little thing going. And at least that way, you get to hear your work out loud. That's one of the reasons that I've chosen to continue living in New York, rather than moving out west, because that community is one that really means a lot to me, and is a relationship that I've fostered for a really long time. It helps me to stay sharp and stay in contact with some of the writers who are coming up. For example, I did a play two summers ago called Paradise Blue. It was written by a woman named Dominique Morisseau, who is a fantastic, fantastic writer, and she's now writing on the show Shameless. I knew her as a playwright, but now she's getting more TV space, and as a result I think we're going to hear even more from her going forward. There's more real estate available for new writers and new talent than there is in film and TV.

Talking about TV a bit, you worked with Steven Soderbergh on The Knick. Dr. Algernon Edwards was one of the best black male characters we've seen on television. How was it working on the show? Will you do more TV?

Holland: I just want to play interesting characters, and I want to work with the best directors I can work with. I always imagined that that would be in film, but the way that things are now, people are working everywhere. So if that ended up being a TV series, then I'm open to that, as long as it's a cinematic experience, not one that's sort of a framed-by-numbers type of show, or a procedural — I'm not really attracted to that kind of stuff. The Knick changed everything for me. Working with Soderbergh was the first time I realized what it’s like to really live with a character, and to do that in the hands of a real filmmaker. It checked all the boxes for me.

If I find great material, or a great character, or a great director that wants to do something on TV, or whether it's in film, or whatever it is, man — as long as it's good, and on the level, I'm open to it. The lesson I learned from The Knick is that everything will come at a time that it's supposed to come, and that it's really up to me to create opportunities for myself. So, has there been a huge rave of things now that Moonlight's come out? No, there hasn't been, but there have been some things that have come along that are interesting. There's one thing that I'm doing in the summer, which they've made me swear to secrecy on, but it's a film and it should be interesting [following this interview, Variety announced that Holland will star in Steve McQueen's Widows with Viola Davis]. I'm hopeful that there'll be more coming, and I'm grateful for everything that has happened. I think it should be an exciting year. I'm hopeful that it will be.

As a black man in Hollywood, and looking at how we're represented in the future, what do you want to see more of and what do you want to see less of?

Holland: Good question. Good question, and it’s one that I don't actually know how to answer. Actually, here's what I want to see: I want to see directors like Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Andrew Dosunmu. What's wonderful about Moonlight is that it really does amplify Barry in a wonderful and very well-deserved way. But at the same time, I hope that we can find a way for that to also shed some light on some other filmmakers who can really use a little bit of a lift right now: people who have stories to tell and just need an opportunity to tell them. I want to see more young filmmakers, and specifically filmmakers who have a unique voice. I wouldn't mind seeing less of the attempt to force-feed people what others think they want, if that makes sense — whatever the formula is that some people seem to operate under, like needing a certain star, or needing a certain thing in order to get a piece made. Moonlight is just a story that these two young guys from Miami wanted to tell, and they did it without any huge, huge stars — obviously Mahershala and Naomie are stars in their own right — but it wasn't about that: It was about telling the story in an ensemble way. I want to see more story and character pieces from a unique perspective.

I've always thought that the best things I want to see, personally, are when you look at the Oscars — and they don't all have to be Oscar-nominated films — and see films like La La Land, Arrival, Nocturnal Animals, and 20th Century Women: films like those that don't have to just have white people in them. And then I see Moonlight as an art film taking up that space, because, you know, normally that story would not be told with black people in it.

Holland: Very well said. I don't know that any other filmmaker ever could've made Moonlight, because it is so unique to the creators' experiences: It is so personal. I guess that's what I'm getting at: things that are singular, stories that are singular, that derive from a strong, strong, strong point of view. Those are the kinds of things that I like to be a part of, and would like to see more of. Because I think it's only really through that specificity that you can get at anything that's even remotely universal.

The III

I. Bangklyn East Harlem

I visited the Guggenheim for the Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers exhibit, and since I haven’t really been to East Harlem since I used to live there over 15 years ago, I stopped at Bangklyn for some Thai. I don’t think I’ve had better Thai in the city. I highly recommend the fried chicken and fried rice.

II. Sombr, I Barely Know Her

I had no idea who this man was when he appeared at the VMAs, but I loved his performance and texted a friend about it only to realize I’d been told to listen to his album by three separate people. At least I’m on board now! I love his slinky, Alex Turner/Julian Casabalancas vibe.

III. Audition

I mentioned how much I love Katie Kitamura’s Audition last week, and now we have a casting announcement for the film adaptation. Lulu Wang is directing Lucy Liu and Charles Melton. Fuck yes.

Ciao,

Ira the Third

Obviously, I love Katseye’s “Milkshake” GAP ad. And I support Kelis getting her streams! BUT we used to educate the masses through GAP commercials. Much like new generations of Americans learned who Burt Bacharach was and witnessed horrific renditions of disco songs on American Idol, the early 2000s were not only as fun to watch as an MTV video, but they were also full of music education.

You could discover the music from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story and Jerome Robbins’ choreography.

You could learn Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity choreography, set to James Clarke’s “Blow Up A-Go-Go!” because it was presumably cheaper than the actual “Rich Man’s Frug” music. Beyoncé would later use Fosse’s choreography in her video for “Get Me Bodied,” which braindead stans on the internet claim is theft instead of homage. Even Robbie Blue, who choreographed Katseye’s GAP ad, threw in some Fosse! “Bob Fosse has always been my biggest inspiration as a choreographer,” Blue told Submission Beauty in 2024.

Movies

Favorite first-time watches: 25th Hour, Brief Encounter, Freakier Friday, The Ice Storm, Life or Something Like It, Misericordia, The Naked Gun, A Place in the Sun, Stranger by the Lake, Querelle, Weapons

Rewatches: D.E.B.S., The Departed, Freaky Friday, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Mission: Impossible II

Skip It: Heart Eyes

I injured my leg this month, so I watched nearly a movie every night (while I wasn’t bingeing The Gilded Age and Andor, two shows I’m now obsessed with). I still managed to make it to theaters to see some new films, of which Weapons is my fave. I loved it, even though I agree with many points in JP Brammer’s review of the film. The gun metaphor was pretty stupid but it was also only one scene, so I just ignored it.

I won’t exactly recommend Life or Something Like It, but I will say that Angelina Jolie gives an Oscar-worthy performance in this mess of a movie, and I miss when we used to stick A-list actors in big-budget rom coms. Real rom-coms, not Materialists.

Criterion had a very random collection this past month, ‘90s Soundtrack Movies: “These films form a must-listen playlist from the era when indie and mainstream cultures converged, allowing genuinely strange and exciting art to flourish on multiplex screens and Walkman headphones alike.” From this collection, I watched Singles and SubUrbia. Both are very of their era, and both films I will never watch again. Directed by Cameron Crowe and Richard Linklater, respectively, they’ve both turned out better versions of these films. For Crowe, Say Anything is a better romance than Singles. Almost Famous is a better time capsule of a specific place and time in music history. For Linklater, Dazed and Confused is a more fun watch, and Everybody Wants Some!! is a masterpiece.

Speaking of directors’ ‘90s endeavors, I watched Ira Sachs’ The Delta. It’s a queer film that I would recommend just for its southern milieu and seeds of the fantastic director Sachs would become.

I thought I was going to be a Bigas Lunas fan after Jamon Jamon, but I watched Golden Balls and was bored out of my mind. It’s a pretty simple story about Javier Bardem playing a womanizing cad who gets a dose of karma at the end. The film lacks a real antagonist for him and anything resembling the electric chemistry he had with Penelope in Jamon Jamon.

I’ve been rereading a lot of Neil LaBute and David Mamet for a play I’m currently writing, which led me to watch In the Company of Men. It would’ve made a better play.

Heart Eyes was my most disappointing watch. Recently added to Netflix, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a Netflix original. It looks like one! It’s a mix of a slasher film and rom-com, and while it gets the gore right, the end reveal makes no sense, and the rom-com part of the film is neither romantic nor comedic. Great concept though. I’d watch a sequel!

Reviews of all these films are on my Letterboxd.

Television

Yes, I’ve finished all of The Gilded Age and the first season of Andor, but the show I’m loving the most right now? Survivor: Australia versus The World. I’m watching via a VPN, though there are other ways to watch online, and no season of Survivor has made me smile this much. This has truly been like watching the Olympics. It has not only iconic Australian players, but the fact that I’m watching Cirie Fields and Parvati Shallow play Survivor together again is nothing short of magical. I’ll have more to say about this once the finale airs on Sunday.

I also have to mention how magical it is watching Rachel Reilly playing Big Brother again. Yes, she’s playing with a bunch of idiots. But also, the fact that she’s surviving with these people who are awful at the game is a miracle. She’s really putting in work in this house, and the Big Brother feeds are the better for it. TWICE she’s avoided being nominated! She didn’t even have to compete in the veto competition to save herself. This feels a lot like Boston Rob running circles around people when he won Survivor.

I watched the new Netflix series Hitmakers from Adam DiVello, creator of The Hills and Selling Sunset. I’m fascinated by music writing camps, where songwriters and producers gather to create songs for big-name artists. But this show relied too much on petty drama instead of the actual songwriting process, so I was kinda bored! I also tried Hulu’s Are You My First?, their virgin dating show. It’s horrible. I lasted one episode. It wants to be 2000s VH1 reality TV, but it’s not mean enough. Also, why is Kaitlyn Bristowe hosting and narrating the show? Recession indicator? I didn’t watch Colton Underwood’s season of The Bachelor, but he is not made for television. He has the charisma of a plank of wood.

Music

This includes the three good songs from Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend. I don’t have many thoughts about the album, which feels like a retread of Short ‘n Sweet. I will say, though, when I saw Carpenter at Coachella, the audience there for “Espresso” and “Feather” were silent (or silenced, actually) during the rest of the songs. She has a lot of albums. And many of them were throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick, like “Looking at Me,” which is a shameless Camila Cabello rip-off. It makes sense that she’d want to rush out a second album that sounds like her last one to give fans a catalogue they’ll actually want to stream. “House Tour” is fun as hell, I need the 12” remix.

I love Khalid’s new song “in plain sight,” his first since he was outed. I did his prior GQ interview, where it felt pretty obvious to me that Khalid was queer, if not gay, but that was none of my business. I’m happy he’s found peace enough to make an album about his journey.

Books

It’s been a slower reading month for me, between all the writing I’ve been doing and the television bingeing. One book I read and absolutely loved was Katie Kitamura’s Audition. I’m excited to read more of her work, and I won’t ruin the twists for anyone who wants to read, so instead I’ll focus on the form of the book. Kitamura has a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium and teaches creative writing at NYU, which is probably why her book feels so excitingly constructed. I’d suggest this book to anyone learning the craft of writing a novel, because the way Kitamura introduces characters and then slips into a flashback to reveal something about them in each chapter was beautifully done. In fact, the first half of the novel takes place in about 24 hours, but feels so much more expansive.

I’m also in the midst of reading Miranda July’s All Fours (finally). I’m alternating between the book and the audiobook. I’m also excited to dive into Baldwin: A Love Story.

I recently got ARCs of Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures and Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us, both of which I’m incredibly excited to read.

Theatre

I saw Can I Be Frank? at SoHo Playhouse, which I mentioned last week.

I also saw two fantastic Shakespeare productions from The Public Theater this past week. Twelfth Night at the newly remodeled Delacorte Theater and Pericles at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. My last Shakespeare in the Park show was coincidentally also Twelfth Night, which starred Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald. It rained during my production. It was amazing. This recent one was just as amazing — Sandra Oh and Lupita Nyong’o, and Peter Dinklage were especially great. But the standout was Daphne Rubin-Vega, who plays lady-in-waiting Maria. The last time I saw Rubin-Vega was in a very bad Tennessee Williams adaptation (I’ve yet to see a really good Williams adaptation in New York, and yes, I’m including Paul Mescal’s Streetcar).

Pericles done as a gospel show with a full choir was astounding. Part of Public Works, it included stars like Alex Newell but also ordinary people who live in all five boroughs of New York. I was mesmerized watching the choir on stage, watching the individual quirks people added to their performances. It made me miss the Baptist church I grew up in. Not enough to go back to church, mind you, but I had a good time.

In case you’re living under a rock, you know that Travis Kelce’s girlfriend (maybe you’ve heard of her) is releasing her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, on October 3. She announced this on Kelce’s podcast, New Heights (which he co-hosts with his brother Jason), which was Taylor Swift’s first-ever podcast appearance. I’m sure it’s already the biggest podcast episode ever in the history of podcasts1, which isn’t going to help the podcast industry. Instead, it’ll just create unrealistic expectations from places like Amazon (which now owns Wondery, which produces New Heights) and create more million-dollar payouts for celebs to host podcasts, who will, in turn, get big celebs on their podcasts. There’s a lot of talk about how traditional media is dead (more on that in a bit), but podcasts are also in a state of flux. Imagine launching a successful new podcast without a celebrity name attached! Imagine interviewing a pop star about anything substantial? Thank god for Popcast, which is doing great work in that regard, but every other podcast tour stop for pop stars is thinly veiled PR. Actors, however, actually love to talk about their craft, so you can expect to still see them pop up on interview shows. They seem to hate the annoying PR shit, unless it’s a late-night show, but those are gonna be replaced by podcasts anyway, aren’t they? But only the thinly veiled PR ones!

Btw, sources tell me that the video portion of Swift’s New Heights appearances went through 20+ rounds of edits before it was approved. Regular podcasts, even the big ones, do not have time for all that.

Throughout the length of their relationship, Kelce has been referred to as a “golden retriever” boyfriend. Far be it from me to defend men, but I wondered if this was a good thing when I first heard it. Apparently so!2 But really, it’s a nice way of calling someone a himbo. A sweet, loyal one, but a himbo nonetheless. Meaning, he’s dumb and kind of illiterate. I pointed this out online the other day, and people rushed to tell me he’s dyslexic. Okay, so is Anderson Cooper, and he can presumably read and write books. I have a feeling we’re infantilizing Kelce more than we would the average man just because his girlfriend is Taylor Swift and everything in her orbit is a-ok! Like her flying on her private jet back and forth from Stockholm to record this album with Max Martin and Shellback during the European leg of her tour. Fuck carbon emissions, am I right? But actually, I’m personally fine with it since that means Jack Antonoff is AntonOFF this latest album, and she’s back working with the producers behind 1989 and the majority of my favorite Swift album, Reputation3.

Apropos of nothing but really fucking good pop music, if you’re a millennial who only listened to Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” circa 1999 and not the entire album, it fucking slaps? Desperately need to hear “Man of the Year” in the club.

Anyway, back to Swift’s man. The podcast episode was fascinating to watch not only because Swift rarely gives interviews, but because watching a power couple of this magnitude give an interview is almost unheard of. Sure, you’ve got Dave Franco and Alison Brie trying desperately to become America’s Sweethearts on their press tour for Together. But they’re running through interviews like the Tomb Raider. Swift and Kelce’s interview is the Pay-Per-View main event.

It was also fascinating to watch for hints at whether Kelce’s golden retriever act is just that: an act. Yes, we’ve seen the tweets from 2010 (classics like: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy”), so we know he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed (now I’ve got Smash Mouth stuck in my brain, not sure why I’m on a 1999 alt rock TRL countdown kick today).

At one point, Swift refers to Folklore as “esoteric” (which, sure, I’d argue The Tortured Poets Department is her most esoteric work, given fan reaction versus general critical consensus) in comparison to The Life of a Showgirl, which is presumably more mainstream pop-oriented4. Kelce interrupts to say, “She’s so hot when she uses big words.” “You know what esoteric means,” Swift responds. “I know, it means for a specific following,” Kelce says. “He knows what that means,” Swift says, speaking to Jason. She then goes on to say that Kelce loves to do an “I don’t know what that word means” thing, but he does know what most big words mean.

So, is it all an act? One might presume that the golden retriever bit is an act, but let’s parse his use of “esoteric.” There’s a possibility he learned the word on his own, but more than likely, Swift explained the word to him. And knowing Swift, if she’s referring to Folklore as esoteric, then this is a talking point she has devised for her promotion of her new album. Which means he probably overheard this at some point, then asked her what it meant. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that Kelce is going out of his way to educate himself in his new relationship, but it does mean he’s at least asking questions when he’s confused. Which is how you become smart anyway, so maybe he is a lot smarter than he appears to be. Swift seems to agree, because she also course-corrects when he acts like “fortuitous” is a big word. More than likely, Kelce is a golden retriever of a boyfriend, but Swift is using the podcast to let people know that he’s actually kinda smart, too. He knows what big words mean, he just pretends not to! In a way, this acknowledges that Kelce is “acting” in his public persona. Most celebrities would shy away from this. But Swift is banking on the fact that it comes across more as self-deprecating than as an act. And besides, everyone knows she’s a showgirl. Why can’t he be a showman?

Further insight into Kelce’s mind appears in the September issue of GQ, which he covers, styled by Law Roach. Interviewed by Sean Manning, this description of Kelce has made the rounds on social media:

Still, the Travis Kelce I spend time with is different from the Travis Kelce I expected. Though no less ebullient, he is more introspective. “That football is shaped funny,” Kelce says with Yogi Berra–like sagacity. “That thing can bounce your way, and it can not bounce your way. There’s a lot of fortune that goes into playing this game.” It’s this slightly philosophical bent that complicates the carefree, club-hopping Midwestern bro persona that has made him so relatable and beloved. “I’m starting to phase out of wanting to be known as the party guy,” says the guy who emcees a namesake music festival in Kansas City that draws 20,000 spectators to see the likes of Diplo and Lil Wayne, the guy whose post-playoff victory routine is a guttural rendition of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).”

But there does seem to be some moderate introspection from Kelce. He worries about partying too much. Or rather, being perceived as partying too much. Which, girl, same! He worries that he let his team down in the Super Bowl because he didn’t practice enough and was busy shooting movies. That’s the real meat of the interview with Kelce, which sadly, we don’t get a lot more of. The interview focuses a lot on his upbringing and the standard “my parents worked hard” stuff that will surely be in his biopic someday. But I didn’t really learn anything about Kelce from the profile. There’s a point when he describes watching Swift perform and says, “I get to be the plus one. I get to go and be that fan. Because I am a fan. I’m a fan of music. I’m a fan of art.” One might expect a follow-up question to be… what kind of music? What kind of art? But Kelce’s interests remain a mystery.

But I will congratulate GQ on landing the interview. In a time when everyone has declared media dead, magazines should exist as collector’s items. And this issue seems like it would be prized memorabilia not just for football fans, but also Swifties. I’m not generally a fan of GQ as a magazine these days (it feels like an inessential part of culture, aside from its Man of the Year party), but it’s at least creating positive buzz for Condé Nast instead of whatever the hell is going on at Vanity Fair right now.

Though… I’m not sure if the cover is something I’d want to put on my wall. It’s far from my favorite Law Roach styling, though I get the idea of attempting swamp glamour with Kelce. Because he lives in Orlando, I guess? He’s from Ohio. He has a condo in Orlando, but I don’t tend to associate Kelce with the swamp. And the article doesn’t delve much into what his life is currently like living in Florida, so the whole MAGA adjacent vibes seem kinda put on? If anything, the styling seems like an attempt to reposition him as more masculine, given the fact that he’s generally seen either as a dumb jock or a pop star’s boyfriend. The dumb jock archetype should be seen as masculine, but pop culture has given us too many Finn Hudsons in Glee types to buy dumb jocks as macho men anymore. They’ve got hearts of gold and untapped emotions.

At one point during the New Heights podcast, in another attempt to prove Kelce’s intelligence, Swift mentions apropos of nothing, “he may not have read Hamlet, but I’ve explained it to him.” To be a himbo, or not to be? That is the question.

Edit: I said the New Heights video went through 30+ rounds of edits, it was 20+ per my source.