In 2020 the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts picked up a one-star review that read "worst aquarium ever." It is a museum about the history of whaling, and it keeps no live whales. Six years later, the museum has printed the line on hoodies, T-shirts, crew necks, and bags, according to Boston 25 News. — Read the rest
On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob poured into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s majority African-American Greenwood district and began setting it ablaze. Families were driven out of their homes at gunpoint as their neighbors looted their belongings and burned their property to the ground. The lucky ones escaped the city with their lives, the less fortunate were rounded up and detained by law enforcement, and scores of men, women, and children were simply gunned down in the street.
Within the space of 48 hours Greenwood, a beacon of prosperity previously nicknamed the Black Wall Street, was wiped from the face of the earth. More than 10,000 black families were left homeless, and the death toll, tallied at 36 in 1921, is now estimated to be upwards of 300.
In all likelihood, most people who tune in to Sunday’s highly anticipated premiere of “Watchmen” (9 p.m. ET, HBO) will have never heard of this bloody, racist massacre that occurred almost a century ago on American soil.
The thought that such a crime could happen at all beggars belief to those of us who cling to the version of the American story that draws the place as heroic and just, where our greatest wrongs are made right. But nearly two weeks ago came the headlines that scientists and forensic anthropologists have begun the process of searching for the mass graves where untold numbers of murdered Tulsans may be buried.
And this is why series creator Damon Lindelof opens his part of the story with a re-enactment of that massacre that includes historically accurate eyewitness details from the thick of the nightmare. The vision of planes swooping down and dropping bombs on the screaming, unarmed citizens below, and the Klan openly hunting them, might appear to be heightened elements tossed in for dramatic effect, just part of the story that differentiates reality from fictionalized alternate history.
Except, according to records, that is actually what occurred. By air and on the ground, American citizens waged war on other American citizens, and made sure the survivors were frightened enough to stop talking about it, thereby keeping this account out of the history books.
The Tulsa massacre is the origin story of Lindelof’s “Watchmen,” an inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987.
In the original series Moore and Gibbons presented an interrogation of our relationship with superheroes and the popular notion of heroism itself with its story of people with purported superhuman abilities emerging between World War II and the 1960s and changing the trajectory of history itself.
In Moore’s and Gibbons’ history, these heroes gave the United States political and military advantage, allowing America to win the war in Vietnam, making it a state in the process, and gain the upper hand during the Cold War.
Within that history, too, are the effects of things that never came to be. Richard Nixon was never forced out of office, and term limits were abolished, allowing him to remain president well into the 1980s. After that, he was replaced by our first celebrity president, Robert Redford. It is against the law for freelance masked vigilantes to operate, and those that remain either work for the government or have gone into retirement.
The looming threat of World War III serves as the backdrop to the A-plot, a story comprised of many smaller tales and plots told from various points of view. But this overarching anxiety pitting the United States against the Soviet Union is annihilated when a gigantic squid reported to be from another dimension drops on Manhattan, immediately killing millions.
Lindelof’s continuation is intimately informed by that game-changing climax, only not in any way that the fly-by comic book consumer might immediately connect. The threat in the “Watchmen” comics mirrors the overriding fear hanging over the Reagan era, which is that of nuclear annihilation. Twenty-seven years later, in the alternate and actual histories of 2019, the all-destructive threat assumes the form of violence driven by white supremacy.
Only in this new “Watchmen,” the cops in Tulsa are the ones wearing masks, yellow face coverings for the uniformed beat cops, and more elaborate, fully immersed get-ups for its detectives. Nominally this protocol allowing the police to remain anonymous was enacted to keep officers safe; only Tulsa’s Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) allows his face to be seen while he is on duty.
In practice, as is quickly evidenced, this inability to be identified allows the cops to operate with near-impunity and intimidate any population it deems a threat – mainly poor whites suspected of making up the ranks of the racist Seventh Kavalry, branded a terrorist organization.
Second in the chain of command is the fearsome cloaked Sister Night, the alter ego of Angela Abar (Regina King), a devoted wife, mother of three, and bakery owner. Angela claims to be retired; a hideaway under her bakery proves otherwise.
And her costume is the sleekest and most intimidating of her band of law-enforcement besides that of her colleague Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), a severe by-the-book soldier whose engulfing reflective mask renders him featureless, and hints at a streak that is equally skeptical and paranoiac.
I suspect each will inspire a few Halloween costumes, maybe and hopefully replacing the popularity of Rorschach’s mask following Zack Snyder’s 2009 theatrical adaptation. In alt-2019, the Rorschach mask is the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry, making it the equivalent of a Klansman’s hood. He’s not around to critique this appropriation of his mantle, but other original characters are, including Doctor Manhattan (referenced but not seen), the former Silk Spectre, who now just goes Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), now the lord of a manor and still very much an arrogant tinkerer.
What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of “Watchmen” provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr. as the mysterious Will Reeves, a figure who seems designed to irritate Angela at first but, owing to his age, is obviously there to give her clues as to how modern-day Tulsa connects to its past.
For all of its fantastical details, elements of “Watchmen” resemble the real 2019 too closely to be thought of as comfortable escapism. But the viewers that it hooks will be as fascinated, inquisitive, and passionate as its haters are rabid. If that isn’t a hallmark of inventive, provocative television, I’m not sure what is.
As I stated earlier, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” is not a divergence from the original story but an extrapolation – and a brutally intelligent one – of the original comic’s theories about our blind trust in authority, our misplaced reliance and trust in power, and even our concept of identity, shared and individual.
And yes, part of this has to do with the title itself, and Lindelof’s signature creative approach. The audience that knows him via “Lost” may have been flummoxed by “The Leftovers” and its insistent, unsettling interpretation of the mystery surrounding grief and loss.
What’s funny is that “Watchmen” is more straightforward than “The Leftovers” but will nevertheless confuse anyone who tunes in expecting a straightforward superhero tale, or even an obvious sequel to the comic.
“Watchmen” is very true to the original mythology – so much, in fact, that at the very least I’d advise reading a few summaries about the comic’s plot before diving into the show. This is because Lindelof intentionally steeps “Watchmen” in history: its own, and ours, and the version that answers the various “what if” questions that hold the potential to tweak the trajectory of an entire culture.
On the page, “Watchmen” liberally toys with the meaning of story and the power of perspective, but it also forces the question of whether the systems and structures we presume to be good or working for us actually are. The HBO series also does this in obvious ways, but makes answering that question more complicated and foggier as the series progresses.
But where Lindelof’s take finds the strongest and more fertile common ground with Moore’s is in the examination of history, and the difference between what actually happened and the so-called official record.
What “Watchmen” posits throughout its story is that history is only as accurate as the honesty in the edit and of the editor. In large part, history is a means of asking a culture to adopt an identity by remembering the past in a prescribed way. At its most aggressive, it demands we accept a particular point of view to the erasure of others that may blemish that perspective – essentially asking an entire nation of people to live in the heads of a select few.
That the series begins with an actual historic account that’s been intentionally kept out of the books is part of the trick, one that dares the viewer to simultaneously believe and distrust everything we see afterward. That’s very much in keeping with 2019, both the version in “Watchmen” and the one we’re living through. After all, if hate can wipe an entire town off the face of the earth in two days, an event that tens of millions never knew about, then why couldn’t squid rain down from the sky?
“Watchmen” premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20.
Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.
But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.
Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.
While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.
He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers.
I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.
Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.
An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.
The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.
Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.
But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.
Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.
The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.
Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.
In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.
In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.
In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.
And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.
In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”
In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.
At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X. As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)
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The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.
Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.
Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.
“I NEED TO SEE THE ODYSSEY IN 70 mm IMAX.” | Universal Pictures/The Odyssey official trailer
In late July, Universal and IMAX extended 70 mm IMAX showings of The Odyssey through mid-September. In New York City, these screenings basically sold out immediately, save for a few seats in the front row.People trekked to AMC Lincoln Square 13 — one of only 25 theaters in the US, 41 in the entire world, that can screen the film in this format — to wait in line to buy tickets in person because the app was constantly crashing. Similarly, September screenings across the countryare still packed.
This phenomenon signals to me that there are a lot of people (Virgos? Oracles?) who have a better grasp of the future, specifically the 30 days between August and September, as well as the concept of an upcoming Wednesday, than I will ever possess.
I also see it as a sign that scarcity is the most powerful social currency of the moment. Like a cup of frozen yogurt people wait hours for or a Trader Joe’s tote that incites a hot frenzy, seeing Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece in its intended format is just the latest and greatest example of how access to something limited or exclusive has become a dominating cultural force.
Why seeing The Odyssey in 70 mm IMAX is an odyssey in itself
Paul Hardart, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business who specializes in the marketing of film and television, sees the demand to see The Odyssey in this specific format as a collision between scarcity, and high value cultural currency. Hardart said that in order to really understand why the movie has become such a phenomenon, you have to understand that there’s a higher bar for going to see a movie in a theater than there used to be.
“Coming out of the pandemic, what has changed — particularly in the movie business and particularly the theatrical movie exhibition experience — is people go to comedies, dramas, and adventure movies less frequently,” Hardart told me. One of the big motivators to get people off the couch and into a multiplex is the promise that the movie will be an experience.
“To get me out of my home, it’s got to be worth it,” Hardart said of the current mentality, adding that The Odyssey is exactly this type of movie. “I want to have an experience and I’m going to go with my friends and you know what, I might pay extra for it. I’m going to go see The Odyssey the way it was intended.” When you’re able to get an 70 mm IMAX ticket, not only do you get to see this great work of art, but you also get to tell everyone you were able to do so despite it being so difficult.
“I saw it in a regular theater and I felt like a loser,” Hardart added. It’s not that the regular, non-70-mm viewing didn’t have great performances, or beautiful cinematography, or any of the factors that contributed to all of the critical adulation that the movie’s received. Hardart thought it was fantastic. But he wanted to see it in the way Nolan intended, in a format that’s only available in 41 rooms in the entire world. This experience-first approach isn’t specific to movies; Hardart is also seeing it happen at concerts, festivals, and any kind of in-demand, exclusive event.
“If you go to the US Open, they have those Honey Deuce drinks; so many people there are taking selfies of themselves drinking these $25 drinks,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re there for tennis. But I think some of them are there to say, ‘I went to the Open, I had the experience, and I drank this bespoke drink, and I want you to like me or respect me or think I’m cool.’”
The dopamine-fueled reason we want things that no one else has
Jared Watson, an assistant professor of marketing at NYU Stern, studies the things people buy to feel cool, and the broader subject of consumer culture at large; he introduced me to a concept called signal theory. In the context of consumer behavior, it’s how we try to communicate to others that we’re hip, or smart, or likable — any trait that might not be immediately observable — through the things we buy and possess. Thanks to social media, our experiences have become as visible and effective as material objects in telegraphing an identity.
“We’re all constantly trying to show people who we are and what we’ve done and the life that we have,” he told Vox. “And scarcity is really gasoline on that fire.”
There’s still massive social currency to be mined.
The more difficult it is to have an experience, the higher its social value. Watson said that humans get much more satisfaction when they’ve experienced or purchased something before everyone else has. Once everyone has access to the thing we’re using to signal, its social value goes down.
This may help explain The Odyssey’s 70 mm IMAX phenomenon. Because there are a limited number of showings, seats, and theaters, it’s going to be a long time before the number of fans who’ve seen it in 70 mm outnumber the people who haven’t, if that day ever comes. There’s still massive social currency to be mined.
There’s also the fact that humans love the anticipation of getting our hands on something, maybe even more than obtaining it, according to Ginger Pennington, an associate professor at Northwestern University. Pennington studies human motivation and consumer psychology.
“The pleasure that you’re feeling is more intense right before you get the thing you’re coveting than when you get or when you actually have it and are able to consume it or use it,” she said, explaining that the positive hit resembles the pleasure some people get from gambling, and is part of what drives shopping addiction.
Essentially, getting to the front of a frozen yogurt line is going to be more satisfying than whatever the frozen yogurt tastes like; nabbing a Trader Joe’s bag is going to make us much happier than stuffing the tote. And perhaps finally getting tickets to The Odyssey will give you more pleasure than actually seeing The Odyssey. Though, to be clear, I do not pretend to know how intensely one can love The Odyssey or Christopher Nolan. I just know I need to see it in 70 mm.
But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.
Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades.
“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play.
Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.
I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The public-private video game alliance that wasn’t
The US federal government has worked on pro-democracy campaigns with video game companies. In 2024, the State Department collaborated with The Global Game Jam, a nonprofit games development organization, on an initiative called Ctrl+Alt+Disinfo to create video games that would raise awareness of the global threat of disinformation.
The results, Osborn writes, featured “some fantastically inventive explorations of how disinformation works, including Medieval Courier (where a cunning messenger fox tweaks messages sent between two courts to sow mayhem), Polar (a game where you manipulate information by playing tarot cards with different propagandizing effects), and My Little Conspiracy (which puts you in the shoes of an early online moderator capable of guiding the conversation online).”
The next year, President Donald Trump began his second term, and Elon Musk’s DOGE began aggressively cutting budgets across the government. Educational video games didn’t make the cut, and the State Department clawed back the money it had already granted the project.
You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?
In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.
Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”
The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them.
What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it.
In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?
The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.
It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.
Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.
Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?
It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically.
Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.
I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.
A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?
I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them.
The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.”
When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”
How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?
You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities.
That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.
I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?
Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds.
This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society.
You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?
I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association.
Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work.
So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”
Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games.
It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent.
Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign.
It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.
For folks who spend the majority of their waking hours contemplating the music of The Beatles — and there are probably vastly more of us than you might think — “Revolver” (released on August 5, 1966, in the United Kingdom) sure checks a lot of boxes. For one thing, the album’s 14 tracks are a tour de force, a masterpiece of inspired songwriting and musicianship. The LP is also a whirlwind of competing genres in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr flex their muscles and prove that they’re at home in virtually any genre.
But when it comes to The Beatles’ unparalleled legacy, “Revolver” finds the bandmates on an unimpeded trajectory towards greatness. Released the previous year, “Rubber Soul” set things into motion — arguably rock’s first cohesive LP. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson later recalled being mesmerized by the album, the first record, to his mind, that didn’t have any filler. Just one study in pop-music mastery after another.
In terms of the album’s reception history, “Revolver” has enjoyed a strange odyssey in the United States. For many critics, it served as the tantalizing appetizer before the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, a dazzling entrée if ever there were one.
And for years, “Sgt. Pepper” reigned supreme, routinely topping “best of” lists as the finest album ever recorded. In the decades since the release of The Beatles’ masterworks on compact disc in 1987, when the group’s American LPs were deleted in favor of their canonical UK counterparts, the “Revolver” album has slowly but surely gained momentum — particularly among Stateside listeners, who had no idea what they’d been missing.
As we celebrate “Revolver”’s 60th anniversary, I have come to see the album as The Beatles’ thrilling turning point — in many ways, a continuation of their virtuosic performances on “Rubber Soul.” George Harrison seemed to agree. In later years, he would describe the records as parts one and two of the same album. In one sense, he was selling himself short: “Revolver” featured three Harrison compositions, a glut of new material that included “Taxman,” “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You.”
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Harrison, of course, was by no means alone. Paul McCartney and John Lennon, too, rose fully to the occasion, reeling off such masterworks as “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” not to mention a bravura single’s release featuring “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” All told, The Beatles and their magisterial producer George Martin loosed 16 amazing new songs into the world in August 1966, an incredible bounty, by any measure.
Ultimately, “Revolver” exists as a weigh-station, of sorts. First, it was the culmination of the most profound demographic growth in the history of entertainment. During their early years, the band appealed to a narrow swathe of teens and young adults. But all of that changed with “Yesterday,” which Martin adorned with a string quartet. Not only did “Yesterday” emerge as a chart-topping American hit, but the groundbreaking song also saw the band growing their demographic to include the highly desirable world of working adults, ages 25-54, who longed for something more sophisticated.
And then there was “Revolver”’s “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine.” In one fell swoop, The Beatles penetrated two more demographics. “Eleanor Rigby” attracted a post-55 audience in droves, while the good-natured storyline and nautical sound effects inherent in “Yellow Submarine” drew children and pre-teens into The Beatles’ camp. Quite suddenly — and scarcely more than two years after their triumphant American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — the group dominated nearly every quadrant of the consumer age range.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) The Beatles’ “Revolver” album cover, designed by artist Klaus Voormann
Yet feats of demography are only part of what “Revolver” bequeathed. The LP served as a runway — or perhaps more accurately, a launching pad — for the more experimental and challenging efforts to follow. There they are, in quick succession: “Sgt. Pepper,” “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967), “The White Album” (1968), the “Get Back” project (1969, released the following year as the “Let It Be” album), and “Abbey Road” (1969).
And then they were gone, leaving a sense of wonder and mystique in their wake that remains unparalleled in the annals of popular music — perhaps even for the whole of Western art. But first, there was “Revolver” — a glittering array of musical chestnuts that we’re only just beginning to appreciate.
This year’s “Everything Fab Four” Fest, taking place November 5-8 at Monmouth University in New Jersey in conjunction with the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, will be a celebration of the 60th anniversary of “Revolver.” Please watch for more details and ticket information soon.
Even if you scorn Boomer myth-making, the 50th anniversary of “Revolver” — perhaps the Beatles’ best album — is a big deal. It not only sent the band in a new direction, it showed new possibilities in rock music. Look at the state of rock music in the 21st century — when so much of popular music is about artfully recycling existing tropes and styles — and it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. But the album was groundbreaking for a bunch of reasons, and it’s aged better than almost any of the great records of the era.
One way that “Revolver” immediately stood out was its eclecticism. The album that preceded it, “Rubber Soul,” saw the band mostly in acoustic-folkie mode, and the one that followed it, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was mostly expansive, psychedelic, and orchestrated. Both are masterpieces. (The hype around “Sgt. Pepper’s” has led some to dismiss it, but go listen to it sometime — even overlooking the backstory and concept-album pretensions, it’s packed full of good tunes.) But “Revolver” shows a complex band stretching all over the place: Between an Indian tune, chamber pop, acid-influenced psychedelia, muscular rockers, and everything in between, the album is so wide-ranging that, with the inclusion of one more genre, it would probably not have held together.
Part of the reason “Revolver” worked so well was that the on-again, off-again battle between the band’s three songwriters has reached a point of productive detente. The Beatles had begun as John Lennon’s band, and would soon become Paul McCartney’s: Drugs and indifference and general orneriness would take Lennon far away from the collaboration that a rock group needs. McCartney’s curiosity and squareness — his avoidance of hard drugs, his interest in contemporary art and experimental music, his earnest band diplomacy — was making him more sophisticated and essential with each album. But both were still at the top of their game and working together at least some of the time.
The emergence of George Harrison completed the perfect chemistry: Frustrated over the years by being pushed aside, the guitarist saw three of his songs — the opener, “Taxman,” the Indian “Love You To,” the moderately dissonant “I Want to Tell You” — sneak onto the album.
Throw in Lennon’s rocking “And Your Bird Can Sing” and his psychedelic breakthrough “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and McCartney’s “For No One” and “Eleanor Rigby,” and you have a collection of timeless songs even with an entire side to go.
As lively and inventive as the early Beatles albums were, “Revolver” is also the one that saw them unleashed in the studio. Abbey Road was quite primitive by the standards of our day, and less sophisticated than studios in California. But producer George Martin and Geoff Emerick went out of their way to make instruments sound uncanny, to allow Lennon to indulge strange ideas (a microphone, wrapped in a condom, submerged in water), to incorporate tape loops and unorthodox instruments into the sound.
“Revolver” was so sonically advanced, in fact, that the band stopped playing live around the time of its recording: They saw no way to play its songs outside the studio. In some ways, the process deepened an insularity that would hurt the band creatively and personally.
“Revolver” isn’t perfect. McCartney’s chipper “Good Day Sunshine” and his Motown-inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life” are not among the band’s best music: They’re musically derivative and emotionally forced. Despite its charm, “Yellow Submarine” may not quite fit on the album. “Revolver” would be too grim and brooding with all three of these numbers removed, but they tear its fabric a little bit.
But it’s still a wonder. Part of what’s odd about “Revolver” is that its eclecticism and psychedelia didn’t last long. Music and culture was changing so fast in the ’60s: Bob Dylan released the forward looking “Blonde on Blonde” the same year, and the Rolling Stones briefly dabbled in psychedelia. But by 1968 and ’69, musicians were turning back from the restlessness of “Revolver.” The Stones were in retro-country mode, as was Dylan. Between The Band and Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, many of the most talented musicians were looking backward. By 1970, Jimi Hendrix — who seemed the most likely to extend the Beatles’ experimentation — was dead.
It’s also safe to say that “Revolver” was the album that kids who grew up in the’70s and ’80s grew into, once their pre-pubescent fascination with earlier, less-challenging Beatles albums wore off. It was the record they were listening to as teens, and it was the one that, possibly more than any other album, was a touchstone for the indie-rock movement of the ’90s. (Just try to imagine the Stone Roses or Oasis or Pavement or Radiohead without it.)
The Beatles experienced a backlash in the United States just before the release of “Revolver” because of Lennon’s remark that the band was “more popular than Jesus now.” More popular or not, as great as their earlier work had been, it was “Revolver” that made them deities.
Throughout July, The Swell celebrated the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.
While I would never deign to speak for all critics — I’ve been around enough to know I don’t need that smoke — we’re not generally fans of inscrutability. A little layered mystery is just fine. Many of us appreciate artistic execution that leaves plenty of openings for wild interpretations. But once we’re venturing into the territory of “What in the hell was that?” the knives tend to come out.
That’s part of the reason I left “Howl’s Moving Castle,” adapted from British author Diana Wynne Jones’ novel, for the last flight in our monthlong look at Hayao Miyazaki. The plots of “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” are as lucid and pure as spring water, relatively speaking. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” on the other hand, is an unconventional love story wrapped inside an anti-war plot about a prince who gave his heart to a demon and a young girl turned into an old woman by a jealous witch. It’s also about curses and a giant house that moves around on chicken legs and a turnip-headed scarecrow and pollution and . . . see what I mean?
It’s nice to know I was never alone in my befuddlement. “There’s much to admire in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ which is precisely the problem,” remarked film critic Stephanie Zacharek in her 2005 review for Salon. “Its whimsical grandiosity practically invites us to use the passive voice, a kind of verbal genuflection.”
“Howl’s” champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.
The benefit of returning to a story like this 20 years after a first viewing is that presumably, time has softened us. For “Howl’s Moving Castle,” that matters since its heroine, Sophie Hatter (initially voiced in the English dubbed version by Emily Mortimer), spends much of the film waxing and waning between young and elderly selves. When she’s youthful, Sophie catches the eye of a handsome, richly dressed stranger who gallantly escorts her away from two men harassing her on the street. He introduces himself as Howl (Christian Bale), a flamboyant wizard who whisks her across rooftops on her way home.
But Sophie, an introverted milliner, never asked for anyone’s attention and is convinced she’s plain and unattractive. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) echoes her insecurities back at her when she strides into Sophie’s shop, insults her, and with a wave of her hand, transforms Sophie into a hunched-over dowager (with Jean Simmons taking over the role).
I could easily hail “Howl’s Moving Castle” as a tribute to maturity, especially when placed against other Miyazaki stories starring young heroines setting out on adventures. That feel especially valid at a time when we have plenty of shoppable salves to soothe midlife crisis ego death in whatever forms that it takes. (I have no idea what the Turnip Scarecrow’s significance is in all this, other than to be this fairy tale’s frog prince.)
But when viewed in one way of many, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is an encouragement to look inward and see the truth about ourselves honestly and kindly. Most of us aren’t the same person on the inside as we seem to be on the outside — including Sophie, a woman in the early bloom of her life whose dedication to work has shriveled her vitality.
Trapping Sophie in a crone’s body and making her realize how much harder it is to cross rolling hills and climb stairs gives her a new appreciation for everything she’s been taking for granted. But more than this, as an old woman Sophie abandons her insecurities about taking up space in the world — especially when she crosses paths with the Witch of the Waste again, and a more powerful wizard’s magic deflates said Witch into an enfeebled pile of skin.
Instead of taking pleasure in the Witch’s undoing, Sophie tenderly cares for her. She understands what it’s like to be unloved and ignored more than most, after all. Eventually, Sophie’s demonstrated empathy makes Howl fall more deeply in love with her.
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That’s one strand in this tale’s tangle. When following “Howl’s Moving Castle” as the story of Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal), the fire demon who holds Howl’s heart and fuels the castle, the movie becomes a fable about nurturing and destruction as two sides of the same coin. When Howl loses himself to a beastly form after attacking opposing forces in the war into which he’s drawn, it’s an allegory about how armed conflict robs us of our humanity. Its complexity makes the movie a treasure.
Ultimately, though, this vision of Miyazaki’s comes down to a lesson about the chameleonic nature of the human heart and soul, how we change to adapt to every situation and interaction, and how the those who love us must love every version. It champions the bravery of embracing maturity with a young heart.
But that’s just my take. Zacharek accurately referred to Miyazaki’s narratives as “wriggly, noodle-shaped things,” and not in offering her compliments to the chef. I get it. I’ve also come to understand that some of Miyazaki’s offerings are tastes worth acquiring through a few tries, even for skeptics. His filmography is as vast and varied as this bizarre castle’s meanderings, with life lessons for anyone.
For a time, John F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the most famous boys in America. He was three years old when a photographer captured him saluting his father’s casket, and for many years, that was how most of America pictured him. Until the 1990s, that is, when relentless tabloid coverage reinvented him as New York City’s Adonis.
“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” which stars newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn, hangs its justification on that faint memory and his Cinderella-style courtship with Bessette. Next to exes like Madonna and Daryl Hannah, she was a commoner, a Calvin Klein stylist who somehow snared the heart of an American prince.
After a courtship that unfurled in fits and starts, they married in 1996. Three years later, they died together in a plane crash. Given that these details are the extent of what most people know about the couple, one assumes “Love Story” has so much more to give.
Since this is another Ryan Murphy product — this one created by Connor Hines — we should not be surprised to discover that most of the blanks are filled in with squabbling, private anguish and stretches of scenery that could double as feature-length ads for a designer perfume. CK One, perhaps?
As long as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. retains his starring role in the current administration, “Love Story” won’t be the worst thing to happen to the Kennedy clan or America. This first installment of Murphy’s latest anthology franchise is a serviceable romance in a time when such stories rarely receive even modest studio budgets, let alone wide theatrical release. Remember those? Some were better than others; a few defined for a generation what true love could look like, albeit inaccurately.
But this one stretches a basic courtship that could be covered in about 90 minutes, tops, over nine episodes and a total runtime landing between seven and eight hours. In comparison, “Ghost,” one of the genre’s standard-bearers, got it done in two hours and seven minutes. And neither of those characters is a Kennedy.
However, the “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, played here by “Feud” star Naomi Watts. It’s O.J. Simpson.
Ten years ago this month, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” became the first and still best entry of a Murphy-produced franchise to seriously engage with the anesthetizing myth Americans like to tell themselves about themselves.
Recreating the theatricality of Simpson’s eight-month-long murder trial using extremely famous actors as bait — John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Schwimmer and Courtney B. Vance, among them — persuaded us to sit with one of the most famous and broadly televised examples of the unresolved racism baked into our supposedly liberal society.
That it came to TV more than two decades afterward aided in our understanding of the phenomenon less as a murder trial than an unscripted soap opera playing out in front of our eyes, casting otherwise anonymous prosecutors Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark as either heroes or villains.
Some people wanted to see Simpson punished, while others viewed his acquittal as vindication, however meager, for decades’ worth of societal abuse. Either way, the limited series catapulted the careers of Sterling K. Brown, who played Darden, and Sarah Paulson, already a repeat Murphy trouper via “American Horror Story,” to stratospheric heights thanks to their Emmy-winning performances.
(FX) Paul Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in “Love Story”
The “Love Story” forebear that matters most in this discussion is not John F. Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It’s O.J. Simpson.
It also proved Murphy’s glossy approach could coax viewers into considerate contemplation about systemic ills by wrapping them in celebrity skin.
But eventually, style overwhelmed substance. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” tried to examine institutionalized homophobia by following the trails of missed opportunities to halt Andrew Cunanan’s escalating malevolence until he appeared on the fashion designer’s doorstep with a loaded gun in 1997. Only this time, its star power (by way of a cast toplined by Oscar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin) distracted from the narrative critique.
“Impeachment” was a step-by-step drill-down on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that strayed wildly from its original intent. Murphy meant this third “American Crime Story” to be a clear-eyed analysis of abusive power differentials in politics and the workplace. Instead, its parade of latex prosthetics and wigs pulled the spotlight, especially the Linda Tripp fat suit that wore Paulson instead of the other way around.
Murphy had better success in creating a more obvious political parable with the “Cult” season of “American Horror Story” in 2017. But in matters of conversation-shifting achievement, “Pose” represents his post-O.J. apex.
Not only was “Pose” a celebratory masterpiece told from the perspective of trans and queer people at the center of the 1980s ballroom scene, but it also provided a keenly intimate view of life on the margins during the AIDS epidemic while never forgetting its dedication to beauty and joy.
Many of these high-profile attempts to foster serious conversation through art drowned it in vanity. Think of “Ratched,” the pretty and pointless “Halston” and his recent ludicrous, gorgeous disaster “All’s Fair.” (As for “The Beauty,” the jury’s still out on its lasting effects.) Others are frustratingly inconsistent — “Feud: Bette and Joan” wasn’t perfect, but Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon’s work boosted its excellence more than the superstar cast of “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” could for that project.
Great performances hide within even the worst of Murphy’s shows, nevertheless. Murphy gave Niecy Nash-Betts enough space and material in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” for her to deliver an award-winning performance that muscled to the fore.
Watts’ take on Jackie O doesn’t hit such heights, but the actor does, in some scenes, achieve a gracious splendor that does justice to her subject’s memory.
And this returns us to “Love Story.” If Murphy’s work can be divided between pulp like “American Horror Story” and prestige, “John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” aspires to the latter.
Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain.
Regardless of how promising the conceit may seem — it’s based on a book titled “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” after all — this is American history for fashion influencers. There isn’t much holding it together, but the looks are on point. Kelly closely resembles JFK Jr., while Pidgeon has Bessette’s fragile, elven bearing. Both photograph well.
But the story reminds me less of any supposed fairy tale than the memory that Murphy once intended to devote a limited series treatment to Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Wales’ bad romance under his “Feud” umbrella. “The Crown” beat him to it, so we got “Capote vs. The Swans” along with its greatest accomplishment: Bowen Yang’s Truman Capote impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.”
Theoretically, the romantic journey of JFK Jr. and Bessette should hold an equivalent pull on us as Charles and Di once did. JKF Jr. was the scion of American political royalty, and Bessette was the commoner who won his heart by side-eyeing his fame. But when two of her Calvin Klein coworkers gush, “You’re going to be the American people’s princess!” my inner narrator countered, “No. Not so much.”
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The difference between what Charles and Diana — or Diana, specifically — meant to the world and the legacy that JFK Jr. left behind is vaster than the span of ocean between Britain and New York. Prince Charles is now England’s king, and Diana devoted herself to a life of service that helped her triumph in the international court of opinion before her untimely death.
America’s “royal” couple didn’t live long enough to make such a definitive mark. The iconic president’s son failed the New York bar exam twice and co-founded George magazine, a glossy devoted to waltzing at the intersection of politics and popular people.
Bessette was lovely and statuesque. For the public’s purposes, she was a cipher onto which we were urged to project our romantic fantasies. Beyond that, the main point of similarity between Bessette and Diana is that the paparazzi hounded both – Diana to death, and Bessette to resentful exhaustion. Is there an urgent lesson in their story for us to ponder? Not really, but even lacking that, the series fails its obligation to entertain. Watts’ Jackie delivers a moving speech or two about what families like the Kennedys owe to the public, but beyond that, the only turn that took me by surprise within the first two episodes is the unexpected death of a pet.
Every producer wants to achieve ubiquity, and Murphy is one of the few that’s done it. But while his influence has certainly grown mightier over the decade since “The People v. O.J. Simpson” conquered the 2016 TV season, the quality and memorability of most of his work since has fallen. This does not mean he isn’t still a reliable viewership magnet; he’s one of the few auteurs whose work commands conversation regardless of its quality. But to paraphrase Norma Desmond, it’s his ambition to say something meaningful that’s gotten small.
“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” premieres with three episodes at 9 p.m. ET/ 6 p.m. PT Thursday, Feb. 12 on FX, Hulu and Disney+.
For a good portion of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” we watch all versions of the film’s namesake arachnid-juiced hero (Tom Holland) — full leotard, half leotard, sans leotard —cyberstalking Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya), his best friend and love interest, respectively, who now have no memory of him at all since the last time Spidey put them both in harm’s way, in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
Romantic threads are a standard given annoyance in these films, put in so there’s something for everyone, to advance the plot when there is no more plot to be had, and to give me the opportunity to jump into the debate of: “They’re just men when they’re not saving the world, they should be allowed to date” with an emphatic: No they shouldn’t!
If you’re new to the Spider-verse, or you’ve forgotten the details of what took place in “No Way Home,” Spider-Man called upon Doctor Strange to wipe the memories of MJ, Ned and the rest of the world during a tear in the multiverse in which Peter Parker’s identity was made known, which was obviously bad news for him and everyone around him. Shortly before this spell is cast, Parker makes a promise to MJ that once things stabilize and there’s no longer the threat of a dimensional collapse, he’ll find her and make her remember not only who he is, but that she’s in love with him. At the end of the film, we see Parker pay a visit to a donut shop MJ is working at and make the choice to leave her be, rather than tip her for his coffee and cruller by backflipping onto the counter and throwing a posterboard with “YOU LOVE ME” written on it in her face.
But flash forward just short of five years, and here he comes again, putting the woman he claims to love in harm’s way just as she’s gotten settled into a relatively danger-free life without him, newly graduated from MIT and nuzzled up with a boyfriend who, while considerably less exciting, will almost definitely not get her killed.
(Sony Pictures) Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”
What is the plot of “Brand New Day?” You may be asking yourself this regardless of whether you’ve already seen the film or not. Well, given the amount of Marvel Cinematic Universe hooey thrown into this thing . . . what isn’t the plot? But don’t worry, amidst all of the flippin’ and swingin’ and jizzy web-shootin ‘, MJ and other women characters such as a movie-saving Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) and Black Widow (Florence Pugh) are given a few lines so that, regardless of what’s going on, men in the audience will receive flashes of someone to fantasize about saving or showing their pepperoni nipples to.
Sometimes the best way to love someone is by leaving them the hell alone.
The fact that superhero movies always cram in a love story element is both annoying and ridiculous, but it makes sense. Big-budget films of the “Superman,” “Batman,” “Spider-Man” variety need to make sure they turn a profit by getting butts in seats, and that means layering on whatever (and however) they’ve determined each and every one of those butts will be expecting to see in order to make it seem worth tapping their cards for the price of admission and concessions. Romantic threads are a standard given annoyance in these films, put in so there’s something for everyone, to advance the plot when there is no more plot to be had, and to give me the opportunity to jump into the debate of: “They’re just men when they’re not saving the world, they should be allowed to date” with an emphatic: No they shouldn’t!
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Batman has a crush on someone? Cool! She’s probably gonna die. Superman has been in love with Lois Lane for years? Awesome, she’s never gonna be safe again because every one of his enemies is going to try and throw her off a building. Spider-Man finds time to haunt MJ’s Instagram stories amidst all manner of chaos breaking out in the streets of New York and beyond? Well, sure, let’s just do whatever, at this point. Just like the average moviegoer likes to chuck some Reese’s Pieces in their tub of popcorn to get that salty and sweet action going, most people like for their eyeballs to get breaks from the stomach kicking and face punching by watching implied or actual grab-ass. We’re a simple species. And that’s OK. Still ridiculous though.
(Sony Pictures) Zendaya and Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”
In “Brand New Day,” as Spider-Man is dealing with his genes mutating in a way that increases his powers, gives him migraines and makes it so that he no longer needs the use of synthetic webs because real (real gross) ones now shoot from his wrists, there’s so much else going on in this still, somehow, pretty boring movie.
Extras are flash-mobbing in the background as Jean Grey telepathically hops from body to body to do a mixed-bag of whatever she wants: infiltrate the Department of Damage Control, mess with Spider-Man, look for her sister who’s dead. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is grunting and groaning around, helping Spidey and providing elbow-jab opportunities for guys in the audience to turn to their dates and loudly whisper: That’s me. Black Widow is holding meetings in a Russian bath. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) is like, “Did I kill anyone?” And where’s Spider-Man? Putting flowers on Aunt May’s grave each day and pouting when MJ is finally like “Thanks for saying you love me . . . I don’t know you.”
How about this? Maybe in the next Spider-Man movie, and every superhero movie to follow, we put to rest this shoehorned lovey-dovey nonsense and leave viewers with the big takeaway that sometimes the best way to love someone is by leaving them the hell alone and that, in certain circumstances — especially if you’re tasked with saving the world on a daily basis — your job actually is more important.
An Australian library has welcomed home a book roughly 150 years overdue after it was discovered inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace.
Ross Simmons found the water-damaged copy of “The Antiquities of Athens” while renovating a house in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney. The book was published in 1858 and carries the number 506, placing it among the roughly 1,000 volumes held when the Kiama Library opened in 1872.
Simmons believes the book may have been borrowed by his great-great-grandfather, John Simmons, who owned the house when the library first opened. The library’s original borrowing records have been lost, however, leaving the identity of the delinquent reader — and the reason the book was sealed inside a fireplace — a mystery.
Had the library applied the overdue rate printed in the volume, the theoretical fine would have reached approximately 28,000 Australian dollars, or about $19,500 in U.S. currency. Fortunately for the Simmons family, the library no longer charges late fees and has no intention of pursuing a 19th-century borrower’s descendants.
The old lending rules discovered with the book offered another glimpse into library life during the 1870s. A household needed at least three people capable of reading before borrowing, and patrons were prohibited from collecting a book while intoxicated.
Despite some water damage, the volume survived its century and a half inside the fireplace and has now been added to the library’s local history collection.
It will not, however, be returning to circulation.
“We’re not going to allow it to go back out again,” library manager Michelle Hudson said, joking that staff did not want to wait another 150 years for its next return.
The discovery gives Kiama Library an unusually complete local mystery: an unidentified borrower, a hidden fireplace, a theoretical five-figure fine and, after approximately a century and a half, a very late happy ending.
Allow me to sing, o Muse, of a recent dinner conversation about “The Odyssey.” The setting was not a Greek restaurant but a Vietnamese joint. My friend Sharon and I had just settled at our table and ordered our dinner and drinks when she steered our conversation toward Christopher Nolan’s latest opus.
Have I seen it? she asked. Of course. What did I think? It was fine, I said. A little too long, definitely overhyped. I think I described it as Nolan’s baroque reward for “Oppenheimer.”
Then, like Odysseus himself, she aimed at her main target of derision: Matt Damon. What on Earth possessed Nolan, a notoriously detail-oriented director, to tap the all-purpose flour of movie stars to portray one of the most storied heroes in literature?
“What, was Leo not available?” she asked, as if petitioning the gods. But divine entities stopped intervening in man’s affairs long ago; besides, I had the answer drawn and nocked since I’d walked out of the theater days before.
Why not Leo? Because nobody would believe Leonardo DiCaprio could string that bow.
I can only imagine that at this point, restaurant waitstaffs across the world have picked up crumbs and slices of chatter about Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old blockbuster. Nolan’s work is designed to bring out everyone’s inner critic and professor, but his execution of “The Odyssey” tosses us plenty of bones to pick.
By now the distinctiveness of Nolan’s cinematic ruminations is common knowledge. Whether we’re talking about “Oppenheimer,” “Interstellar” or his “Batman” trilogy, Nolan is a seasoned explorer in the realm of man’s hubris and its relationship with personal history, time and memory, especially the selective variety, among many touchstones. The nonlinear nature of Homer’s epic poem lends itself to his style.
But perhaps the least appreciated aspect of Nolan’s approach is his conscious use of modern celebrities in his version of one of the earliest stories to question the human compulsion to reach for fabled immortality at the cost of the people beside us. In essence, Nolan chose a superstar cast to drive home the interpretation of Homer’s saga as a legend about fame.
Spinning that lore for a modern audience, then, calls for fronting the cast with a star whose popular persona is outsized compared to his dramatic proficiency. Damon is the simplest and most reliable vehicle to tell us about a complicated man, as the highly lauded translator Emily Wilson describes Odysseus.
By this, I don’t mean to call Damon a bad actor. I’m just saying that his “Odyssey” performance is workmanlike. Wilson, for her part, walked away from the film with an impression of Nolan’s efforts that makes a person picture the Muse Calliope whispering in her ear, “Drag him.” Thus inspired, she wrote a long and brutal essay for the London Review of Books.
Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because.
In my view, though, if the idea is to position Odysseus as an everyman hero swept up in a maelstrom of ordeals too vast for him to conquer, Damon was always going to be Nolan’s guy.
Which brings us back to the hero’s mythical recurve. Odysseus’ bow is an extension of his valorous identity. It is his Excalibur, his Andúril, the vaunted weapon only he can string and use to hit a bullseye through a row of twelve crossed axes. The fact that none of Penelope’s suitors could do that marked them as unfit to take his place as Ithaca’s king.
And while my friend made very good points about Hollywood personal trainers and physics and how, through creatine, all things are possible, the simple fact is that we’re more likely to buy that the man synonymous with Jason Bourne would be the only one who can bend that buster, string it, and make it sing.
It might seem strange to look this deeply into the why of Matt Damon as Odysseus, since his casting didn’t agitate right-wing trolls. The MAGA crowd whined early and loudly when the trades announced Lupita Nyong’o’s selection to play Helen of Troy, a fuss only slightly outdone by the news of Elliot Page’s casting as a Greek soldier named Sinon. When the rumor mills incorrectly assumed Page was playing Achilles, heads exploded.
But Nyong’o’s Helen, admirably performed though it was, contained few of the metatextual implications of Nolan’s other casting choices.
Tapping Travis Scott to play the Bard singing the tales of Odysseus’ exploits, for example, doesn’t merely reframe the role of ancient storytellers and poets as that age’s rappers. Scott is a 10-time Grammy nominee whose ability to combine spectacle with his lyrical craft has gained him a significantly passionate following. He is a brand unto himself and a sought-after corporate ambassador. If a queen like Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) desired to send a message to her unworthy suitors about their inadequacy, she’d choose a rhapsodist with that kind of pull who also blends in with a boisterous crowd.
Then we have Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, whom Odysseus follows to Troy and, ultimately, his cursed fate. Placing famous directors in front of the camera is a classic auteur filmmaker flourish, and Safdie is both an actor and a director mainly associated with indie films.
Notably, unlike Damon’s Odysseus, Safdie’s Agamemnon is not jacked. But his intimidating onyx armor obscures all that, much in the way Darth Vader’s helmet and cloak overcompensate for his shriveled form. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face for most of the movie until the end, when his wife and Helen’s twin Clytemnestra (also Nyong’o) murders him in the bathtub as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Only then do we see this dark colossus for the slight creature he always was.
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Admittedly, that’s a lot more flexible interpretation than the obvious reasoning behind Damon’s selection. Yes, Nolan has worked with some of the most distinguished actors of our time, including Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy and Leo.
But when reading the famous opener of one longstanding translation — “Speak, memory, of the cunning hero/The wanderer, blown off course time and again” — few broadly popular A-list actors besides Damon live up to that picture.
Damon’s Odysseus captures all the heroic arrogance, bravery and selfish stupidity of an action-flick brawler who would shoot a giant cyclops in the eye as he’s making his escape, just because. Moves like that make it easy to comprehend that his ill-fated meanders could have been avoided if he’d followed the same directions that got everyone else home sooner.
But really, it all comes back to that bow. Only a true and blustery hero can string it, much as we believe that only Damon can win a knife fight by wielding a pen. And if we’re being honest, DiCaprio may have earned an Oscar for his performance in “The Revenant,” but he does not have the biceps to take on that CGI grizzly.
The trouble with Diarra Brickland is she can’t let things go.
“Diarra From Detroit” presents this as the schoolteacher-turned-detective’s greatest asset and her biggest flaw. If it weren’t for her stubborn insistence on finding out why a great guy, Chris (Shannon Wallace), ghosted her after an incredible first date, she might be happier. Then again, nobody would have noticed that Chris had been kidnapped.
But Diarra’s tendency to fixate on small details and slights eventually cracked the case. They also brought to light a broader conspiracy, starting with the twist that this wasn’t Chris’ first kidnapping.
As Season 2 begins, Chris and Diarra have settled into coupledom, which is precisely what Diarra thought she wanted, but nothing like she pictured it would be. Chris is a mess. Diarra would love to dump him, but her nearest and dearest friends Aja (DomiNque Perry) and Tea (Bryan Terrell Clark) warn her that would damage her reputation. The single bright spot and mixed blessing to come out of all this is that her neighbors see Diarra as the go-to person for fixing lost causes and finding lost people. Hence her latest caper, which begins with a mission to track down a vintage desk and turns on a dime into a heist tied to a cache of gold.
But wait, as our hard-boiled citizen investigator is fond of saying. I should go back. You see, these latest episodes of “Diarra From Detroit,” created by its star, Diarra Kilpatrick, have been cooking for more than two years. Three, if you count the series’ debut at the 2023 Tribeca Festival before its 2024 premiere on BET+. From there, it sat in limbo until Paramount renewed it in 2025.
But limbo is better than canceled, which is more likely to happen if the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery goes through.
Like Diarra and Chris’ relationship status, the case of Paramount’s proposed marriage to Warner Bros. is complicated. Hollywood all but accepted that the merger was a done deal until mid-July, when a dozen state attorneys general and along with the Writers Guild of America West and Eastfiled a lawsuit to stop the merger and California U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a restraining order to temporarily halt the proceedings. (Salon’s unionized employees are represented by the WGA East.)
On July 24, Paramount’s legal team agreed to postpone the merger pending the outcome of the states’ antitrust case. That could potentially delay the transaction for more than a year, since the opposing sides can’t agree on when they want the trial to begin. The states would prefer a 2027 start while Paramount wants to kick it off this fall. If the AGs win, Paramount’s inevitable appeal could keep the $110 billion deal backburnered well into late 2027.
The states argue that this merger would leave consumers paying more for less diverse news and entertainment options if finalized.
The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances.
What this means is that as tough as it already was for a TV series created by a Black woman to be picked up by a major platform, it could be nearly impossible in a universe in which Paramount has swallowed HBO, CNN and other prime Warner Bros. channels. Even in a scenario where BET+ still existed — it officially shut down on July 22 — making original stories like “Diarra” requires resources and a level of corporate will that a megacorporation’s smaller brands don’t tend to be afforded. In a contracted media landscape with fewer places to pitch, its odds of landing in front of audiences on a major platform decline even further. And they weren’t all that high to begin with.
Meanwhile, Paramount is urging us to pay no attention to the Ellisonsbehind the curtain. “This merger is lawful, pro-competitive, and will benefit consumers, creators, workers, and the entertainment industry,” a Paramount spokesperson said in a statement.
“All four categories of diversity—ownership, representation, viewpoint, and outlet—are threatened by this merger, reducing the forms of diversity the public depends upon in cinemas, over the airwaves, and across online platforms,” they warn in a recently published paper. Previous findings by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative back this conclusion.
Among those paying attention to The Mystery of the Media Merger, the survival of TV’s Diarra Bricklands is not the top concern. All eyes are on CNN, as Sharon Waxman, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Wrap, explained in a recent New York Times column.
If what’s happening to CBS News under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is a sign of things to come, that’s another assault on our already besieged democracy. A greater one, even, since CNN is a global news brand.
Consider that only days ago, “60 Minutes” announced that former New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat is joining its ranks. Douthat, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy who proposed in a 2018 column that the solution to placating incel violence may be between the legs of hypothetical charitable women who feel sorry for them. Or sexbots.
Corporate media traded insightful journalism for ragebait like this years ago, which is what makes figures like Diarra Brickland and her creator ever more valuable. They’re Black women excelling in roles not often associated with (or awarded to) people of color.
And to specifically bring it back to Douthat’s dubious query, Diarra — either of them — is precisely the kind of woman who puts the lie to fantasies about female submissiveness. Season 2 starts with her realizing she’s probably better off free of her mystery prize.
But for now, Chris and Diarra are in counseling. Part of their unofficial relationship homework involves field missions that spark heated conversations about masculine insecurity and Diarra’s conflicted desires about motherhood.
One topic she’s absolutely clear about, however, is being in control of every aspect of her life — including but not limited to Chris’ access to the part of her body she describes as “the Cadillac of the human anatomy: Gorgeous interior, impeccable design, not to mention the portal for all of humanity.”
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Writing like this ensures that “Diarra From Detroit” remains nimble from start to finish of each episode. That alone isn’t why this show and others like it need to be championed and protected. Television history is littered with the bodies of terrific shows denied more than a few seasons, or even a full order of one.
Citizen detectives like Diarra Brickland, who arranges her messy life around ensuring that the people and prizes typically overlooked or quietly erased by the mainstream keep being seen, are even less common. The continued existence of shows like “Diarra From Detroit” — shows by female, non-white creators about a place and people rarely depicted in the fullness of their humanity on television — is a miracle under normal circumstances. With that in mind, both the show and the merger are cases worth tracking right now and in the months to come, as if the quality of our lives depends on it.
New episodes of “Diarra From Detroit” stream Wednesdays through Sept. 9 on Paramount +.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino looks on after the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on July 19, 2026, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. | Marvin Ibo Guengoer — GES Sportfoto/Getty Images
The 2026 FIFA World Cup wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty great. Legions of fans got to experience the US (and Canada, and Mexico), and Americans embraced visiting teams in turn. There was lots of extremely good football (soccer), and Cinderella teams like Cape Verde had a chance to shine.
Not even two weeks later, though, FIFA president Gianni Infantino is doing his best to kill the good vibes. He has a new proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup to private equity, attempting to capitalize on an enormously profitable tournament — with record revenue of about $15 billion in this year’s edition.
Specifically, his plan would create a new entity to run the World Cup, with FIFA the majority owner. Up to 21 percent of the company would be offered to private shareholders, in a major departure from FIFA’s current, ostensibly non-profit model.
And so far, nearly everyone hates it. Many of FIFA’s 211 member associations are in outright revolt; one of its six regional confederations, UEFA, which represents European football, has threatened to boycott FIFA events if the plan goes forward. “We will never lend this model our legitimacy,” UEFA wrote in a statement released Thursday.
Go a little deeper
UEFA is not the only governing body in football that has condemned Infantino’s plan to bring private money into the World Cup, though it has led the charge. Concacaf — which represents North and Central America, plus the Caribbean — and the Asian Football Confederation have also come out against the idea.
Collectively, they make up nearly two-thirds of FIFA’s member associations, which creates a real math problem for Infantino — the plan would require approval from a majority of FIFA members to take effect.
The intensity of the backlash has raised questions about Infantino’s future. As the Athletic reported on Thursday, he’s up for reelection as FIFA president in March, but he may no longer have an easy time of it. On Friday, FIFA’s chief operating officer described the proposal as “the project of one person” — Infantino — in a statement coming out against it.
For now, though, FIFA and Infantino say they plan to forge ahead with a “consultation period” for the plan. It sets up an even higher-stakes version of the battle over “hydration breaks” — which double as lucrative commercial breaks — that Roger Bennett, founder of the soccer podcast Men in Blazers, described to Vox in June.
“Ultimately,” Bennett told Vox, “the whole game of football is currently in a battle between its roots and the commercial imperative that comes from being as big as it is. … It is the last megaphone which is faintly audible around the world. And when you have something that big, it becomes deeply desirous to make as much money as you can out of it.”
One link for later
➨ Bail on plans the right way. If you’re currently staring down a weekend engagement you’d rather not attend, Vox’s Allie Volpe has some pointers on canceling without injury or offense. For starters, you can only bail on casual events with someone you either know very well or not that well at all. And you should offer an honest excuse before attempting to reschedule.
Before you go…
Did you know…that, until 2016, scientists routinely excluded female mice from medical research? The National Institutes of Health now requires that researchers include both sexes to help guarantee that drugs work safely for both men and women.
Today’s trivia: What’s the Vietnamese word for “festival”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you to identify the “ugli” fruit. Ugli is the registered trademark for the Jamaican tangelo, a natural — and honestly, perfectly good-looking — hybrid that was discovered in the wild in the early 1900s.
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In the Season 3 finale of Bravo‘s “The Valley,” succinctly titled “The Valley of the Damned,” Danny Booko — who does voice work for movies and video games when not reigning as secret-glugger #1 in this Vanderpump-adjacent reality show — takes his maddening schtick one silly voice too far, introducing “Count Bookula.”
While attending a vampire-themed party at castmate Brittany Cartwright’s house, Booko goes to work on making damn sure he ends the season in the cringiest way possible — having spent the previous episodes speaking down to his wife, Nia Sanchez, making women on the show uncomfortable and frat-boy screaming ‘Let’s Go,’ constantly — adapting a pickle-tongued “Bookula” voice upon entry and not dropping it until he gets too drunk to bother and, later, has a plastic cup bonked off his head by Janet Caperna. (And here I will go on record to say: TEAM JANET!)
Roughly 15 years or so, I twice attended an immersive fright house called “Blackout” in New York that was really nothing more than a cheaper way to have a date with a dominatrix. During these occasions, myself and other paying attendees entered a pitch-black warehouse, one by one, and were made to do such things as dance with short naked men, spit in strangers’ hands so another person could slurp it up and be chased until our only option was to fall over the back of a couch. These experiences came to mind while hearing Danny take on a yet-to-be-previously attempted vampire voice as he dodged dirty looks and jettisoned drinkware.
Danny, my love (said in Nia voice), you sucked the most this season, and that’s for sure.
Adeyemi co-wrote the script with director Gina Prince-Bythewood and shared in an Instagram reel posted on Wednesday that she worked on the film “to make it a little better for us to be alive.” She also described the experience as “the worst thing I have ever had to live through.”
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“Even though it feels awful to share this, it’s better to share it and have it known and understood before I see a bunch of you for this new book,” Adeyemi said, referring to her upcoming tour for “The Siren,” which releases in September. “I never want to hear about this project again.”
When authors divorce themselves from film versions of their work, it’s usually a matter of creative disagreement. But Adeyemi describes suffering somatic pain and panic attacks, alleging she is still being antagonized behind the scenes.
To echo what former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said in a Substack post, an “Odyssey”-obsessed moment rife with cultural erasure demands to be countered by popular culture built on the civilizational myths, heroes and heroines of the Black diaspora. “Children of Blood and Bone” is one way of doing that. How unnerving that its creation scarred its creator.
“Children of Blood and Bone” debuts in theaters on Jan. 15, 2027.
These days, there are a million different possible answers to either question. Our culture has confused sex — a relatively uncomplicated, biological thing — with desire, which is an entirely different, much more complex can of worms just waiting to be opened. While the two frequently meet one another on the bed, on the floor or in a back alleyway behind that dive bar on Cherry Street after a few well-tequilas, both of these things are their own animals. It’s act versus thought, performance versus feeling. And yet, sex and desire have become irrevocably intertwined in our modern age, like two sweaty bodies, tangled together, realizing halfway through the deed that they don’t actually have as much in common as they initially thought.
In his first feature film in 12 years, “I Want Your Sex,” veteran counterculture director and perennial cool guy Gregg Araki is looking to have some fun in the technicolor midpoint where sex and desire meet. Sex has played a major role throughout Araki’s filmography, but never in quite such explicit terms as this. His characters — impulsive adolescents and young adults, slicing through their disaffection with sharp bursts of hormonal momentum — typically experience sex as a product of their furious youth. In their eyes, it’s an act of heady rebellion, more in line with the drugs and crime that permeate these underground, nihilistic worlds than it is with true romantic intimacy. So for Araki to dispose of all that to home in on sex itself, rather than building his characters and their worlds around it, there must be a good reason.
(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on how to find real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.
In short: There are plenty. The ’90s-era nihilism that threaded so many of Araki’s films has taken a hard slant toward technological despondency. Many young people act as though life begins and ends with the digital ecosystem. And even if that fact might make you depressed, scrolling will deplete one’s cynicism until it’s replaced by another attention-grabbing post. The simple fact of the matter is that, with so much time spent solitary and online, there’s less time for sex — or even the possibility of it.
And yet, sex (or at least the implication of it) is everywhere. OnlyFans is its own viable economy, with some users raking in millions per year from people who want to live the fantasy through a screen. Manufactured eroticism not only pays the bills but stops the scroll. And, of course, there’s the fact that anyone in the world can access hundreds of terabytes of porn in two measly seconds. It used to be that, if you wanted sex, you had to be forward about it, seek it out to some degree. Now, the proliferation of sex and sexuality has resulted in an ironic prudishness among digital natives, who, as a result of growing up with sex quite literally in the palm of their hands, abstain from intercourse and all the lessons and joy it has to offer. And it’s that reserve that Araki aims at with “I Want Your Sex.”
Yet, for a film with such a bold, George Michael-ripping title, “I Want Your Sex” is curiously unerotic. The characters have sex, sure, but their coitus is so instantly excessive it veers on silly. But that’s also the kind of frisky fun Araki wants his viewers to remember, the outrageous sexual dynamics that are the byproduct of our wildest adventures — exploits that don’t always begin with carnal intentions. By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on finding real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.
And if anyone knows stimulating, it’s hotshot mixed media artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, in her second hoot-and-holler role this summer), who’s made a name for herself in the Los Angeles art scene with a dedication to provocation. Her work is suggestive and boundary-pushing, and she’s exactly the kind of person that neurotic Gen Z art scene sycophant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) would love to work for. After a chemistry-rich interview in her office, Erika hires Elliot on the spot — strange, considering his complete lack of experience and the spate of promising applicants that preceded him in the interview process. But Elliot doesn’t question it. Only later, when he’s tasked with chewing gum to stick onto the outline of a massive portrait of a vulva, does he learn that Erika has a habit of sleeping with her interns.
This piece of gossip soon begins to cloud Elliot’s life and better judgement. His girlfriend, the uptight med student Minerva (Charli xcx, speaking in an accent no one’s ever heard before, with a name no one’s had in 60 years — brilliant), is as cold in the bedroom as she is in the operating room. But Elliot also has no idea how to verbalize his desires. He’s of a generation that overthinks and underperforms. That is, until a wide-ranging chat with Erika in her home results in a proposition: Erika would like to enter into a consensual, primarily physical boss-employee relationship with her inferior, and use their inverse power dynamic to rock Elliot’s world: leashes, S&M, dildos, spanking, the works. But Erika calls the shots. If she says it’s over, it’s over. And there’s nothing like a suspicious, sudden disappearance to pull the plug on a burgeoning sexual connection.
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Araki’s screenplay, written alongside his “Now Apocalypse” series co-writer Karley Sciortino, hops back and forth between the time before Erika’s vanishing and immediately after. Her disappearance is mystifying and arousing — for both Elliot and the police. Elliot is abruptly without his sensual supervisor, and his loss is seismic. Left to his own devices with a new sexual skillset, yet still pining for his boss, Elliot is unsure of how to move forward. And it’s this impasse where Araki fleshes out his clever, if not entirely unique, ideas about the innate limits of the libido.
For as much handwringing as there has been about Gen Z’s attitudes toward sex — and whether they’re having it at all, which is debatable — Araki is careful not to indict the youth. He is, after all, famously still babyfaced at 66, a physical spriteliness mirrored in his bright visual aesthetics and effervescent directorial tone. Araki is very much in touch with what young people enjoy and how they operate. He simply wants more for them. Youth is wasted on the young, after all, and Araki’s mission with “I Want Your Sex” is to make it patently clear that the clock will continue to tick whether they choose to get physical or not. So why not give it a try?
(Magnolia Pictures) Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”
Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves.
Araki posits that it’s fear holding people back; not just the fear of rejection, but a broader fear of the unknown. As much as I hate to parrot the sentiments of irritable older people who grumble about every kid getting a participation trophy, it is true that we live in a world that caters to our fragile egos. Every possible result for any conceivable situation is spelled out for us via a few quick internet searches. In a time when explainers and how-to guides exist for everything, influencers tell you how to dress and what to buy, and making a phone call has become a Herculean task for many, the margin for error has grown so slim it’s invisible. That also means the potential for surprise has dwindled, too. Humans have adopted an aversion to the casual risks that used to be a part of everyday life. Hazarding heartbreak and embarrassment is too dangerous. But the alternative, as Araki suggests, is an utterly boring existence, where, either way, you’ll always wonder “what if?”
(Magnolia Pictures) Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville in “I Want Your Sex”
But just depicting the pleasures of sex wouldn’t be enough to quell all that fear. Members of Gen Z might just fast forward through those scenes anyway, given that they want to see less sex onscreen as it is. Though Erika and Elliot’s intercourse is raucous and sultry, it’s their unpredictable relationship outside of the bedroom that keeps their fire — and the film’s madcap pacing — fueled. Elliot runs around LA doing Erika’s menial tasks until he drops everything at her beck and call. He upends his relationship with Minerva and screws up his best friendship with his roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). And he demolishes his own ego by throwing himself into something wild and capricious headfirst. He’s chasing the spark and expanding his horizons in the process. Great sex is no longer the goal, but rather a nice bonus.
To some, it may feel like Araki is flattening complex social mores and misunderstanding the anxieties behind this era of semi-celibacy. And at times, “I Want Your Sex” does sorely miss the sharp, scrappy bite of Araki’s early films, which had far more to say than his one-track-minded latest. But there’s an amiable flair to the way Araki conveys an old adage in a new way. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey — and if anyone knows this, it’s someone whose youth was spent pursuing sex, art and feeling at risk of mistake and failure. Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves. When we fear the act of sex, we don’t experience the desire that leads up to it. And when we don’t have desire, we don’t truly live.
“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”
Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars.
Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling.
Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B?”
When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.
More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”)
People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility.
The satisfaction of stashing
Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza, said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters.
And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”
Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores. She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”
“If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time.”
Monica Chavez, content creator, House of Esperanza
Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.
While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.
Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later.
Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.
“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science, told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”
Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirloom seeds, it might be time to admit defeat. You don’t need an increasingly crowded shelf of empty jars reminding you of your failure to meal prep or make eye-catching terrariums. In that case, the ultimate container — the recycling bin — can relieve you of this burden.
The impact of reusing jars on the planet
Even though this practice falls under the dictionary definition of “reuse,” is it actually helping the planet? Not particularly. Paul Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies human behavior and public policy, said that this kind of “consumerism-sided decision-making has very little effect on the environment, positively or negatively.”
Ferraro gets the impulse. “These minor decisions make us feel better psychologically,” himself included, he told Vox. But individual choices such as plastic versus glass or paper versus plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way compared to collective changes in how we manage our environment,” he said. It’s not that these decisions are utterly meaningless; more that they’re overall “without significant impact,” he said.
If reusing jars you already have keeps you from buying a slew of Tupperware online, great. But if the hunger to acquire new and better reusable vessels has you ordering glass containers from e-commerce sites and getting them shipped overnight, you might be canceling out any of that good when you account for packaging, emissions, and manufacturing.
Ferraro “would not encourage anybody to waste much time” agonizing over specific decisions like glass versus plastic —“worrying about whether there’s an optimal choice for packaging is misplaced energy.” The calculations that go into it are complicated and very variable, with little to show for it in the end. Glass has higher upfront environmental impacts than plastic, per Ferraro: producing it is energy intensive, and it’s heavier so it costs more to transport. The concern with plastic, meanwhile, is what happens after its disposal — if it’s treated as litter, it’ll break down and leach microplastics into the environment. And your ability to recycle it depends on the recycling practices where you live. “So by and large, the rule of thumb is if I’m going to reuse that glass and it’s going to displace other purchases that I would have made, then the glass can be a better choice,” he says. “But the difference is going to be tiny.”
Of course, it’s much easier to commit to reusing containers than, say, utterly changing the way the United States manufactures products — the latter feels a little above our individual pay grade. But if you want to do your part as an individual to stop climate change, Ferraro says forgoing a cross-country plane ride “would be vastly more impactful on the environment than any of my consumer decisions throughout the whole year,” he said. Ensuring your home is well-insulated is another more effective choice.
So if you’re torturing yourself by holding onto containers you’ll never use for the sake of Mother Earth, release your chains and toss them in the recycling bin. But for many collectors, it’s not about that.
Lynch said that she thinks of the spirit of her grandmother whenever she puts something from her jar collection to good purpose. “Every time I find a new use for something that I have hung onto for a while, I feel vindicated,” she said. “Like, oh, I knew there was a reason I was keeping this.”
Throughout July, The Swell is celebrating the lasting cultural inspiration of animator Hayao Miyazaki and the legendary films he created with Studio Ghibli. As part of GKIDS’ annual Studio Ghibli Fest, which kicked off in June, you can enjoy theatrical re-releases of some of his most famous works.
Writing about culture means thinking about the world in magical terms. Or maybe it’s just me. I frequently struggle to find the right words to describe the elements weaving together the concrete and the conceptual, so I find it simpler to sum up all that as magic. All of us understand magic. Not everyone believes they have the capacity to express it, which is a shame. That’s why I think everybody needs a little “Kiki’s Delivery Service” in their lives.
Out of all of Miyazaki’s movies, “Kiki’s Delivery Service” may be his most timeless. It’s made for young hearts but also has a way of growing up with us, taking on new meaning when viewed at different life stages.
“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is not a Hayao Miyazaki original. He adapted it from Eiko Kadono’s 1985 children’s novel about a half-witch who strikes out on her own to fulfill a tradition established by her kind.
Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.
But “Kiki” holds several themes that recur in Miyazaki’s work. Our titular heroine is only 13 years old when her escapade begins – a little more mature than most of the director’s protagonists, but still innocent enough not to be jaded. Miyazaki’s tales also tend to immerse us in supernatural domains existing parallel to our own, as if reality masks more ethereal, life-affirming realms. Kiki, however, lives in a world that sees magic as part of the natural order, which plunges her into an existential crisis when she loses hers.
To young children, Kiki’s adventure is a simple fantasy about a kid who can fly on her mother’s broom and launches a business with the same enthusiasm that elementary schoolers radiate while running a lemonade stand.
Once Kiki leaves her village with her constant companion Jiji, a talking cat, she sails through the skies, albeit insecurely. She’s uncertain about her flight capabilities, and even less sure of herself when she encounters a more experienced and stuck-up witch who’s around her age, and who brushes her off instead of propping up her confidence.
Eventually Kiki ends up in a bustling seaside city that hasn’t had a witch in its midst in many years. After a rough start, including a run-in with an irritating policeman, she lands at the home of a baker, Osono, who gives her a place to stay in exchange for labor and her delivery services.
Since Kiki’s abilities allow her to defy gravity, she runs packages across town, avoiding auto traffic and pedestrian crowds. Her world looks and operates like ours, and that means there are no free lunches.
Osono’s kindness is part of the fantasy, in that she takes in a strange little girl and lets her live in her extra room without asking many questions. But even when Kiki botches a delivery by dropping a toy mid-air, sending it tumbling into a nearby forest, a bit of reciprocal effort solves the problem. Ursula, the artist who lives there, finds it broken and has Kiki scrub her floors in exchange for repairing it.
I’ve read a few interpretations of the narrative’s emphasis on labor exchange that assume these moments are meant to teach children that labor has value. Maybe. As I see it, Kiki’s willingness to help others conveys a more important teaching about interdependence as an integral part of independence. Her efforts are acts of caring, moving others to do the same for her.
While Kiki’s coming-of-age year as a witch requires her to live on her own, she’s never alone and can’t succeed without other people. That part of the story appeals to the restless adolescent versions of ourselves that can’t wait to find our place in the world.
The third act, however, hits hardest when you’ve lived long enough to lose your mojo and doubt yourself. Kiki meets a boy, Tombo, who is obsessed with flight and, specifically, Kiki’s marvelous ability to fly without the help of a machine. Initially she pushes him away, but Tombo is persistent. Eventually they become friends. And it’s to him that she admits, “Flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living.”
Soon after that, Kiki wakes up to find her magic is absent. She’s expended so much of it on others that she has none left for herself. She can’t even understand Jiji anymore.
(1989 Eiko Kadono/Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, N) A still from “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”
If every Miyazaki movie has a whiff of biographical relevance, one might see “Kiki’s Delivery Service” as his statement of creative purpose and motivation. Who can help a witch who’s lost her flight? A woman who lives alone in a house in the woods, of course – although she’s an artist, not a witch. Ursula’s advice to Kiki is the same as any career coach or mental health professional counseling someone through a crisis of confidence: Stop working so hard, take a walk and look at the world for a while.
“We each need to find our own inspiration, Kiki,” says Ursula. “Sometimes it’s not easy.”
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I can’t think of a person who makes a living from their talent that doesn’t feel that way at some point. We call it burnout. To Miyazaki, Kiki’s depletion is a sign that she’s leaving childhood behind. She regains her ability to fly but is never able to communicate with Jiji again. So maybe she doesn’t quite regain her magic but taps into a new version of it.
Magic is a five-letter word that does so much heavy lifting when it comes to describing the essence of what makes something special. Thinking of it that way makes life sweeter, too. Science can explain the world around us, but magic helps us appreciate the wonder in the atomic arrangement of nature, chance meetings with open-hearted souls and kindness without expectation of anything in return. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” has been telling us that since the very first time we saw it, and in new ways with each repeat viewing.
“Kiki’s Delivery Service” is streaming on HBO Max.
Lenny Kaye is one of rock ’n’ roll’s national treasures. He’s the guy who never has to pay for his drinks in bars from Stockholm to Shanghai, thanks to “Nuggets,” his now-essential compilation of what were obscure garage rock classics that became the foundation of punk rock and a lingua franca for the spirit of DIY. He’s the kind of guy who should have been given a Guggenheim Fellowship because of his galactic range of interests, knowledge and influences and for his input and his contributions to rock ‘n’ roll as an art form.
Lenny was at Patti’s side until she bowed out of public life and rejoined her when she returned — but he’s never sat still.
Kaye was writing about music — for publications like Rock Scene, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone — when the discipline was still nascent. If you read his early writing, which is well worth your time to hunt down (like this review of The Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” in 1972), he brought knowledge and curiosity and genuine enthusiasm; even if he didn’t like something, he still gave it his serious consideration.
It was that exact spirit of inquiry, within an article about the history of the doo-wop revival, that caught the attention of another doo-wop aficionado from South Jersey. She tracked him down and they became friends, hanging out and listening to music. One night, she asked him if he thought he could make a guitar sound like a car crash for an upcoming poetry reading she was doing, and that’s how Kaye joined forces with Patti Smith.
Lenny was at Patti’s side until she bowed out of public life and rejoined her when she returned — but he’s never sat still. Across the years, he put together a band (The Lenny Kaye Connection), accompanied Jim Carroll as he tried to work out his rock ‘n’ roll form, wrote Waylon Jennings’ biography, produced Suzanne Vega’s first two solo albums (among others), has a country and western alter ego, wrote introductions and liner notes and seemingly offered and participated in hundreds of other contributions across the decades. Lenny Kaye was the kind of cool, level-headed rock ‘n’ roll maven who was both important to and part of our history. His openness and curiosity — still, turning 80 later this year! — makes him the music fan’s music fan.
The only thing Lenny Kaye somehow hadn’t done was release a solo record, which he rectified in July of 2026 with the release of “Goin’ Local,” out on Yep Roc on July 17. “Goin’ Local” is a collection of deliberate compositions across a range of styles, whether straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll (the title track), ballads (“This Love,” “Let’s Make A Memory”), folk rock (“The Things You Leave Behind”) and sweet ditties (“World Book Night,” “Pennsylvania Girls”) that might seem light until you find yourself humming them later after only listening to them once. There are bulletproof pop melodies, gentle riffs, solid construction, and engaging stories. And that’s the result of a formidable quantity of skills acquired over half a century immersed in the rock ‘n’ roll trenches, whether as a listener, critic, producer, or active participant.
(Jorgen Angel/Redferns/Getty Images) Patti Smith poses with Lenny Kaye (left) and Richard Sohl (right) from the Patti Smith Group
“Goin’ Local” was assembled both from songs he started 15 years ago with friend and bandmate Tony Shanahan (who has a co-production credit and also plays on half the tracks), and another half dozen that were written over the last few years. “I don’t write a lot of songs,” Kaye told Salon, “I believe a song has to need to be written, if only for one to figure out a situation or to understand the dynamic of a relationship, or something occurs to me that needs framing as if in a picture. So if I write one or two songs a year, I’m happy with that, and I bring them to fruition. But I just continue to sit there with the guitar, and come up with something that is meaningful to me and hopefully, whoever listens.”
Lenny Kaye was the kind of cool, level-headed rock ‘n’ roll maven who was both important to and part of our history. His openness and curiosity — still, turning 80 later this year! — makes him the music fan’s music fan.
The title track is a perfectly crunchy, rock ‘n’ roll number about haunting the East Village’s watering holes and the people you meet (and the challenges of maintaining a cross-borough relationship). Emphasizing the ‘local’ point, the album’s cover is a black-and-white historical photograph from the early 1900s, taken from the New York Public Library’s historical collection, with Kaye imposed into the frame, standing under elevated train tracks. Look closer and you can just make out the street number of the Lyceum Concert Garden (“Follies of the Day!”), which was located on the Bowery at number 302. That’s across the street and about half a block away from where CBGB’s would find itself decades later, and also just happens to be adjacent to another landmark: “If you stand in front of CBGB and look in the 10:00 position, that’s where I lived,” Kaye confirmed.
One of the record’s highlights is a co-write with the musician who stood to Kaye’s right onstage for more than 50 years. “Solstice,” where he shares writing credits with Patti Smith, possesses the same kind of metaphysical shimmer that’s often intrinsic to a Patti Smith composition (think “Ghost Dance” or “Beneath the Southern Cross” to name two other relevant co-writes from the pair). As to how the song ended up on “Goin’ Local,” Kaye said, “As the song developed, Patti thought it certainly suited my new persona,” he told Salon, “and she urged me to sing it. I mean, she could have sung it quite well, but she urged me to take it under my wing and express it. And she felt it appealed to a certain sense of the celestial that I have in my solo persona.”
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Then there’s the delightful “World Book Night,” a song that Kaye performed live via livestream from Electric Lady with Smith during the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, on the anniversary of their first performance together at St. Marks On The Bowery in 1971. “I wrote it originally when there was a kind of strange day set aside called ‘World Book Night.’ Publishers would give books to people and they would spread out all over the city or wherever they were and just hand them out for free, at subway stations or on the beach, and I thought that was a beautiful thing,” Kaye explained. “. . . It’s just my tribute to the written word, how it feels putting those words one after another after another, and the readers out there who find them and find something of themselves within the pages of a book.”
On the note of physical media, there’s “The Things You Leave Behind,” a song that Kaye’s been playing at the occasional solo show for a while now. It’s a wistful, country-folk paean that offers both a wry yet realistic assessment of the disposition of collections someone leaves the planet. “Gonna pick up the pieces and your life and theirs/who gets what and why/we all cart around a whole lot of baggage/that would better be left/by the side of the road/books and records, old clothes and photos. . .” and of course, in Kaye’s case, guitars.
One of the record’s highlights is a co-write with the musician who stood to Kaye’s right onstage for more than 50 years. “Solstice,” where he shares writing credits with Patti Smith, possesses the same kind of metaphysical shimmer that’s often intrinsic to a Patti Smith composition.
Even at 79 — he’ll hit octogenarian status in December — Kaye confesses he hasn’t slowed down as a collector. “I haven’t cut myself off yet, but I’ve been more discerning,” he tells Salon. “That said, I always come home from being on the road with a few well-chosen records and a few well-chosen books that I will read one of these days.”
Does he still have a holy grail?
Kaye laughs. “Absolutely not. At this point my holy grails are things I have yet to discover. I found most of the things I really needed to have, but every once in a while you’re exposed to a new record, and sometimes it’s not that great to just be able to go on eBay and poke the bid. You want to find it. You want to find it in context.”
He’s on a roll now: “The other day I was in the East Village and I went past a store on E. 2nd Street called Ergot and I walked in and they had 12 Umm Kulthum 45s from the ’60s and I just put my money down, came home with them, and they’re all fascinating. I have certain genres that I always check out: I’m particularly into Jamaican gospel now, which is kind of primitive and not reggae, very illuminated, great singers. I’m into Egyptian music too; I really like the music of the Middle East. And of course then there’s the rock band that I’ve never heard of that really needs to be part of my collection.” He pauses. “I always think, like the song, about cleaning it up or at least culling it so I could get all the records off the floor and onto the shelves.”
Kaye was good friends with Tom Verlaine, the late Television guitarist whose epic collections of books are still being distributed and caused hour-long lines when they were first put up for sale, and whose music equipment is next for dissemination. Salon asked Kaye if he had any clue to the extent of his friend’s collection, or its future plans for disposition?
“No, but I’m very excited because it’s kind of a way for me to perhaps move my accumulations into the world at large,” he said. “I knew that Tom loved records, books, all of the above, and often would find the weirdest, which is of course great. I think it’s wonderful that his legacy of intellectual curiosity is being moved into the world at large so other people can be illuminated by his quest for the unusual.”
On the subject of holy grails, there’s the first recording by Lenny Kaye, “Crazy Like A Fox,” released under the nom de guerre Link Cromwell. That was the result of Kaye’s uncle Larry Kusik, who was a working film songwriter (his credits include the love themes from both “The Godfather” and “Romeo and Juliet”), trying to get in on the burgeoning protest music movement in the 1960s. He recruited his nephew to sing the vocals and although the song didn’t chart (it got re-released a decade later under the auspices of Ork Records, the label that launched in order to release the first Television single), it did give the young hopeful Kaye the conviction that he could find a way in the music business. And decades later, that’s Uncle Larry’s lyrics behind the plaintive and gorgeously intricate “Yes I Will,” the album’s closer.
So while “Goin’ Local” is technically Kaye’s first solo record, back in 1984, there was another project, the Lenny Kaye Connection, a quartet which gigged around New York City and environs. They released one album, “I’ve Got A Right,” not on a major label but instead on Giorno Poetry Systems, a record label started by downtown poet John Giorno. The Connection reunited back in 2022 for a show in honor of Kaye’s 75th birthday, but the record’s been out of print for some time. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans to reissue it, even just on streaming.
“Well, you never know,” Kaye said. “Right now I’m kind of pointed to the future. I’ve listened to that record recently and I do songs from it. I still do ‘I’ve Got A Right’ and ‘Record Collector,’ which I often play when I appear at record stores, but at this point I’m future-oriented. I mean, it came out 42 years ago. It represents a much younger version of myself, and right now I’m more in tune with who I am today. That doesn’t mean that it might not see a reissue along with some of the bonus tracks that got left by the wayside in those days, but right now I’m really moving into the future.”
He continued, “I have studio time booked and Dennis Dyken from the Smithereens is going to come up and play on a couple of songs that I have under construction, and that to me is where my fascination is. I think the Lenny Kaye Connection has merit. It is kind of my debut solo album, even though it was within a group context. But to be honest, I’m more about the future. I mean, Patti has that great quote, ‘Progress isn’t the future, it’s keeping up with the present,’ and my present is unfolding at actually quite an unexpectedly rapid rate, so today, I’m just gonna ride that pony.”
“Patti has that great quote, ‘Progress isn’t the future, it’s keeping up with the present,’ and my present is unfolding at actually quite an unexpectedly rapid rate, so today, I’m just gonna ride that pony.” Kaye says.
In 2022, Kaye’s book “Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock ‘n’ Roll” was published. It wasn’t the long-awaited memoir folks might have hoped for, but it was a sterling example of the kind of careful scholarship Kaye excels at, where he can maintain a 30,000-foot view over music history while diving deep into specifics and individual historical moments. This was Kaye’s fourth book, along with the other considerable inches of print he’s logged over the decades. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans for more long-form writing.
“I think I mostly got it out of my system for ‘Lightning Striking,’ that seemed to cover all the bases, though I just did a foreword for a Led Zeppelin biography called ‘When Giants Walk The Earth’ by Nick Walls. So I still write. I have some vague ideas, but right now more on the musical side of my personality,” Kaye said. “You know, writing is time-consuming and very solitary and I’m enjoying making music and following that inclination in my personality. I’m not ruling out another piece of writing. But again, you go into any bookstore and there’s millions of volumes, so just like a song, it has to mean something.”
But he’s not saying no. “I would like to assemble a collection of some of my writings. But that means I have to go into the file cabinet and be shocked by some of my early attempts at explicating rock ‘n’ roll . . . when I finish this next solo record, and see the Adrift project (his “goth psych jam band, a power trio”) through to its record, perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve done that and I can return to the one word after another, after another, after another. I do believe that in writing, there is a rhythm and melody within a sentence, just like there’s a narrative arc in a guitar solo.”
Across the last 60 years or so, Kaye has toured the globe, worked with amazing musicians, and witnessed multiple incredible moments. Salon asked if he had one favorite thing that he’d gotten to do because he was Lenny Kaye.
“It’s really hard for me to say ‘favorite things,’” he explained. “My favorite thing is, I like to go and hang out, and see what the serendipity and pinball of the night shows me. I mean, I’ve done incredible things as a musician. The Dalai Lama put a scarf around my neck at Glastonbury, and I’ve also stayed up till four o’clock in the morning with Tom Clark singing songs at the Treehouse at 2A. To me, they’re all kind of a thing. But what my favorite thing to do is see what my inclination is in terms of the next sentence or the next song or the next guitar part. The fact that I can continue to do that is really my favorite thing.”
Kaye’s always had an optimistic, positive attitude, and that has not changed. “Right now I’m a solo artist, which is kind of fun. I’m up there like a folk troubadour, singing the songs, reading from the book, and making some well-timed joke,” he told Salon. “It’s portable and there’s a certain sense of being able to control the song. I do like the power of a band behind me, but I’ll see how that begins to reveal itself. I’m having a good time.”
He continued, “I feel good. I’m a new artist! That’s what cracks me up. I feel whatever I’ve done in the past, this is a new mode of presentation for me. And it feels very much at one with who I am at this moment, drawing on the experience of, at this point, sixty years of playing that guitar, and yet I feel an excitement because I’m entering uncharted territory. And that, to me, is what makes life exciting and revelatory.”
“Goin’ Local” is out now via Yep Roc and Bandcamp; you can keep up with him on YouTube and Instagram.
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