There’s a corner on Broadway Rd. in Tempe that should have been named Lost Weekend Plaza. It’s a one-stop shop for all your gutter-life needs: a Circle K with an unusually large liquor selection sits kitty-cornered to an OTB bar and a plasma donation center. On any given day, you could see Tweaker Christs playing out their own Stations of the Cross as they cycle out of the plasma center to go straight to the bar or the K and then pass out afterward on bus benches, a still-lit cigarette smoldering in the corner of their lips. …

Stick figures, “The Simpsons,” and the downside of immortality

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt)

After the bombs drop, after the seas drown our cities, after MEGA COVID-45 makes us all choke to death on our shredded lung pulp, The Simpsons will still be on the air. Matt Groening, Al Jean, James L. Brooks, and all the rest of the masterminds behind The Simpsons during that show’s masterful first decade will be rotting in holes somewhere while their creations, misshapen and rendered idiotic by years of subpar scripting, limp on. …

As hacky edgelord music takes go, “The Sex Pistols were a boy band” is right up there with “The Beatles suck, actually.” Thanks to Malcolm McLaren’s unwavering self-promotion — selling himself as the P.T. Barnum of U.K. punk to anyone within earshot — this conception of the Pistols as nothing but a calculated advert for McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s bondage couture is part of the band’s legacy. …

A documentary that reflects our own shit back at us.

The Task (Leigh Ledare)

The geometry of groups trends towards the circular. The huddle, the group hug, the campfire, the cypher, the dance circle the sharing circle⁠ — when we attempt to envision human beings coming together in an egalitarian way, the circle seems to be the shape we default to (as opposed to the pyramid, power’s preferred shape).

Artist/documentary filmmaker Leigh Ledare builds his film The Task out of a series of circles: a ring of cameras surrounding a spiral of white chairs that fill up a room inside the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (with a…

On Capitalism, COVID-19, and “The Third Man”

The Third Man

“When this is over…” I find myself saying that a lot lately, and each time I do the words feel like an incantation. I’m Billy Batson calling down the lightning, hoping that this time when I say the words they’ll work their magic and “normalcy” returns in a flash of COVID-19-annihilating energy. Maybe if I say it enough times, I’ll start to believe it’s actually possible that the world can return to the way it was. I won’t have to keep rinsing the ashes and graveyard dirt out of my mouth every time I say it.

The…

Watching a snake eat its own tail in just ten episodes

Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC)

From the opening of its very first episode, Dispatches From Elsewhere invites you to see yourself in it. Piercing the fourth wall with his steely eyes, Richard E. Grant’s narrator addresses us directly. Equal parts warm and menacing, Grant’s Octavio talks to us with the slow, mellifluous confidence of a professor who’s about to spring an impossible-to-solve problem on his class. Showing us the repetitive life of Jason Segal’s Peter (a sad sack who’s so indecisive that asking him to choose whether or not to eat cake or pie for dessert is tantamount to asking him…

Phoenix performance artist The Ladies dance the pandemic blues away

I’ve been thinking about Zaireeka a lot.

Sitting in my apartment in week number Who Even Knows Anymore of the pandemic, I find myself thinking a lot about that album. It’s one of many tiny things I tear my hair over, now that I’ve had a few weeks to kick myself over not finding an enduring love before the quarantine started or learning life skills that would actually be useful if/when society collapses. Once you dig through all the major layers of existential dread and angst that get exposed when the apocalypse seems nigh, there’s nothing left to rue but…

I. “I have these intricate dreams”

The digital clock under my friend’s TV said it was 6:15pm. The numbers were bright yellow — Pac-Man yellow. The living room was swimming with light: The walls rippled, the floor swayed softly, and the numbers on the clock undulated like seagrass in a current. I had taken a heavy dose of psilocybin an hour ago and it was finally kicking in. …