A Post In the Machine. (Free version).
Women fighting women, the Elderly Zombie Apocalypse, user interfaces of the truly insane, day drinking vs. thinking, dogs with dementia, a murder-suicide plot and much more. Or not.
Note: This paid post is now free.
That’s a pretty sweet headline, is it not?
And yet all of those things will be covered right here. Plus I’m going to talk about my missing “Sucker Free City” hat, I’m going to take some Prozac while I write and I may or may not talk about Eric Dolphy, the black and white porn of “Ripley” and why both “dismay” and “ennui” are great words.
Everything connects, somehow, some way.
It started in either late 2022 or early 2023 — as my dismay with Instagram was growing to a fever pitch with its Reels feature simultaneously annoying me and luring me in for dopamine hits. There, on the feed, every day — without me clicking on it — was a statuesque, cute, volleyball player.
Why is this person following me around? I finally clicked on the Reel.
I don’t need to tell you this, but it was a huge mistake.
The volleyball player in question is from, I think, Turkey. The Reel showed her playing almost no volleyball, but acting playful and cute and dancing to music in the arena and then, yes, absolutely crushing a spike, etc.
OK, fine. This was what was following me around for weeks (at the time)? Why? My partner KB said there was no mystery here — the Great Dopamine Algorithm knows that you like hot girls and butts, she said, and volleyball shorts are kind of a slam dunk.
While this was indefensibly true, I didn’t know this player/person from Turkey and, just to prove some innocence, I suggested that the world of volleyball has, theoretically, an endless array of even hotter women in shorts that I would, theoretically, be more inclined to click on if I didn’t hate Reels. Why this person?
I don’t know, she said, but now you’ve done it.
She was right. That volleyball player would not go away. It was like she was stalking me, as was some other weird Reels thing — brutal dash-cam accidents. Ugh. (Don’t Google it.) Within weeks, I just deleted Instagram and pretty much stayed off.
When I returned, it was stealthy — a quick post, then out. No Reels. This worked for a while.
Fast forward almost a full year — that’s not an exaggeration.
I’m wasting time on Instagram like an idiot and there she is again: the volleyball player from Turkey, or somewhere. Like a haunting ghost in short shorts. I did not click.
“The volleyball girl is back on my timeline,” I said. KB: “Did you click?” Me: “Hell no.”
The point is that an argument could be made — a theoretical one — that if a person did find, let’s say, something lovely to look at, that person could click dozens of times, alerting the Great Dopamine Algorithm of a potential addiction, and the reward would be hundreds upon hundreds of Reels of said person.
But that never happens to such an extent (so I’m told). And yet, just one click and all of sudden I’m into spiking balls somewhere in the vicinity of the Middle East? Makes no sense.
And yet, it’s a necessary build up to what happened about four months later (and is still happening).
A lesson was not learned, is what happened.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to do some digital detoxing. (Early grade on that? C-, trending toward F.)
And I’m going to blame mixed martial arts for starters, and for some reason Muay Thai fighting, then perhaps unrelenting ennui and, in descending order we finally get to me.
I’m kidding. It’s all my fault.
Instagram and Reels, which I had been avoiding — because it was all crazy real life people hurting each other or cars crashing — fed me a video of a badass Muay Thai boxer shaking her head in disdain at an opponent’s kicks, while bobbing and weaving. I recognized this swagger from other sports. It feeds into me. The video, un-clicked, stops as this person, billed as Supergirl, looks about to go into destroy mode.
I think you know what happened.
I clicked, then fell into a world I haven’t returned from, which is different than the post I had planned for a couple of weeks ago (exploring the dangers of dopamine hits on creativity and actually getting anything, creative or not, done). I know my college age kids and all of their peers have grown up in that environment and I wanted to approach it not from some annoying New York Times opinion page place of highbrow tut-tutting but from….some other angle.
I was ready to take on the obvious — that despite my love and support of women’s sports maybe the Occam’s Razor of this whole thing is hot women and butts. The cynic/journalist in me always ends up pointing to human weakness/wiring whatever as the most likeliest cause. And I was fine with the self indictment. Plus, it just made a lot of sense — I like badass women in action films so why wouldn’t I like them in the MMA? Simple; end of story.
Except that I also like badass dudes of all stripes in action movies of a certain kinds, but universally loathe watching men beat the shit out of each other in MMA, in boxing, in videotaped street encounters of any kind (basically, 90 percent of what’s being pushed on phones as people document the fall of mankind).
I was also ready to write a whole different column, probably on a Sunday, about how I had just deleted the app and went back to meeting my 2024 resolutions of digital detoxing and more reading.
Instead, I’m here to say that I have gone ever deeper into that whole women fighting women thing and, while I am compiling lots of intellectually airtight thoughts on why and what it means, etc., mostly I’m finding that I just like it.
That I’m stunned at how ferociously badass so many of these women are, how they would knock out or kill me in under two minutes (and you as well; maybe three of us together at the same time); how high, how hard and how fast the kicks come with supreme force, how advanced the boxing is, (both kickboxing and MMA) how much tougher every single one of them is than I am and just how many female fighters there are; I didn’t really know that whole world was so deep.
I mean, like any sport I dive into as a newbie (you should have read all my zeal-laced columns on soccer), the discovery is kind of thrilling. What a strange world I have dropped into. I’m finding favorites, intriguing back stories, old fight footage, progress — a story arc!
And while it doesn’t dispel the original cynical assumption, not all of my favorite mixed martial arts female warriors are hot, so there. (By the nature of the sport, though, there’s a lot of strong legs and glutes, I’m not going to lie).
I may approach this from a more intellectual standpoint later, but right now I’m just watching a lot of badass women fighting each other, which is better than a lot of shows I’ve seen lately.
And now for the surprise twist kicker — KB is a black belt in tae kwon do.
Over a cup of coffee recently, my friend Dan and I (well, it was mostly Dan’s idea but I added some killer fine tuning) came up with a great idea for a film.
Does it involve elderly zombies like the headline says, you ask?
Uh, sorta? Not really?
I’m not going to tell you the plot specifically because then someone will steal it and Dan and I will become more disappointed in the world than we already are, but the gist of it comes from the ashes and sadness of what it’s like to grow old in this country.
He’s dealing with two aging parents in a kind of healthcare nightmare. KB is dealing with same with her mother. My good friend Sue is dealing with her aging and ill father. I’m dealing, relatedly but differently, with a much older sibling who has been in a nursing home for almost four years.
I’m confident you know someone — perhaps yourself — dealing with how badly a first world country treats its elderly, how expensive the care is and how chaotically caring for family member upends your own life.
It’s not a sexy sell for a movie. Everything about growing old in America is a nightmare — and the less money you have, the worse your story will be.
As Dan and I talked about this over coffee, I jokingly told him that knowing how bad things can and will probably get in later years, KB and I have settled on a plan:
Murder-suicide.
(And yeah, we’ll work out the details of who kills first later.) Dan laughed and said he had his own plan — (insert film plot here, ahem). I loved it. I said, actually, it would be even better if (insert plot adjustment from me here). Our eyes lit up. We talked about how strangely great the idea was and how simply it arose — albeit out of ongoing tragedies of various degrees for various people.
He’s a director, writer, wine merchant, possibly a merchant sailor, I don’t know — he’s a polymath and we already had plans to start a now long-overdue podcast, so maybe this is just the next thing. There’s always got to be multiple creative things or you go crazy (and broke).
So it’s not about an Elderly Zombie Apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean I won’t write that movie if I get really desperate.
I’m back in Portland yet again and with all the moving done (aside from a few stray days of Box Stratego), my new desk has been mostly set up and I’m lovingly adorning it with things. I’m also doing something I haven’t done in a while — slowly immersing myself back in the creative life. What does that mean? I don’t know. Thinking. Trying not to think. Walking. Day drinking — a thing that sometimes happens after thinking, or during thinking and after walking — which at least half-counts for something, creative or not.
I know a lot of articulate people who garble their words when discussing what it means to try to put oneself in a position to be creative. It’s a complex expression, which is probably why a handful of people eventually write great books about the process. I brought one with me up to Portland, specific to writing: Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life.”
These are the first few days, after about a year and a half, of being free to do this…thing, which partly comes at great cost and risk but mostly with gratitude at getting the chance to write again.
Over that coffee, Dan and I talked about this very thing — maybe, finally, being able to get back to doing something creative. Paying attention when stray thoughts about stories zing by your brain while “adulting.” Maybe the high stone walls of “adulting” will crumble away now? Maybe the craziness of elder care will? Perhaps all the moving will be finished? Managing a lovely, old, three-quarters blind dog with dementia who can’t be away from your side? Figuring out how to make ends meet on tax day? There will be fixes and workarounds for those things?
Maybe that time is almost here.
One day I might write while listening to Eric Dolphy. Maybe one day I’ll try writing about Eric Dolphy. When I was younger and open to discovery, The Wire, a British magazine about jazz, ranked his “Out To Lunch!” as the best jazz album I could ever discover. I should be listening to that on vinyl right now. Or later, as I write about the Elderly Zombie Apocalypse. But lately it’s more likely going to be “lo-fi chill beats,” on Spotify of all places, which isn’t nearly as cool.
Still trying to figure out how the Max user interface home page can be so fucking terrible. How is this possible? How can one thing be so bad, so consistently unhelpful to all the brands involved — particularly HBO — and not be fixed yet? I think I know the answer because it involves an executive’s ego, but this is what happens when people don’t listen to input (even from their own employees). You get the Max app. You get a reduced experience. Eventually, you choose something better.
The other day a writer named Rory O’Toole interviewed me for a story he’s working on about the 20th anniversary of the Alex Tse-written, Spike Lee-directed almost-was-a-series called “Sucker Free City” on Showtime. That was a long, long time ago and I had to Google my own damned stories to be helpful, but it was quite the trip down memory lane (I had written a lot about how that San Francisco-set series almost, but didn’t, come to fruition — the pilot ended up a movie instead, which you can read about when O’Toole’s story comes out and I’ll link to it). In the meantime, he mentioned that friend and San Francisco Chronicle writer Peter Hartlaub had remembered having a rare “Sucker Free City” hat, which was stolen by someone at the Chronicle. (It wasn’t me — I had my own. Which then made me think, whatever happened to that hat? That was great swag for some of us. I wouldn’t have just given that away). Shit. I could rock that up here. More likely I’ll get a Thorns cap.
I watched another episode of “Ripley” last night, seduced yet again by its great black and white cinematography from Robert Elswit. While watching, I came up with another idea for a post: Shows that are good but not great and whether (and how much) that matters. I often think, “That could have been great,” but how much is that diminishing my viewing experience? I’m not sure because I’m watching female Muay Thai fighters at present. But I hope “Ripley” gets better.
Sucker Free City was ahead of its time - seems like nowadays there at least seems to be more opportunities for a show like this to exist vs. in 2024 in the before-fore-fore times of Old Cable
So, I'm about halfway through The New Look and. Wow. Emily Mortimer and Juliette Binoche are every bit as good as well all expect them to be but, is there ANTYHING Ben Mendelsohn can't do? He's a revelation.
Maisie Williams. I loved her work in the Pistol series but in The New Look she's transcendent. Who knew little Arya Stark would pull a Daniel Radcliffe and grow up to have a career that exhibits impeccable taste in choices of roles and deliver performances like this. I can't wait to see what she does next!
The series itself is beautiful and I love learning about history that I didn't really know. The juxtaposition of Juliette Binoche's Coco Chanel and Ben Mendelsohn's Christian Dior works beautifully and it's fascinating to see the famous names of Parisian fashion during the war and how they rebuilt the art and culture of Paris and the demimonde in the post war period. Maisie Williams plays Dior's younger sister Catherine who was a Resistance courier and was captured and spent a couple of years in Ravensbruk Work Camp while being tortured and interrogated and her re-entry into the world following liberation is almost as brutal. Catherine, in a very real sense was Christian Dior's muse.
Highly recommend.