Alone, Silo, The Invite, Backrooms, Adult Braces, The Studio, We All Live Here, and EEEK, the News

I recently disappointed someone I love, and the weight of that has been so heavy on my heart that I’ve been avoiding sitting for more than a moment at a time with my feelings—which has set me on an absolute consumption spree! Does my being aware of this because I’m Paying Attention make it better? Apparently not.

Renee and I watched Season 10 of Alone (10 episodes), a History channel reality show we watched on Hulu in which 10 people are dropped on remote islands with camera equipment, an SOS phone for when they want to give up, and some limited hunting, fishing, and camping equipment. (If you are a super fan, you can see here a list of what each contestant chooses to take.) Whoever survives the longest wins $500,000.

The show is compelling! Seeing how each individual thrives or flounders—
and keeps his or her spirits up or spends all day whining—is fascinating.

Finding food should be everyone’s number one concern, but some of the people instead spend all their energy building elaborate log cabin shelters with insulation, stone chimneys, and indoor fire. By the time they’re done, they have no energy left to hunt or fish. The flaw in this strategy seems so obvious (and the show has run for many seasons, so all these people have watched what worked and didn’t for past contestants) that I am amazed how many of them still focus on their shelters over ensuring they have enough to eat. One woman mysteriously lived on an almost entirely vegetarian diet. One guy caught many huge fish, while another never even tried to fish and slowly starved as he mostly ate only mice he caught in his tent.

Renee and I were rooting for a Southern dad who kept saying he wanted to win the show’s cash prize so he could get his autistic son the services he needed. (This made us tear up, to think people have to go on a reality show to provide their child with basic services.) But we also found it distressing that the man had other children and never, ever mentioned them.

You can see all the contestants here:

I was amazed by how lonely some of them got for their loved ones. Not that I wouldn’t want to see people after spending two months by myself in the wilderness, but I was amazed how many of them made their SOS “tapping out” call claiming they couldn’t take missing their families for one more day. That didn’t make sense to me. They knew going in they were forgoing time with their families for the chance to win half a million dollars. What makes them suddenly unable to be alone?

One woman was almost manically cheerful all the time, then shot secret footage (or rather, footage she thought she could keep on a hidden USB drive that she was forced to turn over) of herself sobbing and telling her fiancé she missed him so badly she could barely go on. She was determined to hide her sadness from the crew as she felt they were out to torment her and make her look weak; possibly hunger was making her paranoid. (She was the near-vegetarian who just kept eating berries and reindeer lichen, which you have to boil many times so it doesn’t give you diarrhea.)

Anyway, some seasons of this show are better than others, but I found Season 10 extra gripping. Renee watches for the lessons on bushwacking and survival-in-the-end-times; I watch for the study of human behaviors. (I do not want to survive in times that are any closer to the end than we are now, thank you very much.)

Renee and I also watched the first two episodes of Season Two of Silo, a show on Apple based on a sci-fi book series (which Renee read but I didn’t) about societies existing after the end times. We enjoyed Season One and were excited to see Season Two, but then I just noticed that Season Three recently came out, so we are trying now to catch up. I hate this new world in which one can never have a predictable time for new seasons to come out.

I remember fondly when all of America watched its television shows together. This was still happening even after cable channels were creating content we could all stream, as with The Sopranos, which we watched an episode at a time as each new episode was released weekly. All the new shows and new seasons used to come out in September. Now it’s a free-for-all. (Do I sound old yet?)

I watched the first episode of the brilliant Seth Rogen comedy The Studio on HBO, which Rogen directs, in which he plays a studio head who dreams of making artful, award-winning films but is forced instead to make huge commercial successes that appeal to the lowest common denominator. The show is fast-moving, fierce, and funny, with many cameo appearances by celebrities playing themselves. Despite how great the show is, I think I will not continue watching it because I felt it raising my blood pressure in real time; I felt too anxious over how much stress all the characters were under. I don’t need that kind of tension in my life. (This is also why I eventually gave up on watching the brilliant show Breaking Bad; every week was more terrifying than the last, and I realized I was doing this to myself, putting myself each week through the nerve torture of watching evil, violent men plot against each other, and that I could just avoid feeling that way if I stopped watching. So I quit.)

Given the second year in a row of record Emmy nominations for The Pitt, we plan next to catch up with that show, which follows an emergency room doctor through one very long shift. We watched the first episode last year and liked it but didn’t feel compelled to keep going with it, but friends tell me we should definitely give it another try, so we will.

I saw a movie double feature with a friend and her teenage kids: Backrooms, a low-budget indie horror film and The Invite, directed by one of its stars, Olivia Wilde.

The Invite was brilliant, sexy, funny, tragic, moving, clever, and smartly crafted. Penelope Cruz is a wonder. I loved it, give it a 5, cannot recommend it highly enough. (I do not, however, recommend you watch it with a couple of 14-year-olds unless you want to see them die of embarrassment from having to watch so many sexual scenes with adults.) But you must see this movie! You will laugh and cringe and be wide-eyed and on the edge of your seat. I told my wife I can’t wait until we can see it together at home, and when she watched the trailer, she found all the discussion about polyamory and orgies disturbing, but that’s not why I’m recommending it. Swinging is just the concept they use to open up conversations about marriage and relationships. So, so good! Watch it and tell me what you think.

Olivia Wilde also directed the awesome girl comedy Booksmart, which came out in 2019 and which I also highly recommend.

Backrooms left me googling what it all meant. I was scared throughout (because I am a scaredy cat about scary movies) but the story did not hang together clearly enough for me to draw any clear meaning from it. However, the friend seeing the movie with me seemed to understand right away that the backrooms were manifestations of people’s disturbed psyches.

The backstory of Backrooms is interesting. An internet meme about getting stuck in a weird office-space backroom with sticky carpets and yellow wallpaper went viral in 2019, after which a young guy named Kane Parsons made a successful internet TV show based on this meme, and now (at the age of 20!!), he has made this movie, which is the highest grossing film of any put out by production company A24. You can learn more about this background here.

To avoid my own thoughts, I’ve also been listening to audiobooks (or audio news stories or podcasts) any time I’m not otherwise engaged. I listened to Adult Braces, Lindsay West’s essay collection in which she recounts how she has happily turned her marriage from one in which she felt like her husband was cheating on her, even though she’d technically agreed to polyamory when they married, to one in which she’s thrilled to be in a throuple with her husband and his mistress. She is smart and funny and her essay collections are thought-provoking and often laugh-out-loud hilarious, so I recommend all of them, including this one. Here you can listen to her read aloud from and be interviewed about the book; just watch the first 10 minutes to hear her read a chapter to get a sense of how funny she is. I didn’t think this collection was as brilliant as her earlier ones, but it’s still great fun to listen to her tell stories. And if she says she’s happy, who are we to disbelieve her?

I’ve also been listening to We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes, a reliably delightful British author who weaves romance and humor into all her domestic dramas. In this novel, a how-to author is dumped by her husband two weeks after the release of her book on how to keep your marriage sizzling. Now she’s a single mom of two teen girls and has to do school pick-up next to the now-pregnant woman for whom her husband left her. Her stepfather of 35 years moves in with her after her mother dies, then her bio father moves in, too. The crowded house is full of chaos, and the various stories running through the book all blend together seamlessly. This is a thoroughly enjoyable novel and the English reader of the audiobook does a great job.

I didn’t love Moyes’ most popular book, Me Before You, even though it was an engaging read, because I was upset the main character felt his life was not worth living because he was a quadriplegic—and we readers were supposed to accept this point of view. (I’ve since read that disability advocates were also disgusted by the suggestion that the disabled are better off dead.) But I loved and highly recommend Moyes’ book about brave women librarians who delivered books on horseback in 1930s Kentucky, Giver Of Stars. (And I’m about to read the novel on the same subject that was released several months earlier, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.) And even if it isn’t my favorite of her novels, I love this story from Moyes’ Wiki page about how she sold Me Before You: “Moyes' publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, did not take up the 2012 novel Me Before You and Moyes sold it to Penguin. It sold six million copies, went to number one in nine countries, and reinvigorated her back catalogue resulting in three of her novels being on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.” Ha ha, eat that, rejecting publisher! (Not that I’m taking personally all the publishing rejections I’ve received lately or anything.)

I listened to a New Yorker article that says we’re talking less than we ever have due to how often we instead now communicate with our devices—plus more and more of our interactions are now automated and stores have us do self checkout instead of interacting with cashiers and when we need help, bots answer our questions, etc. Everyone! Be the change! Wait on line for the live cashier. Talk to your friends on the phone. See people in person. We must all work to save our human connections.

Then there’s the news, which I’ve also been following compulsively. This past week has seemed worse than many previous ones, with the bad things happening in such a snowball-accumulation way there is no way to keep up, which is definitely the point.

• Trump has ended the cease fire with Iran and is again threatening to wipe out their entire civilization.

• The Trump administration fired the last members of the independent Election Assistance Commission, ending independent election review. I don’t see how we can keep counting on the midterms to save us.

• Trump opened our natural wilderness to drilling and pushed a major regulatory rollback on threatened-species habitat protections.

• Trump ended all the subsidies for wind and solar projects and spent billions of our tax dollars to pay companies to cancel wind and solar projects that were already under construction. How is this stupidity allowed to go on and on!???

• The Supreme Court ruled that Trump could end temporary protected status for all the immigrants currently under its protection, which will soon mean 300,000+ Haitians and other brown people will face deportation. Tens of thousands of CNAs wiping our mother’s asses, tens of thousands of manufacturing workers in our factories, all hired legally, all paying taxes and contributing to our society, are now going to be thrown out of their jobs and out of our country.

• The Colorado River is drying up and running out of water for the seven states it hydrates.

• Trump is a greedy, fucking monster and no one is doing a thing to stop him robbing us all blind:

Internationally, the genocide continues in Gaza. This image left my heart shredded:

But so that we don’t only focus on the gloom, there’s a death or two we can be glad about—image is of Lindsey Graham viciously defending Kavanaugh. (My mother, daughter, and I went to DC to protest Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, and I’m proud of that, even if Kavanaugh did still get in.)

And almost nothing is making me happier than seeing Hunter Biden able to find his voice again:

Except perhaps seeing all the good Mamdani is accomplishing. Here’s the speech he gave for our nation’s 250th birthday. Please take the couple of minutes to listen to this speech. Thank God for him giving us all hope!

Please tell me what you’ve been consuming and what you recommend or don’t. Hopefully you’ve taken more time to reflect, create, and be than I have. Though I did do some painting, then repainting, which I didn’t like, so now I’ll be repainting again.

My daughter taught me recently that acrylics are so much more forgiving than watercolors, because you can just paint over your mistakes, and I’ve been really enjoying exploring this concept on a big canvas someone left on the side of the road (with an easel and paints that were gifted to me on Buy Nothing). Such fun!

Wish me luck slowing down this week!