Mission Impossible kinda sucks, so consume this stuff instead…

Films Daughters of the Dust (1991, USA) This is one of the most surprising movies I’ve ever watched. It's about a group of African-Americans, with a distinct culture, living on a South Carolinian island after the Civil War. The community contemplates leaving the island to integrate into conventional society. It’s about leaving home to seek opportunity. It’s about casting off institutions to embrace personal freedom. It’s about abandoning one’s culture to skinny-dip into the American melting pot. The culture felt alien to me, but the themes are as American as they can get. A The Return (2003, Russian) A father mysteriously returns after a twelve-year absence, to embark on the camping trip from hell with his two boys. It has a lot to say about the state of masculinity in Russia. The father is a brute, but the film’s central (and heartbreaking) question is whether the father is merely a brute or trying his best to prepare his boys for a brutal world. A- The Wild Pear Tree (2018, Turkey) I have developed a special weakness for slow, 3-hour-long, atmospheric Turkish movies. This is the third film I’ve watched by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In this one, a young writer struggles to sell his first book. B No Bears (2022, Iranian) This film is very much like Ceylan's films, where educated urbanites are marooned in rural villages. In this one, our protagonist contends with, to his eyes, bafflingly outmoded rituals and traditions. B Aftersun (2022, Scotland) A Scottish father and daughter go on holiday to a Turkish holiday resort. It sounds like a comedy, but it’s a melancholic drama about depression and the nature of memory. I will never forget this one. A Eastern Promises (2007, USA) I love pretty much everything Viggo Mortensen does, and this thriller features, hands down and briefs off, cinema's best-ever naked fight scene in a sauna. B+ Stories We Tell (2012, Canada) A moving and funny documentary from actor/director Sarah Polley. She interviews her family about a big family secret: her mother had an affair and never told Sarah who her real father was. B+ Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (2023, USA) The scene in which a train cascades down an Austrian cliff was worth the price of admission, but I just wish a film so visually amazing would weave the action with a serious plot, believable dialogue, and meaningful relationships between characters. It has neither the heart of Top Gun: Maverick nor the compelling (and realistic) plot of something like Eastern Promises. C+ TV Jury Duty (2023, Amazon) This one starts to fizzle in the final episodes, and a lot of comedic scenarios misfire, but I have a special weakness for “reality-prank comedy.” The premise — surrounding a real person with actors in a fake trial — is ingenious. I really wish there were more shows like this. Get someone to believe they’re a spy recruited by the CIA to save the world. Get someone to believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. The possibilities are endless. B The Rehearsal (2022, HBO) A somewhat innocent experiment turns dark as show-runner, Nathan Fielder, grapples with the nature of artistry: Is it okay to exploit others for the sake of one’s artistic product? B+ What I’m Listening to Drifting off with Joe Pera - Fellow Buffalo man, Joe Pera, has a new podcast with some of the best sound production I’ve heard. I found this episode, in which he interviews a video game voice actor, touching. The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum - My favorite essayist, Tim Kreider, talks about the mortifying ordeal of being known, and evolutionary psychologist, Diana Fleischman, talks about human sexuality. Ezra Klein - I don’t think Klein gets credit enough for his curious mind and broad subject matter, which ranges from the here-and-now details of the Russia-Ukraine war to interviews with novelists. While the news is devoted to disposable political scandals and while much of podcastdom moans about wokism, I find that Klein is grappling with the stuff that never makes front page headlines but that matters most. Here’s a fascinating discussion with an author about how being animal could help us be better humans. Rewatchables — My favorite movie podcasters review, what they call, one of the last real comedies, This is The End. WTF — I wish Marc Maron would abandon his usual interviewing formula, which is to get a famous person to recount their professional life from the beginning to the present. Forget the autobiography; I find his discussions about ideas with thinkers far more engaging. Here’s one on the state of conspiracy theories with Robert Guffey. Bill Simmons Podcast — Behind all the NBA and NFL chatter, there's often a really interesting conversation about other stuff. Skip ahead to Chuck Klosterman talking about the woman who weirdly claimed that a man "wasn't real" on an airplane and to a good discussion on AI with Derek Thompson.

What I’ve been doing A good portion of my time is devoted to fixing my house (which is only 25 years old!). After two years of chronic respiratory problems and a curious smell coming from the kitchen (that I’d hoped would just magically waft away), I finally tore down the old countertop to find a wall full of mold. It has taken longer than expected to tear out all the moldy dry wall and insulation, cut pipes, install a new sink, and make our own homemade concrete countertop, so we’ve been without a kitchen sink for three months, hosing down our dishes in the front lawn like hill people. To pay for everything, I’m planning a Fall speaking tour — which might be my last for many years — hopefully along North America’s West Coast, where I've never given talks before. I enjoy the speaking tours, but they — and the ordeal of making money — has distracted me from my true vocation, which is being an author. Off and on, I have been working on my relationship memoir Out of the Wild for two years now. I’d say I’m about 4/5ths done with the first draft. Most times, I just edit some of the early chapters, which are far more funny and refined than the later stuff, which reads like a bad rough draft. But that’s just the nature of writing: it gets better with age.

Isle of Bute trip

I have a 3.5-year-old daughter who, for the first time, isn't impossible to travel with. We had a nice weekend holiday on the Isle of Bute, where I dusted off my camera, which I hadn't taken out of its case for years.

Once known as the "Madeira of Scotland," Bute used to be a common (and easy) getaway for people across the UK. (A train station takes you right to the ferry, or you could take your car on the ferry for a measly £40 round-trip.) The main town of Rothesay has a shambly, falling-apart feel to it, like it's seen better days, which was the case. Decades ago, cheap flights made it just as easy and cheap to get to the real Madeira, and not one known for midges, rain, and gray skies.

My main observation: For such a small country, the variances in climate across Scotland are exceptional. I live on the dry, sunny east coast. The west coast (just 100 miles away) feels way more sodden, more humid, and more ferny.

Sidenote & something for me to look into: I am amazed that the VIkings came all the way over to raid and colonize these relatively resource-poor Scottish islands, including Bute. On first glance, I don't see how that could have been worth the hassle, but, as I say, something for me to look into...

On being dull

“You’re boring!” In high school, a fellow student said this to me. “You never have anything to say!” he added. Some girls in the class leapt to my defense, but I was unmoved by the insult. (Insults only hurt when someone points out what you’re not ready to admit.) I already knew I was boring. I’m reminded of my insulter because I feel like I’ve been at my “peak boring” — my Mount Dull — for these past few years. Nothing dulls you quicker than being a parent. Having a child is like injecting anesthesia into your personality. For the past three years, I’ve been groggily pushing my child on swings, endlessly tidying the kitchen, and resentfully mending the shoddy house we bought. Last month, I spent a whole week sanding three interior doors and ripping moldy drywall out of my kitchen—it was seven days of toil that could be summarized with a grunt. I used to be able to skim through tons of books, soak up lots of movies, and keep up with the news. For a few years, I was perched somewhere among the top 5 percent of people abreast of developments in culture and thought. Such is the fortune of someone who has neither debt, a job, nor children. This consumption of content always gave me something to say. But, since then, I’ve become a conversational stonewall. In conversations with my wife, I offer little more than pre-language throat noises: “mmm hmm,” “mmm,” or “mmff!,” which, when typed out, look like interesting porn categories, but are responses that make conversations crash and die. I agree with my high school insulter: I am fundamentally boring. And it’s not just the parenting that makes me boring. I am slow-witted. I have no gift for oral storytelling. I have a poor memory of facts. I’m too much of a loner to gather good gossip. I rarely offer an anecdote. Never a joke. When I’m invited to brunch, I leave thinking that my hosts will never invite the quiet guy back. I’ll say this in my defense, though. As a rule, I think being quiet is more polite than subjecting listeners to dull anecdotes. And sometimes I do have something interesting to say, but not a receptive audience for the highly-specialized miscellanea that interest me: the interpersonal dynamics between players on my rec league sports teams; the Buffalo Bills’ not-so-bad off-season; Ulysses S. Grant’s astonishing life-journey; the growing prevalence of UFO stories in mainstream media; or the triumph of Succession’s fourth season and the misfires in Black Mirror’s sixth. It takes two to make one dull. My parent-friends who have two kids — a toddler and an infant — are in an even worse position. When we all get together, we have little to talk about other than our kids—development milestones, potty updates, nursery appraisals, our regrets for renouncing contraception. Mostly, we just spend two hours either being interrupted by our kids or yelling at them from afar to not do something. The consequences of our dulldom aren’t dire. Eventually, we’ll go back to our interesting jobs, take up old hobbies, pursue new dreams, and consume films and books worthy of discussion. But there was once a time in my life when I felt like my boringness was a serious matter that needed addressing. During my college years, I was what you might call a pre-social media “involuntary celibate” (couldn’t get laid and also couldn’t complain about it on the Internet). The problem wasn’t my smarts or my looks. (I was a good student, free from all date-ending deformities or asymmetries.) The problem was that I was boring. Like many young men, I enjoyed trying to master skills, compete against friends, and achieve goals in videogames. I liked watching hockey on TV. I liked getting obscenely drunk playing beer pong with friends. I couldn’t have been more ordinary. And going to the gym to pump up biceps didn’t compensate for my boringness. I mostly didn’t mind being boring. But when love and physical attention continued to elude my grasp throughout the first half of my twenties (inconveniently at the peak of my desires), I, in quick order, quit all videogames, stopped watching sports, and passed a temperance amendment to my personal constitution. I embarked on a journey of self-transformation — to make myself interesting — by throwing myself into my coursework, embarking on risky adventures, and consuming good art. Here’s a rare anecdote from me: Once an old man, who picked me up hitchhiking, said, “Sounds like your pecker is taking ya across the world.” I'd told him that I was traveling thousands of miles to see my then-girlfriend. You could also say that my pecker also played a role in compelling me to open up Middlemarch, to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, or to write my first book. In time, I went from being invisible to visible. From incel to enticing. From self-abuse to, well, you get the idea. But, at bottom, I was and, to some extent, still am my boring high school self—a guy who’d derive plenty of pleasure from a tray of greasy pizza and an all-night Civ VI marathon. Anthony Bourdain once said, “I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.” Bourdain and I have one thing in common: we’re aware and critical of our dullness. The only thing left to do is carefully draw up and adhere to a syllabus of self-enrichment. Some sort of artificial mechanism, requiring sacrifice and discipline, is probably too much for most people, so I’m tempted to end this by saying that it’s okay to be dull. But the truth is that I can’t stand dull people. When I’m stranded with dull people at a social event I begin to fantasize about overturning a table laden with silverware, cheerfully exposing myself, or taking some ridiculous political position just to keep myself stimulated. The weight of some people’s dullness is so heavy that you become a mere comet fixed in an inescapable orbit around an unimaginable mass of worthless anecdotes and tedious monologues. But I can’t stand the dull mostly because they remind me of the worst of myself—and because they haven’t put in the work to become aware of their dullness or develop their own syllabus of enrichment. Being dull is a killer to your existential life the same way greasy pizza is a killer to your cardiovascular system. It’s the wastefulness that’s repulsive. Let me proclaim into the cosmic void — to those who have the fortune of leisure — that we should all climb down from our Mount Dulls as best we can. Think of it as socio-cultural hygiene. For the same reason we roll deodorant into our armpits, we should consume that which enriches, makes us think and feel, and that gives us something meaningful to say. Chuck the Big Mac and eat your veggies; quit your true-crime podcast and chow down on some Ken Burns. Eat your cold tofu and go cold turkey on Marvel. Follow your pecker to George Eliot but always use contraception. It’s as much for others, as it is for ourselves.