Category: 2022

Book Update – May/June 2022

Darryl by Jackie Ess

The titular Darryl is a man living in the Pacific Northwest who is going through a profoundly chaotic and confusing period of his life. Due to a healthy inheritance, Darryl doesn’t work and spends his days abusing GHB and watching his wife have sex with other men. He claims he’s a cuckold, but the other cucks on the message board he follows don’t see it that way. There is something deeply wrong with Darryl, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. Like devils & angels on his shoulder, two other men play formative roles in Darryl’s sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious revelation. Bill is a longtime friend, someone who has sex with Darryl’s wife but seems genuinely worried about our protagonist. Clive is a “therapist” brought in by his wife, who turns out to be another man just interested in fucking her. He drugs Darryl, who is more than happy to be numbed to life. Author Jackie Ess has written a brilliant, short novel about such a distinct voice. There are few books like this one, and even if you aren’t very knowledgeable about kink culture (like me), it’s a very approachable text that confronts the good & bad in people.

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Movie Review – Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future (2022)
Written & Directed by David Cronenberg

The horrors that humanity is wreaking on the planet are being repaid on the species at a rapidly intense rate. Right now, back in the area where I used to live, they are experiencing a heat bubble bringing temperatures into the 100s-110s over the next week. Even here in the Netherlands, we saw a couple days’ bump of warmer temperatures than average temps for the time of the year. The ocean temperatures are rising as the byproducts of our mass production are pumped into the atmosphere, ice caps are melting, and with each passing day, microplastic or other toxins are discovered in overwhelming numbers in our bodies. Against such a bleak tableau, the future of humanity feels quite hopeless. There seem to be two paths: the entirety of the human race works to radically reduce the harm we have caused to lessen the collapse around us, or our bodies are forced to adapt to a polluted, poisoned world.

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TV Review – Kids in the Hall (2022)

Kids in the Hall (Amazon Prime)
Written by Garry Campbell & Dave Foley & Bruce McCulloch & Kevin McDonald & Mark McKinney & Scott Thompson & Jennifer Goodhue & Matt Watts, and Julie Klausner
Directed by Aleysa Young & Kelly Makin

I was a nerdy kid. I’m sure that really surprises you. Because I was living in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a two adults’ very dysfunctional marriage, I found solace in odd things. The TV Guide Fall Preview issue was always a highlight, teasing all the fantastic things I’d be able to watch soon. In 1993, when I was 12 years old, I remember coming across a description of a show that was going to air late night on Fridays on CBS. It was called Kids in the Hall, and the description said Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, was making it. 1993 was around the time I started watching SNL religiously, so I was excited. Unfortunately, I grew up in the Southeastern United States, and I genuinely think our local CBS affiliate chose not to air KITH because it was a very transgressive show that didn’t hide its countercultural take. It wouldn’t be until 1999, during my freshman year of college, that I finally got to see the Kids for the first time as they were rerun constantly on Comedy Central.

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TV Review – The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate (Netflix)
Written by Mike Myers & Roger Drew & Ed Dyson
Directed by Tim Kirkby

In the 2000s, Mike Myers was one of the biggest comedy stars in the world. Just Shrek alone made him rich, but add onto that the Austin Powers franchise and the enduring love for earlier projects like Wayne’s World and So I Married An Axe Murderer. Then The Love Guru came along and like magic it was all over. Audiences cringed at that picture and he hasn’t made a big splash since. Until now that is, with his Netflix series The Pentaverate. I watched this entire show for one big reason, I wanted to see just how bad Myers had become and I had no idea just how terrible it would be. This is one of the worst self-indulgent pieces of media I have seen in a very long time.

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