Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED World

    Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED World

    Two months shy of sixty-four in August of 2025, I found myself on the 405 heading north, fantasizing about writing a book on life’s last trimester. My wife (still spry at fifty), one twin daughter, and I were crawling toward Studio City for cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday. Around Westwood, the freeway collapsed into one lane of misery thanks to a construction project that looked like it was engineered by Dante himself. A trip that should have been forty-five minutes mutated into a two-hour festival of fumes and despair. Traffic isn’t just exhausting—it’s the nihilist’s victory parade, proof that “progress” and “civilization” are marketing scams.

    By the time we arrived, Pete’s lush estate felt less like Studio City and more like Sherwood Forest with valet parking. He asked how I was doing. I told him I needed a “405 Traffic Therapist” to exorcise the demons of my commute. Was there a triage tent with a cot so I could convalesce for a couple of hours and then join the party refreshed?

    The party teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the Beatles-and-Stones cover band. I admired them: financially secure but not pompous, health-conscious without being kale cultists, capable of joy in ways I’ve never mastered. When twilight came—salmon sky, ninety degrees—they stripped down and leapt into the pool like aging dolphins, while I swatted mosquitoes and sulked in long pants.

    Later, in the spacious backyard beneath the canopies, I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband—a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    He complimented my kettlebell regimen, and I confessed the truth: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and terror of driving after dark. He leaned in, lowered his voice, and delivered the line that should be etched on my tombstone: “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.” 

    I countered that invisibility was merciful compared to the greater horror: we are annoying relics in a world sprinting at 5G speed. Father Time has us hardwired for lag. You can swallow kale and swing iron all you want, but in the end, you’re a Samsung with a dying processor.

    I bit into a fig, dribbled juice onto my shirt, and told Jim about my actual Samsung QLED. Four years old, picture fine, processor a fossil—menus freeze, apps load slower than a Pentium II. Samsung skimped on the chip. My fix? Upgrade to an LG OLED with a 4K AI processor that doesn’t choke when I click Netflix. The irony was obvious: I scorn Samsung for its lag while lumbering through life as a laggy processor myself. My thirty-something colleagues update effortlessly; I freeze, buffer, and curse the interface. I’m a Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED world.

    Jim tried to comfort me—“You’re still funny, the students must love you”—but I waved him off. Nature documentaries have already written my script: Scar the lion rules until the young challenger rips him down, and then Scar limps off, invisible, licking his wounds. You don’t fight the arc; you nod, maybe crack a joke, then spend five grand on an OLED so you can pretend you still belong in the modern ecosystem. I looked down at the feta crumbs on my lap and muttered, “Did they forget napkins?” Meanwhile, dozens of voices rose from the pool in a raucous “Hey Jude” singalong under a moonlit salmon sky. It was a magical moment, and all I could think about was how I’d forgotten to spray myself with DEET.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators argues that the television series To Catch a Predator (2004–2007) trafficked in a sensational form of “rage bait”: staged ambushes, blurred safety protocols, and police tactics sacrificed to the show’s appetite for ratings. The program framed itself as public service, but its producers often prioritized spectacle over procedure, converting criminal justice into prime-time theater. Osit links this practice to a broader media phenomenon—rage bait—that rewards outrage, erodes critical thinking, and normalizes vigilantism and voyeurism. The same dynamics, we could argue, animate conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones (see The Truth vs. Alex Jones): both convert moral panic into entertainment and profit, with corrosive effects on civic life.

    In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, evaluate the claim that treating criminality and conspiracy as spectacle—whether through To Catch a Predator or Alex Jones’s media operations—cultivates our worst impulses rather than our better angels. Using specific examples from both Predators and The Truth vs. Alex Jones and other reliable sources, analyze the ethical and civic consequences of rage bait in an attention economy

    Three sample thesis statements (with mapping components)

    Thesis 1 — Ethical-civic critique (best for moral analysis)
     Thesis: By converting crime and conspiracy into spectacle, both To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones manufacture moral panic and reward voyeuristic retribution; rather than fostering accountability, they degrade due process, incentivize unsafe policing practices, and train audiences to prefer outrage over inquiry.
    Map: (1) define “rage bait” and show how each case uses spectacle; (2) document procedural and ethical harms (policing compromises, doxxing, false beliefs); (3) analyze effects on civic habits (decline of deliberation, rise of vigilantism); (4) propose remedies (media ethics standards, platform governance, public media literacy).

    Thesis 2 — Psychological-manipulation frame (best for evidence-driven argument)
     Thesis: Rage-bait media—exemplified by To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones—exploits cognitive biases (moral outrage, availability heuristic, social proof) to increase engagement, and that manipulation converts viewers into amateur prosecutors and conspiracy enforcers, producing measurable social harms like harassment, miscarriages of public trust, and political polarization.
    Map: (1) summarize psychological mechanisms; (2) show how production choices trigger those biases in the two cases; (3) cite empirical consequences (harassment, wrongful accusations, erosion of trust); (4) recommend policy and audience-level interventions.

    Thesis 3 — Comparative-intent frame (best for nuanced balance)
     Thesis: While To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones both monetize outrage, they differ in intentionality and practical outcomes—one trafficked in staged public shaming with ambiguous law-enforcement complicity; the other peddles wholesale distrust—yet both converge in the same social result: normalizing spectacle as a substitute for justice and public reasoning.
    Map: (1) compare production intent and methods; (2) detail convergent harms despite different aims; (3) argue why intent does not absolve societal damage; (4) close with corrective measures that address both content creation and platform incentives.

    Three likely counterarguments and tight rebuttals

    Counterargument 1 — “They serve the public good: exposing predators / exposing lies.”
     Claim: Defenders argue To Catch a Predator and figures like Jones uncover dangerous people and warn the public—both perform watchdog functions that mainstream institutions neglect.
    Rebuttal: Exposure can be legitimate, but methods matter. When producers stage confrontations or flout safety protocols, they risk false positives, entrapment claims, and endangering both suspects and vigilante viewers. Similarly, Jones’s “exposés” often rely on unverified claims that harm innocents and erode trust in verified institutions; exposing wrongdoing while abandoning standards of verification is not accountability but sensationalism. Evidence-based journalism follows verification and respects due process; rage-bait substitutes spectacle for those constraints.

    Counterargument 2 — “Audience agency: viewers choose to watch—blame the audience for wanting spectacle.”
     Claim: Some say demand creates supply: if people didn’t tune in to outrage, producers wouldn’t supply it. Viewers are responsible for their choices.
    Rebuttal: Demand is shaped by supply. Media design and platform algorithms amplify outrage, reinforce confirmation bias, and make the extreme more visible. Moreover, many viewers do not have the media-literacy tools to parse staged setups or conspiratorial rhetoric. Responsibility therefore rests both with producers and with platforms that monetize attention; blaming passive viewers ignores the structural incentives that manufacture and magnify the spectacle.

    Counterargument 3 — “Different aims—public safety vs. entertainment—so comparison is unfair.”
     Claim: Critics argue the comparison collapses distinct categories: a sting operation aimed at child safety is not morally equivalent to a conspiracy show that pushes falsehoods.
    Rebuttal: Distinguishing aims matters, but consequences and methods matter more for public judgment. When public-safety rhetoric is deployed to justify theatrics—compromising police protocols for ratings—the boundary between service and spectacle disappears. Both enterprises monetize outrage, and both can cultivate a culture of punishment without procedure. Comparing them is not moral leveling so much as showing how different rationales can converge on the same harmful social model.

  • The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    Yesterday I watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones and came away unsettled and discouraged. The film lays out, with testimony and footage, how a powerful falsehood about the Sandy Hook massacre metastasized into a lived reality for many—how ordinary people came to believe grieving parents were actors in some sinister plot. The human cost is plain: families harassed, reputations shredded, lives made worse by a rumor that would not die. The documentary also cites polling that suggests this belief is far from fringe, which is precisely what made me sit up and take notice.

    Alan Jacobs, in How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, gave me a frame for that discomfort. Jacobs argues that critical thinking is not merely a set of intellectual tools; it is a moral posture. It requires humility—the readiness to admit you might be wrong—intellectual rigor, and a willingness to engage, civilly, with rival views. In a public sphere where grievance entrepreneurs monetize confusion and cruelty, Jacobs’s point feels less like scholastic nicety and more like civic equipment. To believe in the conspiracy about Sandy Hook is less of an intellectual deficiency and more of a moral one. Willful ignorance is born of belligerence.

    There are historical moments when falsehoods gain unusual traction and the public square warps into a theater of lies. Watching the documentary, I thought about those moments not as distant epochs but as warnings: when social media rewards certainty over care, and when spectacle drowns out verification, civic habits fray. On the evening he announced his retirement, anchor Brian Williams put it bluntly when he spoke of “evil winds” in our national weather—less a prophecy than an observation that the job of keeping the truth in view has grown harder.

    That’s where I am: uneasy, but oddly steadied by the thought that civic muscles can be strengthened with small, repeated acts. Viktor Frankl reminded us that life’s circumstances often determine the work we must do; perhaps one task for this hour is to preserve the habits that let a shared reality exist in the first place.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

    One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

    Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

    My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

    That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

    Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

    Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

  • Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were vacationing in Maui. There, on the beach, I spotted a short, compact man in his mid-seventies parading around in dark-blue Speedos with a woman at least fifty years his junior — a striking Mediterranean beauty in her twenties. The guy was trim, well-manscaped, scampering confidently on the sand like a millionaire who spends half his life in boardrooms and the other half trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. He dove into the waves with the vigor of someone convinced that as long as he keeps moving, Father Time can’t catch him.

    You could smell the wealth on him. He was probably a CEO with a portfolio big enough to buy the illusion of eternal youth. He worked hard and played harder, to borrow Hugh Hefner’s mantra. Now, I’m not here to pass moral judgment on a man who chooses a partner young enough to be his granddaughter — that’s his business. What fascinates me is the fantasy: money, discipline, and a little manscaping used as talismans against aging, as if youth were a rare potion you could sip to stay forever young.

    The whole tableau, though, felt wrong. He and his youthful companion were mismatched puzzle pieces jammed together by brute will. It was as if two jagged halves of a broken mirror had been glued into place; every forced smile and awkward embrace chipped another sliver off, until all that remained was a pile of glittering shards — the perfect image for the futility of trying to cheat time.

    This rich, fit man is Father Time’s frenemy — the one who insists they’re on friendly terms while secretly plotting a hostile takeover. He may have sold himself a “perfect picture,” but the public sees the mismatch as plainly as a traffic cone in a tuxedo. The spectacle exposes his poverty: an inability to relinquish something that no longer belongs to him, a clinging to youth that reveals fear rather than confidence. That fear, in turn, sabotages his aspiration to curate an enviable life; the attempt to perform eternal youth only underlines the loss he refuses to admit.

    I’m reminded, uncomfortably, of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted. Born in Ecuador in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Ferraro turned to bodybuilding, gambling, and organized crime as a teenager, hungry for money, women, clothes, and respect. He got it all — a Rolex Daytona, gold necklaces, designer sunglasses large enough to require their own zip code — until seven months in prison and eventual deportation stripped him of his infrastructure. In his sixties, he’s a sculpted caricature: tank top, ostentatious sport coat draped like a cape, and penetrating melancholy eyes that reveal he knows the score. He says he wants his life back, but knows he’s too old for the young man’s game and can’t look away from it.

    Both the rich man in Maui and Ferraro in exile put me in mind of Lot’s wife. They cannot relinquish the lifestyle that defines them; youth is their identity, and the thought of being disconnected from it registers as a kind of death. Unable to let go, they calcify into pillars of salt — frozen monuments to a self that no longer exists.

  • Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

    It’s rare that I fall in love with books these days, but when it happens, I’m grateful because reading reminds me of my glory days, the early 80s when I consumed books with ferocity, imaginative pleasure, and obligation like a bodybuilder taking protein powder and creatine. Three major factors have curtailed my reading of books: One, I’ve grown so cynical over the years that I’ve come to the belief that 99% of books are in actuality just a short story or essay with padding. An author has an intriguing idea, and they sit down with their agent and cook up a book that is mostly chicanery with a dash of substance. 

    Then three days ago, I heard actor Zosia Mamet talking about her memoir Does This Make Me Funny?, a collection of essays, with KCRW host Sam Sanders, and I was so struck by her depth of wit, intelligence, and moral perspective that I immediately bought her book, or I should say the Kindle eBook version of it. Even more rare than buying books as intellectual property, it is even rarer that I buy a hard copy of something, unless it is a kettlebell training book or a cookbook like Miyoko Schimmer’s The Vegan Creamery. 

    Getting most of my books on Kindle speaks to the second reason my reading has diminished. The physical act of reading is unpleasant. Holding the book, turning the pages, getting into a comfortable position, attenuating my eyes to the various font sizes. I find the whole thing disconcerting and unpleasant, like trying to figure out the seat positions, buttons, and levers of an unfamiliar car. The most comfortable forms of reading are either sitting at my desktop and reading the Kindle on a 27-inch screen or reading while sitting in bed with a 16-inch laptop.

    The third reason I don’t read as much is that the Internet and its attention economy have fried my brain over the decades. The attention muscles inside my cortex have atrophied to a woeful state. 

    But occasionally a rose grows out of the cracks in the cement sidewalk, and such is the case with Zosia Mamet’s memoir, as witty, deep, self-deprecating, and salient as the author speaking to Sam Sanders three days ago. Reading the memoir is to connect with someone for whom her writing voice and the core of her being are the same. The result is something distinctive and salient, something that recoils and then snaps forward to leave its literary fangs inside you. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Nabokov was like that. So was Kafka. And so is Zosia Mamet.

    I detest some confectionary celebrity memoir reeking of privilege, superfluousness, and mediocrity. None of that is in Zosia’s collection of essays. 

    As we read in Jancee Dunn’s New York Times article “At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It,” the core of her book is about her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Coming from a family that is deeply entrenched in literature and the arts is a double-edged sword with excruciating pressure to live up to superhuman expectations causing Zosia’s thorn in her side to be the constant sense that she is falling abysmally short. 

    Like the best comedia, she opts out of self-pity for humor as she does a deep dive into her anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, anorexia, and anhedonia, and all the self-destructive behaviors she succumbed to in order to overcome these afflictions. Because she knows that body dysmorphia is a delusion that hijacks her brain, she says about herself: “I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality.” 

    Which in a nutshell is the human condition: Can we trust ourselves or are we getting duped by our own fake narrative? 

    What tools from our emotional toolbox can we use to be more reliable? Perhaps comedy is one of them. Think of our irrational states: overcome by maudlin self-pity, vanity, and grandiosity, we spin grotesque narratives about ourselves that compel us to behave in ways that are ridiculous and often result in self-sabotage. Perhaps comedy is the antidote. Perhaps comedy distances us from our preposterous self-mythology and helps us in the arduous process of self-reinvention. That’s the sense I’m getting from Zosia Mamet’s very necessary book, a book that has no padding at all but has been made from a brilliant mind with blood, sweat, and tears. 

  • The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    The Villages Killed My Florida Dream

    Recently I dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it like they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side like a misplaced airport refugee, and then I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop. This was not their first rodeo: it was their fifth marriage each, the residue of decades spent riding the carousel of lust, liquor, and litigation. Their message was plastered across the sky: hedonism may lead to divorce court, bankruptcy, and sun-damaged skin, but look—if you just keep grinning, it’s practically a lifestyle brand.

    I felt an almost religious revulsion at the billboard. It was hollow cheer dressed up as wisdom, a glossy ad for despair masquerading as joie de vivre. Pulling my luggage closer, I glanced at my watch and felt relief that my wife and daughters would be joining me soon. The counterfeit joy overhead only made me hunger more for the real life that I have.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground-for-the-aged about forty-five miles from Orlando. If synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties sounds like paradise, The Villages will sell you heaven with a tiki umbrella on top. For anyone with taste, patience, or shame, it reads more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay staff to micromanage your leisure until even leisure looks like a job interview.

    The film’s most magnetic human mess is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who’s practiced charm until it’s fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment and in a scene that sticks with you he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it’s a slow, merciless clock—and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can be prison for someone whose last liberty was earned by deceit.

    The director never sneers at the subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable: it’s a retirement complex caught mid-regression, a carnival mirror that reflects geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The architecture of fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom; it’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops. For a year I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. Some Kind of Heaven demolished the fantasy with water ballet and sedated margaritas. The obsession evaporated. Apparently, all it took was Neil Sedaka and a ceiling-fan stare.

  • The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    The Carton of Milk Expiration Date on Your $3,000 Smart TV

    Today to make room for a brand new LG OLED TV, we played a round of Musical TVs, the sad cousin of Musical Chairs, where everyone gets a screen but no one gets a perfect fit. The ten-year-old, 43-inch LG—now equipped with a trusty Roku brain—was dragged into the limbo-like office while my daughter debates whether it’s worth sacrificing square footage in her already modest quarters. The 50-inch Samsung, a QLED that once lorded over the living room, now teeters on another daughter’s dresser, swallowing what little space she had left for, say, books. I myself dragged the other Samsung—a year-old 50-incher—into the primary bedroom, wedging it precariously above the dresser like a luminous monolith threatening to tip over in the night.

    Here’s the irony: both Samsungs, with their decent QLED panels, are sluggish as elderly donkeys thanks to endless software updates. The new champ in the living room, a sleek 55-inch LG OLED with all the bells, whistles, and marketing superlatives, purrs along just fine and the interface moves at lightning speed. 

    The oldest and smallest of the TVs, the 43-inch LG, weighs more than both Samsungs combined. It radiates old-school build quality, but if I mounted it on the wall, the drywall would come crashing down in an avalanche that would obliterate my family mid–Netflix binge. 

    What important lesson have I learned? These so-called “smart TVs” are dumb as dirt. You spend $700 to $3,000, and in a few years the software updates strangle the hardware until it wheezes. The fix is cheap and almost comically obvious: don’t throw the TV out—give it a new brain. A Roku or Apple TV box, a mere $100 to $150, resurrects the panel for another decade. A carton of milk lasts longer than a smart TV OS, but a $99 box of plastic keeps the pixels glowing.