On a colder than normal October evening, years and years ago, I stopped by my buddy’s restaurant for post-work takeout. As usual, the crew were a few joints in and watching a movie that shouldn’t be on a public television. But this time there was something I had never seen before.

Anna Paquin wandering through the woods dressed like Little Red Riding Hood before getting attacked by what appeared to be a vampire. Well, shit. So much for whatever I’d planned on watching that night. I went home, fired up Trick ’r Treat, and found something I’d end up watching annually the way one would A Christmas Story or Home Alone.

Michael Dougherty’s 2007 cult classic is a mean-spirited, gleefully silly anthology of campfire stories carved up and reassembled (think Creepshow meets Pulp Fiction) that somehow becomes the perfect embodiment of the season. You can nitpick the threads, but the whole thing works far better than it has any right to.

Most importantly, Trick ‘r Treat looks and feels like Halloween in a way I don’t think any film ever has or ever will.

Taking place on a Halloween night where we find the residents of a small midwestern town discovering that some traditions are best left unbroken. Interwoven stories follow the local principal hiding a dark secret, young teens investigating a local legend, the aforementioned Red Riding hood lost while in search of the right companion, and a bitter recluse facing his past. Their paths cross, all while a burlap-sacked Halloween Cop lurks in their shadows, ensuring that disrespecting the holiday comes with deadly consequences.

For realiously. This movie has everything: an old school safety video, an opening that serves as an homage to the original Halloween’s, an EC comics-inspired title sequence, a little kid dressed like Chucky that hates Charlie Brown, a “Phantom Vampire,” urban legends, monsters, a Marilyn Manson needle-drop, Brian Cox as a Scrooge/John Carpenter hybrid (with scenes that nod to Christine, The Fog and The Thing, no less), a musical cue from Scooby Doo, a Pet Semetary reference, an Evil Dead-style finale, plus, Coach Taylor was in a hot dog costume butt-fucking a pig, I think?

There are dead leaves underfoot, jack-o’-lanterns on every porch, and always, always, something potentially awful happening just down the block. It captures what I think is a very real childhood feeling that, for one night, all the spooky shit might actually be real.

And being a kid won’t save you.

🏴‍☠️ Arr, matey!

📖 Soviet-era Hobbit illustrations.

💰 You cannot convince me that the gents who occupy the lockers next to me at the club aren’t considering pulling off one last job.

🤔 New motto? “Every day I should create a little and destroy a little.”

👩‍💻 DoorDash.com was once a pornhub.

🕹️ Some random Tetris tid bits.

👏 Congrats to Maria Popova on twenty years of The Marginalian, “marginalia on our search for meaning” and “learning to live.” Always inspiring.

🎨 11 things learned in art school. Among them: “You don’t have to like an important work of art just because it’s an important work of art. You also don’t have to shit on it just because other people are.”

💬 Talk less, listen more and “other top tips on giving good advice.”

Do they actually want my advice?

Am I jumping in too quickly?

Have I really got the answer?

💪 From 2001, Black Flag: a 12-step program in self-reliance.

“I can do this, so I’ll do it.”

— Greg Ginn

❤️ Keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

Surprised this was one of the most compelling films I’ve ever seen in a theatre, even more surprised to see Billy’s dick, but even more surprised to see my buddy Phillip!

On Nathan for You, comedian Nathan Fielder would often offer (real) small businesses advice so bizarre that watching someone consider it would be unbelievable had you not been watching it with your own eyes. On screen, he often plays a fictional version of himself, though those around him are largely unaware. In You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes might have reversed the roles.

Co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, the movie begins about a month before Holmes goes to prison for investor fraud over her company Theranos, a startup that claimed it could run many medical tests using just a few drops of blood. This proves untrue, but Holmes holds steadfast and unwavering that she never lied about it; it was just a matter of semantics.

She and her partner, hotel-heir Billy Evans, give the filmmakers unfettered access to their domestic life. Fielder stays in their home, asking questions while the couple plays with their children, break bread, and discusses a future that seems both performative and delusional.

Somehow this becomes one of the most compelling things I’ve ever seen in a theatre. And this despite having limited knowledge of Holmes and no interest in The Dropout, the miniseries that was made about her life for Hulu.

There is a Nathan for You bit where a child feeds Fielder answers through an earpiece during a law-firm interview. Here, Nathan is in something closer to the interviewer’s position. His access to Holmes lets him observe her closely without necessarily understanding her motives or establishing who is shaping what he is being told. Eventually Fielder shows Holmes and Evans “Who’s on First?,” an old timey bit about the confusion of language, to explain what talking to her feels like. Or, more specifically, why she might feel she is being misunderstood. Her response requires further discussion.

Oppenheim shoots these conversations so that even when you’re laughing, you’re watching Holmes and Evans for any sign of something else. A glance amongst them may seem revealing until one of them speaks and you’re confused again. Nathan’s presence further complicates things. At times it feels like Oppenheim making a documentary about Fielder making a documentary about Holmes.

Fielder is our investigator, but he’s also another person in the room with motives and blind spots, not to mention a particular way of presenting himself. Here, his apparent confusion becomes harder to separate from the very real possibility that he has lost his footing.

Billy complicates this further. He met Holmes after the accusations. He’s now raising children with her and planning for her absence. I wondered what he made of Nathan’s questions, and Nathan in general. How much of this had they already discussed privately? What did he think needed explaining? Their life together gives Nathan something to observe, but Billy has a stake in how that life appears on camera as well.

Fielder’s attention to Holmes begins to feel… off. Is he attracted to her? There are moments when that seems like a reasonable question, even though as far as we can tell, the only person’s genitals we see Fielder get a glimpse of are Billy’s. I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to understand her or wanted to believe her, or if at times he wanted something else.

SPOILERS:

Somehow Amanda Seyfried complicates things. Earlier we see Homes allegedly watching The Drop-Out for the first time. Later, we see Seyfried, star of said Drop-Out, watching Nathan’s footage. Later, she joins Fielder to reconstruct conversations with the actual Holmes that he couldn’t film, but it becomes more meta than that.

Seyfried has already spent considerable time interpreting this woman, or at least she feels like she has. Now she’s interpreting Nathan’s interpretation while responding as herself to the people involved. She brings an emotional directness that changes the film’s rhythm. She participates in the exercise and questions the person conducting it. At times, her responses sound like anyone drinking wine and dissecting a true crime podcast or Netflix doc as they are watching it.

As Fielder reconstructs his prison conversation with Holmes, small decisions seem to carry enormous weight. I’m sure Nathan wants to get it right, but doing so requires deciding what Holmes meant. Watching him direct Seyfried becomes a way of watching him think about Holmes. More uncomfortably, it arguably becomes a way of watching him feel about her.

The comparison to Orson Welles’ F for Fake makes sense: both films begin with people known for deception, then gradually turn that scrutiny on the filmmaker’s own authority. Welles shows that storytelling can manufacture belief; Fielder explores how a desire to tell the truth can coexist with an attachment to the subject that ends up shaping the story told.

I would guess that all of us have wanted to believe someone simply because we care about them. Here, Oppenheimer and Fielder examine that across documentary, performance, how we treat celebrity, the news media, social media, consequences, and an actress deciding the best way to deliver a sentence.

📜 Get up early, even when you don’t feel like it. Reflect before the day takes control of you. Stay engaged in the world you actively live in. Ryan Holiday on living like a stoic in modern times.

👾 If you live in my neck of the woods, tomorrow night is Downtown East Lansing’s ‘80s Night, Presented by RetroDuck. Pinball Pete’s will have games in the streets, Starfarm will be playing the hits and we’ll be giving away about 600 t-shirts.

🕊️ Birds may use dreams not just to rehearse what they know, but to explore what they could do differently.

🧑‍💻 The Ringer article argues that Google Search isn’t just getting worse, it’s transforming from a gateway to the web into a destination that tries to answer everything itself. And to that end, I personally believe thus far it’s doing a piss-poor job.

📲 In some states, you can add your driver’s license to your Apple Wallet.

📖 In the Los Angles Public Library, the world’s largest pop-up book.

💵 In Chicago, the library is handing out reciepts to let patrons know how much they’ve “saved.”

🗺️ Why mapmakers inserted fake towns into their work in the 1920s.

🧑‍🚀 Astronauts returning from six-month missions describe a persistent ‘observer’ sensation. “They sit at dinner with family and feel like a guest. They drive on a familiar street and feel like they’re piloting it. The room is loud and they are in it, but a part of them is hovering near the ceiling, taking notes.”

🌞 For our last few summer days:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

✌️ Are ya keeping that Hoping Machine running?

Love,

Luke

I was 12 when O.J. Simpson interrupted Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals.

At the time, I knew him mainly as the guy from The Naked Gun. I couldn’t have explained the charges against him or why the chase mattered more than the game. I could have told you the Knicks were in the Finals and that even though I am sure I loved things other than basketball, it didn’t feel that way. I had picked the Knicks somewhat arbitrarily. I didn’t care about the Rockets, and I was too young to appreciate Hakeem. My Pistons had gone 20–62. Jordan was playing baseball. Shaq had turned the league upside down, but Orlando was out. The Knicks were what I had left. Spike Lee intrigued me at an early age, apparently.

The game stayed on, technically. NBC pushed it into a little box while the Bronco moved down the freeway. I was furious at the Bronco, at O.J., at the network, probably at the entire adult world. Put the car in the little box.

Watching June 17th, 1994 brought that anger right back. The 30 for 30 doc is made almost entirely from footage recorded that day: Arnold Palmer playing his final round at the U.S. Open, the World Cup beginning, Ken Griffey Jr. chasing Roger Maris, the Rangers celebrating their only Stanley Cup, the Knicks and Rockets at Madison Square Garden, and O.J. in the Bronco.

I remember Griffey’s home run chase. I remember the World Cup. I watched SportsCenter religiously. By this time, it felt like homework for anyone who wanted to be considered cool. You needed the scores, the highlights, the names and whatever pop-culture references the anchors were throwing around, even when you didn’t understand them. Missing an episode meant arriving at school with nothing to say and a lack of proof you hadn’t been watching cartoons instead.

By that summer, it had become habit. I kept watching for at least another decade, long after I stopped needing the information for the next day’s conversations.

Sports came at me as one long feed in 1994. Baseball ran into basketball, basketball into hockey, hockey into the World Cup. SportsCenter gathered everything up each morning and told you what you had missed, and by extension, what mattered.

Then the Bronco drove into the feed and stayed there, in one form or another, for the next year and a half.

The Knicks won Game 5. Game 6 was Sunday. By Monday, I was at summer camp. Game 7 was Wednesday night, and the counselors refused to let us watch.

We were supposed to sleep while the Knicks played Game 7 of the NBA Finals. I would still like to know what principle was being upheld. My counselor’s name was Jacque. He was either 16 or 40. He let us cuss and then threatened to tell our parents when we didn’t do what we were told.

Lights-out accomplished nothing, not even with the threat of being narced on over using the F-word. We whispered across the cabin and tried to guess what was happening. I have a vague memory that someone was getting updates, though I can’t imagine how. At one point, a boy snuck out to look for a television and came back empty-handed.

We talked for hours. At least it felt like hours.

We found out early the next morning that the Knicks lost. John Starks went 2-for-18. My memory of the night has almost nothing to do with the game itself. I remember the bunks, the darkness and the whispered arguments over pointless hypotheticals.

It was one of the best nights of my life.

There was a girl at camp named Sarah. I fell in love with her, which at that age meant that I thought about her constantly and could barely speak when she was nearby. I did manage to ask her to “go out with me.” That was probably the longest conversation we ever had.

She gave me a friendship bracelet. Before camp ended, there was a dance. I had kissed a girl. At some point before I had my first kiss at a thing called “Kids Night Out” at the nearby high school. I had asked successfully asked two girls to “go out” during the school year, even though nobody went anywhere. This was different. Dancing with Sarah seemed real, or different, or whatever, standing very close and trying not to look terrified. I had one hand somewhere near her waist and the other holding hers, though I was thinking so hard about whether I was doing it right that I barely heard the music. She had given me a friendship bracelet, which made the whole thing feel official in a way I couldn’t have explained. I was pretty sure were going to get married, even though I had never even heard of the town she lived in.

Then “Tears in Heaven” came on.

Sarah started crying. I wondered whether I had done something wrong. I tried to understand what Eric Clapton was singing and what it had to do with us.

Her brother had died earlier that year. The song made her think of him.

I had no vocabulary for that. I stood there waiting for the right thing to say. Nothing came. I don’t remember what I eventually did. We may have kept dancing. I may have asked what was wrong. I may have said nothing.

Somehow, watching the movie brought Sarah back too. It doesn’t matter that the evening had nothing nothing to do with that specific day in question.

That whole summer sits together in my memory: the Knicks, Griffey, the World Cup, the Bronco, the cabin, Sarah, the friendship bracelet, that song. I already knew “Tears in Heaven” was sad. I had no idea yet what sadness could contain.

The movie has no narrator. It doesn’t organize the day or tell you what it meant or what everyone learned. The people on-screen fill airtime, repeat rumors and wait for something to happen. Most of them have no idea how the story ends.

At twelve, I assumed that eventually someone would explain everything. SportsCenter usually did the next morning.

I loved camp. Game 7 night remains one of the best nights I can remember, even with the Knicks losing somewhere beyond the woods. Sarah’s grief remains attached to that dance, and the dance remains sweet.

The movie ends by noting that the Knicks had not won a championship since May 10, 1973. That line is finally out of date. They won this summer. Spike Lee was there. The World Cup returned to the United States too.

I started out trying to review a documentary about one day in 1994. I ended up back in a cabin after lights-out, listening to boys invent a basketball game we weren’t allowed to see, swearing, swimming, campfires, first loves, and maybe growing up.

Five stars. I suspect most of them are for the summer and being 12.

📡 Starting at 3pm today and thru the weekend, 97.5 becomes PRIDE FM, powered by RetroDuck.

🌇 Yesterday was my last day on East Lansing’s Downtown Development Authority, the culmination of sixteen years serving the city.

⚽️ A look at the World Cup and sports’ ability to inspire. “Although fleeting, sporting events have the enduring power to crumble divisions and highlight the beauty of kinship.”

🏀 All the NBA fans in my life are obsessed with 82-0, where the objective “is to construct a historical NBA roster capable of achieving a perfect undefeated season.”

💿 The Complete Kubrick is coming to the Criterion Collection.

📼 A shop in West Michigan that stocks over 10,000 VHS tapes.

🍕 Apparently West Michigan is bringing back Pizza Huts, too. If they can bring back

🎬 Re: influences on Star Wars, I knew about Hidden Fortress, but never knew about Dam Busters.

🎨 Pallet Inspiration: “Explore color palettes extracted from thousands of masterworks - from Renaissance elegance to Impressionist light.”

👩‍🍳 Pudding’s interactive look at the earliest restaurants in the United States, including a map of 5,000 historical menus.

🚽 Apparently ya just have to poop at the Eiffel Tower.

🤔 Are people laughing at you behind your back? Maybe you are doing something right, so says Seth Godin. “If that’s not happening, it’s possible you’re not being bold enough, generous enough or creative enough.

It might be teenagers, competitors or that stranger down the street, but generous creative leadership always creates skeptics.”

🎼 Been listening to this quite a bit as of late.

Come Monday night we turn the telly off,

to listen to the silence.

Light that comes in from outside,

if you could catch it all

and pin it to your wall

then you would sleep much better.

Baby, you would sleep much better.

Maybe you would sleep much better.

Baby, you would sleep much better.

❤️ Get some rest, and keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

There are arguably albums that sound “like the ‘90s,” and then there are albums that sound like the idea of the ‘90s if the decade had spent less time buying cargo shorts and puka shells at the mall and more time flirting in all-ages clubs.

Seasick, the 1996 debut from Imperial Teen, belongs firmly in the second category. In my mind, it’s one of the great indie-pop records of its era: it’s sly, glamorous, emotional, catchy enough to burrow into your skull for decades, and just weird enough to avoid becoming anybody’s “commercial breakthrough.” It also just flat-out rocks.

I just did a quick Google Search and nobody, and I mean literally nobody wrote about the 30th anniversary this month of what I consider one of the best alternative albums of the ‘90s, and while I get it (read on), man, someone has to.

I caught wind of the band in the most correct possible way: on a mixtape. An actual cassette tape. A friend, J.W., gave me a tape1 that included “Water Boy” alongside Pixies, The Rentals and Built to Spill.

Honestly, that whole chain of transmission feels deeply appropriate for Imperial Teen. Post-Nirvana, a lot of the indie stuff that came before and a few years later seemed to be discovered socially, through local legends, tastemakers, dubbed Maxell tapes, and friend networks. You didn’t encounter a band like Imperial Teen via radio or an algorithm gently suggesting that “you may also enjoy emotionally this complicated indie pop.” You heard them because some cooler, stranger person than you slipped a tape into your hand and said, essentially: trust me2.

At least that was my experience.

Anyhow. “Water Boy” is such a perfect mixtape song. It’s quick and distorted and loud. I had to hear more. What I got was what Q Magazine called a “lo-fi mix of Californian psychedelia, trash punk riffage and instant pop hooks....hazy, good humoured goofiness and thrashy, angst-ridden chords.”

Imperial Teen formed in San Francisco in the mid-’90s. Keyboardist and singer Roddy Bottum was already known from Faith No More, which meant at least one member had previously spent the early ’90s inside one of alternative rock’s strangest accidental mainstream successes. But Imperial Teen felt almost deliberately anti-macho, bright where Faith No More were abrasive, intimate where that band was theatrical.

Alongside Bottum were guitarist/vocalist Will Schwartz, drummer/vocalist Lynn Perko Truell, and bassist/vocalist Jone Stebbins. The key to the whole operation, arguably, was that everyone sang. Not in the wholesome “drunk friends around a campfire” way, but in overlapping, conversational bursts. Indie designed by people who loved passive aggression, or ABBA by way of Pixies. That four-way vocal chemistry is all over Seasick. Songs don’t unfold so much as ricochet between personalities.

The album opens with “Imperial Teen3,” featuring sly glamour, emotional ambiguity, eventual fuzz and conversational vocals that feel half flirty/half social-warfare.

Immediately following is the aforementioned “Water Boy,” which immediately establishes the band’s central magic trick: disguising razor-sharp songwriting as something tossed off in ten minutes while somebody sat on an amp eating candy bought at a gas station. My ears still ring from listening to “Bow down to me, bow down, yeah baby, baby” as loud as the stock speakers in my ‘97 Chevy Cavalier would allow.

I won’t go track-by-track, but honestly, listening to the record right now, it’s all bangers. “You’re One”, the one with the music video and arguably one of the best indie-pop singles of the decade. Maybe ever. Probably ever. It’s built around a chorus so simple and direct that it almost feels accidental. You hear it once and suddenly you’re wandering through your kitchen three days later muttering “you’re one…” and “peace and love and empathy…” to yourself like you’ve been lightly hexed.

Beneath all the wit and occasional stylish detachment, Seasick is full of bruised feelings and emotional honesty, not unlike the other and more conventional answer to what is the indie-pop album of 1996. The songs are packed with longing, insecurity, crushes, jealousy, and emotional negotiations so small they’d barely qualify as “drama” in a different band’s hands. Here, they become entire universes. “Pig Latin,” the ballad, is basically my whole deal, at least deep down.

Revisiting the album now, one of the most fascinating things is how long it took me to clock how openly queer it is. Completely off my radar in the ‘90s, but the flirtation, the gender play, the emotional codes, the campy glamour, the way desire shifts perspectives without explanation or apology, it’s all there. Christagu clocked it immediately: “Coy about their Faith No More link, which leaves no mark on their hand-crafted jangle-pop. Not so coy about their gay subtext, which--well, as they say themselves, ‘our subtext is our plot.’ A painful one, too.”

Roddy Bottum was one of the few openly gay figures connected to major alternative rock in that era. But Imperial Teen didn’t approach queerness as “issue-oriented” songwriting. There are no big declarations4 or heavy-handed identity anthems. Instead, Seasick treats queer perspective as completely normal as it should be.

That may actually be why younger listeners in the ’90s could miss it. Or at least why this then-sheltered smalltown boy did. In retrospect, that ambiguity feels incredibly queer in itself, at least when tethered to its era. But Seasick is full of side-eye, understatement, theatrical coolness, and emotional exaggeration delivered with a smirk. Not a joke band, more like “the funniest person at the party quietly saying something devastating while staring into their Solo cup” funny.

But there’s a “sad but rad” energy that does come through. As SPIN5 wrote in ‘96, shortly before putting at #4 on their albums of that year, “the happy/sad lyrics draw you in with abstract intimacy...”

There’s a bit of lore, as the kids say, connecting parts of Seasick to Kurt Cobain. My research could be a bit off on this one, but apparently “Butch,” containing the lyric “death is worth the price of fame.”

But elsewhere, including a New York Times reference repeated in later bios, “You’re One” has also been described as “the song about Kurt Cobain.” Honestly, both interpretations make sense. “Butch” feels spiritually tied to Cobain because it’s loaded with gender tension and queer subtext. “The prince wants to be a queen” remains one of the album’s most revealing lines, and Cobain himself famously challenged macho rock culture, spoke publicly about homophobia, and had a kind of yearning relationship to femininity and queerness in his art and presentation.

At the same time, “You’re One” absolutely carries Cobain’s shadow too. The loud/soft dynamics, the raw emotional desperation, the way desire and pain blur together. It feels deeply post-Nirvana. One critic even described it as “the fulfillment of Kurt Cobain’s queer envy.”6

Another song that sticks out to me is “Luxury,” which opens thusly:

“I licked the lap of luxury

Bit off enough to chew

I love the taste of anything

That I can spit at you

I feel bad to be good

And so misunderstood

About bad and what’s good

And what’s misunderstood

To be had is too good

To be misunderstood

It’s just sad that I don’t have a friend.”

Later in the song, that line becomes “It’s just sad that I don’t have a gun.”

The emotional complexity may also explain why Imperial Teen never fully broke through commercially. Arguably, by 1996 alternative rock had already hardened into recognizable commercial lanes: post-grunge angst, pop-punk brattiness, Lilith Fair earnestness, electronic cool. Imperial Teen didn’t fit quite any of them. Perhaps they were too pop for indie purists, too gay for the mainstream, too emotionally ambiguous for commercial pop, and too funny to benefit from the “serious artist” mythology that helped a lot of ’90s bands. Afterall, it took Weezer half a decade to climb back to the top after Pinkerton flopped.

Thankfully, Imperial Teen kept quietly making solid albums, the kind that maybe inspires lifelong attachment rather than mass conversion. I think they could have a bigger audience, but it doesn’t help that an album this good basically doesn’t even exist thirty years later. What I wouldn’t give for this on vinyl and streaming.

Seasick originally came out through the tangled ’90s major-label ecosystem of Slash and London Records, apparently exactly the kind of catalog territory where rights issues, mergers, and neglected licensing agreements can leave beloved albums digitally orphaned. What kept me writing about the album last year when I highlighted 50 that mattered to me perhaps the most was that it’s not available in a record store and it’s not on any major streaming platforms. While they have their fans, they’re apparently not commercially gigantic enough for corporate catalog departments to aggressively maintain their streaming presence. And, ironically7, the band’s sensibility feels more contemporary now than it did in 1996. A younger audience discovering Seasick today would probably hear it less on the wavelength of the songs from its era that have stuck around and more for what it is: the kind of album attached to friends, rooms, tapes, drives home, nicknames, heartbreaks, local legends, and entire emotional eras of your life.

Where a streaming recommendation says: “listen to this,” a mixtape said “this reminds me of you.”

Thirty years later, Seasick still sounds like discovering the coolest band in the world because somebody weird and trustworthy handed me a cassette.

🎺 “Many musicians were born. Miles was lightning that hit the planet on May 26, 1926,” wrote Nas in a new foreword to the recently re-released Miles: The Autobiography.

💿 New Modest Mouse incoming, to which I am cautiously optimistic.

🎼 An ancient, philosophical Song reconstructed and played for the first time in 1,000 years.

⏺️ Aadam Jacobs "secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989. Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online."

📝 On the decline of the movie tagline.

🎥 Asif Kapadia will “bring the long-running ITV documentary series Up to an end with a concluding instalment that will air this year,” so says The Guardian.

🎬 In January, 50 artists followed Werner Herzog to work on short films on an island in the Azores archipelago. “This was the crux of his workshop: Take your camera, get the shot, forgo storyboards, don’t overdo it and, above all else, do the doable. For many this advice was, if not groundbreaking, then certainly liberating.” A few years ago I posted some filmmaking advice from the master.

🤔 Thoughts on making it small in Hollywood from Mike Birbiglia. “Do the things you love. Because no one is paying you anyway… and even if they are, nobody’s really waiting for your thing… Start now. There’s no reason to wait. You can have another job and do that, too.”

📜 Homeric literature discovered on papyrus in Egypt. “According to Field Director Hassan Ibrahim Amer, the papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the “Catalogue of Ships,” which describes the Greek forces that participated in the Trojan War.”

🚏 Love these vintage bus passes.

🎧 Listened to Wil Wheaton read Stephen King’s The Body today as I walked the dog and did yard work. Would recommend!

✍️ Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to prevent World War II through moral persuasion and his philosophy of nonviolence. “You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skillfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war.”

✌️ Keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

🌒 Taken from Artemis II, an incredible shot of the moon eclipsing the sun (see also).

💿 New Strokes coming…

💬 Even if you collect physical books, $25 for the ENTIRE PEANUTS is too good to pass up, especially when the money goes to pups. How this isn’t national news is a travesty.

🧭 Behold: a finely crafted brass compass whose needle trembles not for north, but for unlimited breadsticks.

🎲 12,000 years ago, Native Americans were playing games of chance with handmade dice.

✍️ Writers: always read the publication you wish to contribute to. Editors emphasize taste, authority, and ideas shaped by wide reading. Publishing ecosystems reward engagement; there’s no shortcut to developing sensibility.

🎨 Street artists “take on monumental infrastructure in ‘impossible’ photos.”

🙌 I wrote a litte about the screen printing nun on the ole blog. “On Easter, maybe Sister Kent helps remind us that resurrection isn’t just a story, it’s bright colors and bold love and choosing hope even when the world feels heavy.”

📋 Good shit:

1. I want to be happy.

2. I want to eradicate unhappiness in my life.

3. I want every day to run as smoothly as possible. No hassles.

✌️ Keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

🎨 It’s van Gogh’s birthday…

🔨 and I guess MC Hammer’s, too.

🎺 Also, happy birthday to the Brew, released 1970.

🚇 Riding the subway to Coney Island in 1987.

📰 A man appeared on the front page twice in the same day. For very different reasons.

🤳 A robotics company is using data and over 30 billion images collected through Pokémon Go to power delivery robots that navigate by sight instead of GPS.

🍊 How oranges become orange.

🌈 LEGO retires colors like seasonal menu items.

😭 Disney and Pixar love to make you cry, here’s the data.

🎶 New research argues humans are inherently musical, with rhythm and melody hardwired into the brain from birth rather than learned from culture.

🧬 Though most seemed to come from Scandinavia, a massive DNA study shows Vikings weren’t exactly a distinct ethnic group but a diverse mix of peoples; “Viking” described a role—raiding, trading, exploring—rather than ancestry.

🛹 Skating into middle age. “As I approach forty, I have fewer and fewer memories of being a child. It is enough that the body remembers.”

🤝 Social media was designed to keep us connected, but it’s quietly changing what connection even means. Instead of talking to friends, we mostly watch them: scrolling updates, liking posts, rarely engaging. Real relationships start to feel like parasocial ones, something we consume rather than participate in.

Are we less connected than we think?

✌️ Keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

🧳 Apparently a record number of Americans are leaving the United States, contributing to a rare moment where supposedly more people left the U.S. than entered in 2025, something unseen since The Great Depression.

🐸 List animals until failure.

␘ Morrissey canceled a show last week because he was sleepy. He’s cancelled every show I’ve ever tried to go to. Dating back to his time in The Smiths, he’s cancelled a quarter of his shows.

📝 How far back in time can you understand the English language?

📺 Larry David is coming back to television in a new sketch comedy series, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, set to premiere on HBO Max on Friday, June 26.

🦍 Anyone wanna go see Gorillaz?

🥁 Things I learned on Threads: Apparently the theme from Mission: Impossible is built on Morse code. The letters M and I translate to dash dash dot dot, and composer Lalo Schifrin used that pattern as the rhythm for the bass line and horn hits. And while not beats, at the end of the the title track of London Calling by The Clash, the fading pulses of guitar feedback spell S.O.S. in Morse code.

🪨 AI figured out the rules to a mysterious 2,000 year-old game carved in stone.

🗳️ How to vote in the primaries.

⭐️ Draw your own constellations.

🧑‍🌾 On building your village: “One person said he’d gotten closer to his neighbors by hosting a weekly coffee date. Another strengthened her network of mom friends by organizing a night out. One man grew a garden in his front lawn just to have something to talk about with passersby.”

🛹 Andy Anderson skating thru Paris.

☘️ Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Keep the Hoping Machine running!

Love,

Luke

The premise of Nirvanna the Band the Show, first seen on YouTube and later Vice, has always been beautifully stupid. Two musicians want to play a show at Toronto’s Rivoli. They never consider contacting the venue directly. Instead, they devise increasingly elaborate plans that they believe will somehow force the club to book them. That’s the entire idea.

What unfolds from that idea, now somehow also a major motion picture, is one of the strangest and funniest long-running comedy projects of the twenty-first century.

Part of what makes the whole thing work is Matt Johnson, who seems to make movies by running head-on with a camera into the real world and seeing what survives the collision. Starting with the $10,000 found footage school-shooting satire The Dirties, he would follow that up with a faux-CIA documentary called Operation Avalanche, which famously involved sneaking cameras into NASA facilities. Each one sits somewhere between narrative filmmaking and social experiment.

And now he’s returned to Nirvanna the Band with a movie that would almost feel like a side project if it wasn’t miraculously put together so damn well.

Johnson and collaborator Jay McCarrol play exaggerated versions of themselves in a band called Nirvanna the Band, with the legally necessary extra “n.” Their strategy for landing a gig at the Rivoli involves elaborate schemes, public stunts, bizarre misunderstandings, and a total refusal to take the obvious step of emailing the venue their Bandcamp.

If you are trying to explain it to someone, the easiest comparison is Borat. A scripted story collides with the real world while confused strangers accidentally become part of the movie. The tone sits somewhere between mockumentary, hidden-camera prank show, and an extremely committed improv exercise. But where Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy often aims for confrontation, Nirvanna the Band is more interested in the absurdity of Matt’s logic. Matt believes every plan is brilliant. Jay knows every plan is terrible. They proceed anyway.

The plot, such as it is, begins when another publicity stunt goes wrong and sends the duo back to 2008, roughly the era when the original web series was filmed. Suddenly the film becomes a time-travel comedy that folds the show’s own history into the story.

What makes the movie particularly impressive is how seamlessly it blends the old material with the new. Footage from the original series appears alongside newly filmed scenes, often interacting with each other in ways that feel surprisingly natural. The illusion works because Johnson leans fully into the show’s long-standing aesthetic. Grainy archival clips, improvised street encounters, and carefully structured narrative beats all coexist in the same space. The result feels less like a nostalgic callback and more like the continuation of a project that never really stopped.

That approach also highlights one of Johnson’s strengths as a filmmaker. He understands how to use the unpredictability of real environments as part of the storytelling. The movie constantly places its characters in situations where anything might happen, then builds the comedy out of whatever actually did.

Part of the fun, and the challenge, of making a largely improvised feature is being ready and willing to pivot at a moment’s notice. The production reportedly embraced that philosophy completely, changing the story as they filmed. Early on, they had to work around the fact they actually got past security at a major venue they expected to be denied from. Later, when news broke of a shooting outside the home of rapper Drake, Johnson and McCarrol immediately raced to the scene to film material. Johnson even ended up appearing in the background of a live news report while still in character. Moments like that perfectly capture the show’s strange relationship with reality. The movie is constantly absorbing the real world and turning it into part of the bit.

That tension between Matt’s certainty and reality’s refusal to cooperate is where the comedy lives. You watch these schemes unfold in public spaces with real people who clearly did not expect to encounter two men attempting whatever this is supposed to be.

Johnson’s filmmaking style fits this perfectly. His movies always carry the slightly unstable feeling that anything could happen because half the time they are literally interacting with the real world. Scenes unfold in crowded streets and public buildings. Strangers wander into the frame. Occasionally the success of the entire scene seems to depend on nobody calling security.

For a movie that appears to be built from chaos, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is extremely precise about its comedic rhythms. Johnson knows exactly how long to stretch a gag, how to escalate a ridiculous premise, and when to step back and let the absurdity speak for itself.

Some of the funniest moments come from small interactions with bystanders who are trying to process what they are witnessing. Watching someone attempt to apply normal social logic to Matt Johnson’s thought process is like watching a computer crash in real time. The self-declared libertarian worried Jay and Matt are going to kill themselves is my new favorite character in anything. Watching someone with a very specific ideological worldview try to make sense of Matt’s chaotic reasoning is deeply satisfying. You can almost see the philosophical gears grinding in their head.

More broadly, the movie works because the central relationship between Matt and Jay feels genuine. Jay acts as the audience’s surrogate. He might be a little dimwitted, but he seems to understand how ridiculous everything is but somehow goes along with it anyway. Their dynamic turns every failed scheme into a miniature buddy comedy.

It feels like the culmination of a creative experiment Johnson and McCarrol have been running for nearly twenty years. What began as a scrappy web series eventually became a television show, survived cancellations and detours, and somehow evolved into a full feature film that completely works.

And through all of it, the premise never changed.

They still want to play the Rivoli. They still refuse to contact the Rivoli. They still do not really have any songs. After two decades of elaborate plans, guerrilla filmmaking, and increasingly ridiculous stunts, the band is exactly where it started. Standing outside a venue and convinced the next idea will finally work.

And honestly, after watching the movie, it is hard not to believe them.

10/10 Genderless Burger Experiences 🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔🍔

The Rest of My Top Five, 2025:

Sinners

Vampirism as a metaphor for the exploitation of cultural legacy, using supernatural horror to examine how black artistry is commodified, drained, and defiantly preserved. Michael B. Jordan captivates in dual roles (the first hour, holy shit) while Göransson’s resonator-blues score pulses with spectral energy (that first juke joint number, holy shit). The film’s world is lushly imagined, and its themes resonate with depth. While the climactic action leans too heavily on clunky visual spectacle the stunning post-credit scene delivers the true payoff, but man oh man is its odd placement puzzling, given its importance. Still. Sinners may stumble, but its ambition leaves a mark.

Weapons

Very Stephen King: small-town secrets, layered timelines, and creeping dread coiling beneath seemingly ordinary lives. Its fractured narrative and atmosphere of grief echo his knack for fusing the supernatural with raw, human vulnerability. While not adapted from King, it captures the essence of his work, blending terror with melancholy that’s familiar in a way I have no problem with, not to mention his signature humor. Lotta plot holes, but the film’s mood and emotional weight make it a compelling horror experience. Plus, it’s just a lot of fun.

Marty Supreme

Marty Fuckin’ Supreme, you guys. Chalamet is all nerves and forward-momentum. Absolutely feral. O’Leary is shockingly good at playing himself. And was that Marianne from Brooklyn?

I hate that the anachronistic music absolutely works, if only because the gen alphas and betas already can’t tell the 1950s from the 1980s.

One Battle After Another

Might be the most tonally audacious film of Anderson’s career. A marriage of screwball energy and Cheech & Chong looseness to the structure of a Star War, with thoughts and ideas of radical politics, repression, and moral collapse. Anderson combines absurdity and gravitas, allowing slapstick and satire to coexist with tragedy without ever letting one cancel out the other, not even Penn’s Mussolinish Looney Tune.

Aspires to show that all sides bear moral weight, that resistance and repression each have shadows, and that extremes are dangerous. It never attempts to neutralize the imbalance of power, but it understands that radicalism, too, corrodes those who cling to it too tightly. Sometimes we should just let kids be kids and pass the joints instead of the judgment. Hail, St. Nick, and to Mr. Anderson: Thank you, sensei 🎅🥋

With that said, the Academy Awards are tonight. As I’ve seen every movie nominated for a major award1, figured I would put in my two cents.

Best Picture Nominees, Roughly Ranked:

One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, Sinners, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Bugonia, Train Dreams, Hamnet, F1, Frankenstein. I’d also put Eddington, The Mastermind, The Phoenician Scheme and Sorry, Baby ahead of at least F1.

My Picks:

Best Supporting Actor: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Madigan, Weapons

Best Actor: Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme2

Best Actress: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Best Original Screenplay: Ryan Coogler, Sinners

Best Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Best Picture: One Battle After Another

💩 Hi there,

💌 Paid subscriptions are on sale for only $25, extended until March 9. Only one more week to guarantee getting every week’s essays and the occasional new music column, JAM Sandwich.

✍️ I’ve written about the late Catherine O’Hara and Rob Reiner; an ode to ‘90s MTV; an absurd amount of words about Napoleon Dynamite; five other films I am forever happy I saw in the theater; all the things I find funny; on the rarity of late career album masterpieces; and two parts on 50 albums I love.

⛈️ AI monitors “this Manhattan doorbell camera, counting the people walking by. It counts what they’re wearing and if they have an umbrella. Sometimes the best forecast is just paying attention.”

⛳️ Found this mini golf game I was obsessed with 20 years ago. My personal best is 13 under par. Let me know if ya beat it.

📽️ At Scream 7 this weekend, audiences saw trailer for the new Scary Movie, which with Weapons, Sinners and Bloodlines, seems pretty up to date with their references.

🌕 Blood Moon tomorrow, around 6am, EST.

🌄 March should be the best month for the Northern Lights for nearly a decade.

✌️ Essay Friday. Until then, have a great week and keep the Hoping Machine running.

Love,

Luke

This Is Lorelei is the newish thing I listened to the most in 2025. Blending lo-fi pop, experimental textures, and emotive songwriting, the side project of Nate Amos mixes sincerity and irony with offbeat, internet-influenced production and charm. “I’m All Fucked Up” was on constant loop last year, a frenetic tale of emotional confusion, self-sabotage and dumb/numb vulnerability, delivered with detached, ironic tone, dense lyrics and unpredictable instrumentation. Included a few more tracks of theirs to get the entire This Is Lorelei experience, including MJ Lenderman’s cover of “Dancing in the Club,” a warm, guitar-driven indie ballad emphasizing sincerity over the original’s irony and abstraction.

100 gecs are jerks. Sleigh Bells meets Ween, riffing on late ‘90s rap-rock, ska and pop-punk. If that sounds nonsensical and obnoxious, you’ll probably find them nonsensical and obnoxious.

My friend Eric, who has been playing music loudly for decades, described Geese as “some of it good, most of it fine, and some of it confusing—because it seems bad, but people love it.” That tension feels central to the band: their loose, exploratory style often hovers between inspired spontaneity and unfocused sprawl, depending on how generously you’re willing to listen.

I’ve been dipping back into the 33 1/3 series, and the book on Paul’s Boutique reminded me of The Beastie Boys’ Love American Style EP, which I purchased on vinyl in New Orleans some 30-odd years ago. Pulled from the same sessions, it features tightly constructed sample collages that foreground the Dust Brothers’ layered, crate-digging production.

For the jazz folks, Max Jaffe uses Sunhouse Sensory Percussion, a sensor system that turns drum hits into digital signals, triggering layered sounds while preserving physical repetition, allowing his endurance-based playing to generate evolving, textured compositions.

What else have I been listening to? I don’t love Joyce Manor as much as everyone else, but the new album is growing on me. My buddy Holly turned me on to Peel Dream Magazine, normally shoegazers, but on “Lie In the Gutter” lean into their best Stereolab impression; Sharp Pins, Twisted Teens, The Femcels, and Winged Wheel, which have kept things lo-fi, loose, and guitar-driven; and Mel Tormé and The Innocents, the older, smoother pop that’s always in regular rotation around these parts, sitting surprisingly well alongside everything else I’ve been jamming on. Just trying to have a good time and will Spring to come early. Sunny days and good times are just around the bend.

1. This Is Lorelei – Let’s Go or Watch My Film

2. This Is Lorelei – I’m All Fucked Up

3. This Is Lorelei – Unhappy Acid

4. This Is Lorelei, MJ Lenderman – Dancing in the Club

5. 100 gecs – The Most Wanted Person In The United States

6. Geese – Trinidad

7. Sharp Pins – I Don’t Have The Heart

8. Twisted Teens – Wild Connection

9. Mel Tormé – Comin’ Home Baby

10. Beastie Boys – 33% God

11. The Femcels – Indiest Girl At School

12. Winged Wheel – I See Poseurs Every Day

13. Geese – Au Pays du Cocaine

14. Max Jaffe – Looking At The Inside of Your Eyelids

15. The Innocents – Be Mine

16. Joyce Manor – Falling Into It

17. Peel Dream Magazine – Lie In the Gutter

18. Worldpeace DMT, Rowan Please – Numbers

19. Geese – Taxes

20. 100 gecs – Hollywood Baby

Listen now on Spotify.

JAM Sandwich logo by Chris Shearer.

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“To see good films and to see important films is one of the most profoundly civilizing experiences that we can have as people.” —Roger Ebert

There’s a certain kind of movie memory that, as the kids say, hits different. Not just what you saw, but when you saw it. First-run screenings of movies that didn’t quite land, or that slipped through theaters before anyone realized what they were.

Or at least that’s how they feel in hindsight. That’s the kind of flex this question is getting at. Not box office dominance, but being early to something that would eventually find its people.

The flex is rarity, but also context. It’s sitting in a half-full theater1, not entirely sure what you’re about to watch, and realizing, in real time, that you’re seeing something that might be misunderstood, ignored, or, in the best case, become exactly as big as it should.

That’s why something like Office Space works as an example. It wasn’t a theatrical phenomenon. But if you saw it then, you saw it before it became shorthand for an entire generation’s relationship with work.

Watching something in a theater isn’t just about scale or sound or darkness. It’s about surrendering control. You can’t pause or rewind. You’re stuck with whatever happens, at the pace it happens, surrounded by strangers having the same experience, but not the same reaction.

When you see a movie in a theater, you’re not just consuming it. You’re participating in a temporary community. Laughter lands harder because it’s shared. Silence feels heavier because you can sense other people thinking. Scary shit seems scarier. Even boredom has weight. You notice time in a way you don’t at home.2

That inevitability is what gives movies their power. Not just what happens on screen, but the fact that, for a few hours, you agreed to let it happen to you.

Not sure these five films are my biggest “I saw it in the theater” flexes, but they do stand out. Each blew me away and played a part in making movies, without question, my biggest passion.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

It’s easy for me to say that the late ’90s and early 2000s were actually incredible years for movies. I worked at a theater through most of high school and college, and a majority of my most memorable theatrical experiences are tethered to that. Not just what they were, but where I was when I saw them.

Before that, though, a 12-year-old Luke talked his mom and stepdad into seeing Hoop Dreams. Basketball consumed an unhealthy amount of my attention at the time, and all I knew was that this was a movie about basketball. How did I discover it? My best guess is Siskel and Ebert. Basketball would end up being the least important part. It’s really about access, expectation, and how difficult it is to sustain a dream that depends on so many things outside your control. It just unfolded, patiently, until you realized you were watching something that would quietly redefine what the form could do. Could I articulate that at 12? Of course not. But I loved it. It told a story that resonated with me, and continues to do so over thirty years later.

Rushmore (1998)

Between Hoop Dreams and working at the theater, thanks to late-night cable, the three movies that left huge impressions on me were Pulp Fiction, Clerks and Boogie Nights, cornerstones of my personality, writing style, and whatever I thought my artistic ambitions were supposed to be. They felt different from everything else I was watching, like they belonged to a much, much more interesting world that I wanted full access to.

Rushmore felt like it might be part of that same world. I remember the trailer showing up on MTV, which at the time was as good a signal as anything that something was at least adjacent to a culture I was desperate to identify with. It had a kind of low-key confidence, a sense of humor that didn’t explain itself, and Bill Murray, a childhood hero due to Ghostbusters. It felt precise in a way I hadn’t seen before, like every line and gesture mattered, and the tone never wavered, even when it probably should have, while also pushing me towards ‘60s garage rock and the French New Wave. Wes Anderson, along with Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith,3 and Paul Thomas Anderson became my guys.

1999 was unreal: you had the first Star Wars since the original trilogy. The first Kubrick in 12 years. The Sixth Sense, a semi-horror film attached to no IP from a second-time director became a word-of-mouth sensation that became the second biggest film of the year. The Matrix changed action movies for at least the next decade. Before the market became saturated with superheroes and sequels and reboots, thanks in large part to a rare overlap of studio risk and emerging independent voices. Filmmakers were given room to experiment, and audiences were still willing to meet them halfway. The result was a run of films that were ambitious, strange, and commercially viable, before franchises and algorithms narrowed what studios were willing to support.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The other big horror surprise that year was The Blair Witch Project. It cost a couple hundred thousand dollars and and hinged on an agreement that three actors would pretend they’d gone missing. It would go on to gross over $248 million.

Prior to a film’s release, the staff at the theater would watch them the night before, after work. Late night, mostly empty, just whoever had stuck around. It made everything feel even more intense, more alive.

Partway through, the second reel ran backwards. It only lasted a few moments, but it was enough to make the whole thing feel even more disorienting than it already was. By the time it was fixed, no one was entirely sure what they had just seen, or if the mistake had somehow made it more effective.

When the film ended, we walked out into an empty theater, then out into the parking lot, the night quieter than it should have been. It felt like leaving something unfinished.

The marketing for The Blair Witch Project is legendary. I remember going home and reading the film’s website, which presented everything as if it were real. At the time, that wasn’t a gimmick you immediately questioned. Or maybe you did, but proving it was another story. It felt plausible enough, or at least not impossible. For a brief moment, the uncertainty held.

(At this time I also saw Being John Malkovich, Fight Club and my what’s probably my favorite film, Magnolia. Again, incredible year for film4.)

Memento (2000)

I flat-out couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. Went back and saw it again the next day. Memento made structure the story itself, forcing you to think alongside it, turning confusion into engagement and memory itself into the central mystery. Everyone who bought stock back then in Christopher Nolan made millions.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Friday, November 2, 2001. My old, and still close, friend Josh Lam and I got to Chicago early to see Stephen Malkmus at The Vic. We had a few hours to kill and ended up wandering into a small theater showing only Mulholland Drive.

I was already a Lynch fan, but this was the first time I’d seen his work on the big screen, and it felt immediately different. Not just bigger, but more immersive, like you couldn’t step outside of it. The sound, the pacing, the way scenes seemed to stretch just past comfort. It didn’t feel like something you were watching so much as something you were sitting inside of.

Even knowing Lynch, nothing really prepares you for Mulholland Drive. Scenes didn’t just unsettle, they destabilized meaning itself. Moments that felt grounded would suddenly slip into something else entirely, without explanation or warning. You couldn’t decode it in the moment, and eventually you stopped trying. You just had to sit there and let it happen, accepting that understanding wasn’t really the point. There’s an argument that it is the best film this century has produced thus far, and the fact I saw it in the the theater almost by accident felt like a sort of cosmic luck.

And of course— Naomi Watts.

When it ended, we walked back out into the afternoon, the world feeling slightly off, like something had shifted just enough to notice. It didn’t resolve itself later, either. It just stayed with me, unfinished, which somehow felt right.

Seeing Steve Malkmus that night, it felt like the same idea in a different form. Pavement had always felt like something I’d found on my own, before it meant something more broadly. Not better because of that, but closer.

It’s not that seeing something early makes it better. It just means no one has told you what it is yet. And for a while, that feels like the same thing. It might not exactly be yours and yours alone, but it is yours.

Park Avenue Theater in New York in 1946 (from The New York Times).

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Only ten days left to get your a year’s worth of absurd content for only $25. Just an FYI.

Now, picking up where we left off on Friday…

A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory: Redefined hip-hop’s sonic possibilities. Anchored by minimalist jazz samples and deep, resonant basslines, it fused laid-back grooves with sharp, socially aware lyricism. Q-Tip is is my favorite emcee and voice in hip-hop and his interplay with Phife is thoughtful, playful, and smooth. Ron Carter’s upright bass gives the record an organic feel rarely heard in rap. A blueprint for innovation through restraint.

Radiohead, OK Computer: The album I got lost in the most through the headphones of my adolescence. Its sprawling soundscapes, cryptic lyrics, and eerie beauty seemed to echo everything I couldn’t yet articulate. “Paranoid Android” felt like a nervous breakdown set to music, “Karma Police” a surreal anthem of quiet rebellion. But two tracks forever haunt me: “No Surprises,” its lullaby sweetness barely masking a profound sadness I felt I understood at far too early of an age. And “Exit Music (For a Film)”—that slow, crushing swell—felt like the end of the world being whispered directly into my ears.

The Velvet Underground and Nico: Fearless authenticity. From the hushed intimacy of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” to the fragile dawn of “Sunday Morning” and the beauty-by-defiance “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” it’s a collision of tenderness and dissonance. Achingly human, unpolished, and timeless.

Television, Marquee Moon: Tension and texture. Interweaving guitar lines with introspective lyrics, the music is expansive yet precise. The title track alone, a ten-minute tour de force, demonstrates the band’s ability to blend complexity with accessibility, proving minimalism can be ambitious. I must have listened to it for an hour straight once in the backseat of my mom and step dad’s car.

Stephen Malkmus (self-titled): Breezy, playful, and slyly comforting, like spending an afternoon with a friend who doesn’t take life all that seriously yet might have it all figured out. The songs drift between laid-back grooves and sudden bursts of energy, giving the listener a sense of freedom and spontaneity. There’s humor in the lyrics, but also warmth. The jangly guitars and off-kilter melodies create a mood that’s both relaxed and slightly mischievous, leaving you smiling at its quirks. It’s an album that feels casual yet clever, evoking ease, curiosity, and the joy of wandering without a fixed destination. “Vague Space” embodies that in-between state. Not anchored, not adrift, but suspended in ambiguity, where meaning slips just out of reach.

Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Take a Ride…: High-energy garage rock and R&B/blue-eyed soul. The album bursts with passion, raw vocals, and tight instrumentation that capture the gritty spirit of ‘60s Detroit. “Come See About Me” is a standout, Ryder’s raspy vocals turn the song into a heartfelt plea.

The Clash, London Calling: Genre-blending punk landmark, fusing reggae, ska, and rockabilly with political urgency. Its fiery title track anchors an album that also finds moments both endlessly catchy (“Hateful,” “Spanish Bombs”), and tender (“Train in Vain,” “Lost in the Supermarket”), showcasing vulnerability amid rebellion.

Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville: A raw, intimate, and sexy response to The Rolling Stones, delivered with confessional honesty. Liz Phair redefined women’s voices in indie rock, paving the way for a generation of sharp-tongued singer-songwriters who embraced vulnerability, wit, and unflinching truth in their music.

Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: From gentle piano pieces to explosive guitar anthems, Mellon Collie is a sprawling, timeless exploration of loss and fleeting youth. The wistful “1979” captures suburban nostalgia, “Thirty-Three” reflects quiet faith, “Tonight, Tonight” soars with orchestral hope, and “Zero,” “Bodies,” “Jellybelly,” “Tales of a Scorched Earth,” and “X.Y.U.” rock. Hard.

Beastie Boys, Check Your Head: “Well, just plug me in just like I was Eddie Harris…” Their third album, the third pivotal shift in their sound. Blending hip-hop, punk, funk and jazz-fusion, its gritty hip-hop and groove-driven instrumentals and fearless genre-crossing spirit deeply inspired me, pushing my musical taste toward funkier and more experimental directions. Tonight’s forecast calls for partially cool.

Weezer (self-titled): The blue one, which perfectly fuses power-pop hooks with Pixies-inspired dynamics and Beach Boys-inspired harmonies. Crunchy guitars, melodic precision, and offbeat sincerity, combining distortion with sweetness and irony with warmth.

Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan went electric and revolutionized the genre on a pair of records that captured his shift from timely prophet to timeless visionary. Songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It’s Alright, Ma” cackle with biting wit, social critique, and wild energy; “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” evoke farewell and renewal, while “Like a Rolling Stone” stands as a thunderous anthem of freedom and alienation, a declaration that forever changed what rock could mean.

The White Stripes (self-titled): The first three records, really. Unpolished, urgent, irresistibly alive. A striking foundation for everything that followed.

Ramones (self-titled): Little Steven said it best…

Saturday Looks Good to Me, Every Night: Pure nostalgia. Detroit garage that blends lo-fi twee with Motown undertones and heartfelt melodies into a dreamy, timeless experience. The songs feel both familiar and sincere, creating an emotional, quietly uplifting record that lingers long after it ends.

Pixies, Surfer Rosa: Pretty sure it was Albini that said you can hear Kim Deal smile when she sings. Love that. Love this landmark of alt-rock, with its explosive, loud-quiet shifts and oddly-melodic vocal interplay. This was my Nevermind.

Outkast, Stankonia: She said she thought Hip-Hop was only guns and alcohol/ I said, “Oh hell naw! But yet, it’s that too / You can’t discrima-hate ‘cause you done read a book or two.”

Tom Waits, Closing Time: “And those were the days of roses, poetry and prose, and, Martha, all I had was you, and all you had was me.”

Guided by Voices, Human Amusements At Hourly Rates: Compilation, so probably doesn’t count, but I could give a shit. How I discovered one of the most uneven-yet-still greatest bands of all-time. And yep, it’s a shortcut through decades of lo-fi brilliance. Still, it earns its place by distilling Pollard’s chaotic genius into pure adrenaline. Song after song delivers hooks, humor, and heart with zero filler. “Echos Myron,” “Game of Pricks,” ‘Best of Jill Hives,” “Chasing Heather Crazy,” “Shocker in Gloomtown,” “Non-Absorbing,” “Teenage FBI.” Few bands can survive compression and emerge stronger, louder, and seem more overwhelming than almost anyone else in indie rock history.

Pavement, Terror Twilight: Deep without ever sounding heavy-handed. The album moves like it’s half-asleep, dreamy and slightly off-balance. But there is real emotional weight underneath the looseness. Songs like “Ann Don’t Cry” feel tender and hushed, while “Spit on a Stranger” has an under-aching, distant warmth. Even “The Hexx” feels playful and eerie at once. An album that invites you in quietly and keeps revealing more the longer you sit with it.

The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul: One of, if not the most contrarian things about me: I prefer the first half of The Beatles’ career. These two records represent them at their most perfectly balanced. A Hard Day’s Night captures their peak youthful energy, relentless hooks, and astonishing songwriting confidence with no filler. Rubber Soul deepens that brilliance, pairing warmth and introspection with adventurous textures. I know a few albums came in between (that are also perfect), but together, they show a band mastering pop craft while quietly reinventing what could be. “Better” and certainly more innovative albums followed, but not ones I love more.

The Microphones, The Glow, Pt. 2: A fragile monument to impermanence, recorded like a diary left open to weather. Phil Elverum turns fractured folk, hiss, clipping and sudden quiet into emotional grammar, where joy and dread coexist without hierarchy. Songs sprawl, collapse, and reassemble, mirroring the nonlinear logic of grief. Acoustic, channel-alternating strums bloom into distorted storms; then everything falls away to breath and heart beats and room tone. The record feels handmade and haunted, obsessed with nature, death and self-erasure, yet stubbornly feels alive. Not sure if it’s my favorite album, but it’s the one I’ve connected to the most.

Last year, I wrote a little something-something about an album or so a week. Like most self-respecting aging hipsters, sometimes it seems as if I only listen to jazz and the Dead these days, so it was nice to revisit many of these.

Not necessarily a top 50, but albums that at least one time or another, meant the world to me. Here’s the list. Apologies for using a lot of the same words and phrases over and over and over again.

The Beta Band, Hot Shots II: Where their initial outings were dense, anarchist explorations of everything, Hot Shots II is a polished, meditative and cohesive sonic journey of ambient synths, trip-hop percussion, sampled strings, acoustic guitars and occasional soarings into carefully-crafted rock. Its hypnotic rhythms, layered instrumentation and emotional resonance are perfect for cold, winter nights.

Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One: This album is everything: the upbeat indie rock of “Sugar Cube,” the sampledelia-jazz of “Moby Octopad,” the slow-core “Autumn Sweater,” the charming chamber pop of “One PM Again,” the dead-pan shoegaze cover of The Beach Boys, the sincere cover of Anita Bryant. That it all fits together is a wonder.

Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings: Baker’s trumpet solos complement his singing, weaving in and out of the melodies with a lyrical quality that mirrors the tone of his vocals, his voice smooth, delicate, vulnerable, conversational, haunting. Late-evening listening, best accompanied with bourbon.

Le Tigre (self-titled): I was a bit young for Bikini Kill, so this was my introduction to Kathleen Hannah. First time I heard “Deceptacon,” it felt like a lightning bolt to both my senses and my sensibilities. Effortlessly cool, sample-laden new wave/punk record that will get you dancing more than any other radically political album I can think of.

Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica: Two isolated, cold, lonely places. As introspective as it is sad as it is funny. These lyrics meant everything to me in high school and admittedly still do.

Various Artists, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: ‘50s rock & doo-wop turned batshit, gender-bending, sci-fi-infused camp-glam that has never lost its wild, rebellious charm.

De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising: My now and likely forever all-time favorite hip-hop record. Admittedly there is some filler: if you subtracted say, three songs and replaced with some of its great B-Sides, I’d find it perfect. Still, I can’t think of too many albums that make me as happy as this one.

Belle & Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister: A timeless chamber pop record, Stuart Murdoch’s conspiratorial vocals tell stories of tragicomic dreamers, misfits and lost souls. Its songs of isolation, identity, and quiet rebellion still feels like secrets being whispered just for me.

Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime: Punk’s White Album. A full-throttle rejection of anything that isn’t good times with good friends. Watt’s melodic bass doesn’t just anchor the rhythm; it propels the songs with urgent, restless energy, effortlessly shifting between funk grooves, jazzy runs and raw aggression. Locked in with Hurley’s drumming, he creates the perfect foundation for the late, great D. Boon’s rambles and howls and dancing guitarlines. Stickers of Boon later read, “Punk is whatever we made it to be.” Words to live by.

Prince, 1999: Masterpiece. “Delirious,” “All the Critics Love U in New York,” “Little Red Corvette” and a title track that warns of impending doom—“Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”—yet urges listeners to dance and enjoy life while they can. I concur.

Built to Spill, There’s Nothing Wrong with Love: Not as sprawling or epic as their later work, this is Doug Martsch at both his most earnest and melodic, wistful, weird, charming, and bursting with youthful longing and quirky storytelling, all while retaining Martsch’s signature warbly vocals and intricate guitar work.

Nirvana, Unplugged in New York: Cobain’s vulnerability comes through every note, offering a poignant glimpse into a troubled soul. It’s not just a concert; it’s a farewell letter, as sad and beautiful and haunting as one that’s ever been written.

The Replacements, Tim: Watching their SNL performance (in rerun, admittedly) was life changing. Messy and deeply human; a raw, bittersweet transition from punk to alt-rock, the back half some of Westerberg’s best ballads and anthems.

Grateful Dead, American Beauty: Evokes peace and nostalgia and a subtle optimism, the kind that makes you appreciate the moment without demanding anything from it. Perfect for a day such as today.

Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People: Chaos by design. Anthems not only for seventeen year-old girls, but also the misfits and dreamers.

Violent Femmes (self-titled): Rough and ragged busking applied to angsty teenage punk. It’s awkward, desperate, funny, stupid, and unforgettable. An album that feels very much alive over 40 years after its release.

The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin: Euphoric songs that feel both intimate and cosmic. Wayne Coyne’s vulnerable vocals, paired with lyrics that explore mortality, love, and resilience, celebrate the fragile beauty of being human, insisting that joy and connection are always possible.

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds: Is there a more perfect pop song than “God Only Knows?” Is there a more perfect pop record?

The Smiths, The Smiths: Sad songs for truly last dances. Melancholic, literate, sardonic and almost defiantly romantic. A moody, poetic cornerstone of indie rock.

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation: Where punk met the avant garde, and shaped alternative rock in the process. Its influence was seismic, inspiring a generation of musicians to embrace raw texture, abstraction, and a sense of defiant creativity. Also: it rocks.

The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers: Exile, sure, but this stone-cold classic is the embodiment of The Stones, however problematic. Sticky Fingers is a swaggering rock classic, fusing bluesy riffs with raw attitude. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” stretches into a hypnotic jam, “Bitch” delivers tight, brassy aggression, while ballads like “Wild Horses” and “Moonlight Mile” reveal surprising tenderness beneath the debauchery and bravado.

Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense: A kinetic, transcendent document of a brilliant band at their creative peak. It’s funky, cerebral, and wildly alive. David Byrne’s jittery charisma meets airtight musicianship, with tracks like “Once in a Lifetime” and “Girlfriend Is Better” radiating urgency. The sound is cleaner and more propulsive than the studio versions, driven by layered rhythms and pure performance energy. An argument for live music as ritual, spectacle, and communal release

The Strokes, Is This It, Room On Fire: Along with The White Stripes, The Strokes were a full-blown cultural reset. Their authenticity was often a subject of debate, but seeing Last Nite for the first time was revelatory: I was watching a band I had always wanted to exist. Is This It sounded like the ’70s reborn: raw, loose, and effortlessly cool, channeling the Velvet Underground and Television while not really sounding like either. This band is literally an all-time favorite based almost solely on these two records.

Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel…: This week I was drawn back to this raw, percussive, and emotionally unfiltered masterpiece. Stripped down to mostly voice, piano, unconventional rhythms and found sounds, the record eschews lush production in favor of intimate intensity. Apple’s lyrics are fierce, vulnerable, and startlingly poetic. Songs like “Every Single Night” and “Werewolf” dissect relationships and neuroses with surgical precision, while “Daredevil” and “Regret” feel like outbursts from deep within the psyche. It’s an uncompromising work that challenges listeners to meet Apple where she is: in chaos, in love, in fear, and in motion. “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key…”

Please consider a subscription, only $25 for the entire year until my birthday, March 2nd.

🧑‍💻 Hi! I’m Luke. Follow me anywhere you’d like.

💌 Every week, I send out links and thinks on the arts, productivity, trying to be a better person, and the intersection of those and all things. It’s free forever, but every week I also send out essays, mostly to my paid subscribers. Subscriptions are on sale for only $25, now-my birthday, March 2. Below is an assortment of links I’ve shared over the years.

✍️ Years ago I read Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s resolutions and the list has stuck with me ever since, including one resolution that has since become my motto:

“Keep hoping machine running.”

🤔 Make sure you are having a good day, every day that you can. “Did I sleep enough? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good—like, did I take a good walk, did I eat healthy, did I exercise? If I get those four things in place, usually my days are pretty good.”

🍻 As seen in Bilbo’s: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

🏀 Basketball-Reference is a comprehensive online database that provides detailed basketball statistics, player profiles, and advanced analytics.

⚾️ Of course there’s Baseball-Reference, too.

👏 This video of Paul Simon on Sesame Street makes me happy.

👤 ID of every person on the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

🚴 Kids jumping bikes in the ‘70s.

💻 Stickertop.art: “each laptop tells a story through its stickers and gives us a glimpse of the personality of the owners.”

🎶 Unfortunately there seems to be no references, but some fun music (supposed) facts, including:

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division was a direct response to the popular pop song “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille.

The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” was inspired by the dialogue (“Have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have?”) in the 1955 film Guys & Dolls.

On May 11, 1978, Guided By Voices vocalist Robert Pollard threw the first no-hitter in Wright State University history.

✉️ Kurt Vonnegut on buying envelopes.

♟ Life advice from chess hustlers: “The one thing I tell my students is that when you get to a confrontation of any type, you have to remain calm. When you remain calm, you can see the board a lot clearer. You can see the person you’re playing or arguing with a lot more clearly, for who and what they are. So you don’t even have to entertain that shit. You understand?”

📖 In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin shared his thirteen virtues. “Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.”

🧅 A history of The Onion.

☎ A family in Maine opted not for a smartphone but a landline for their 10-year-old, seeking to give her independence without intro­ducing social-media-driven anxiety and distraction. The parents rallied neighbors to adopt “landline pods,” creating a network of phone-based connection among children. Without screens, the kids focused more on conversation, listening, and empathy; they arranged playdates, checked in with sick friends, and shared real talk.

🎨 Grandma Moses began painting in her 70s. She became an icon.

🧩 “Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing… The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.”

🐶 Been waiting for this video my whole life: all the dogs, explained.

👎 For their 50th anniversary, the 50 best Siskel & Ebert reviews. No Home Alone 3? As far as I’m concerned, whatever streaming service gets this show online wins the war.

🍃 How Not to Waste Your Life: “Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.”

📈 Rapper 50 Cent, adjusted for inflation.

🥛 “The first thing you should know? The dates, as we know them, have nothing to do with safety.” The expiration dates you should actually follow.

📽️ Spike Lee’s essential cinema for aspiring filmmakers.

⚔️ From Ethan Hawke’s Rules for a Knight: “Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.”

🖼️ Over 1,000 pieces of art by Van Gogh have been cataloged, digitized and made available online.

🌈 A look at Reading Rainbow, a wonderful show and cornerstone of my childhood, created in 1983 to combat summer reading slumps. When asked if he was fine with the show defining him, host LeVar Burton replied with a resounding yes. “As a son of an English teacher, as a Black man, coming from a people for whom it was illegal to know how to read, not that long ago, I’m good with that.”

🎧 Loved this breakdown of the “most iconic” samples in electronic music year-by-year, starting in 1990.

🪷 Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that many relationship conflicts stem from wrong perceptions. To repair them, he suggests three steps: first, calm yourself and recognize your interpretation may be mistaken; second, express your hurt gently, acknowledging it might come from misperception and ask for clarity; third, practice deep, compassionate listening to the other person’s response.

🙏 Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the Meaning of Life. “When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!”

And what does “Si jeunesse savait” mean? If youth only knew!

Indeed.

⏲️ And finally, a recipe for life from Muhammad Ali:

“I would like for them to say, he took a few cups of love. He took one tablespoon of patience, one tablespoon of generosity, one pint of kindness; he took one quart of laughter, one piece of concern, and then he mixed willingness with happiness. He added lots of faith, and he stirred it up well. Then he spread it and expanded it over a lifetime. And he served each and every deserving person he met.”

❤️ Keep The Hoping Machine running.

Love,
Luke

🐶 Herroooo,

🙏 Rest in peace to James Van Der Beek, who always seemed like a completely genuine and eternally optimistic dude. And also, Bud Court, part of some truly wild films in the ‘70s, and later appeared in Dogma and The Life Aquatic. Wes Anderson has gotten a million great line readings in his work, and I think Cort’s “We fuckin’ stole it, man” has to be towards the top.

📖 Currently Reading: Crumb, by Dan Nadel.

🎻 Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on original baroque instruments.

📉 On the total decoupling of “consumption” from “fandom.” “We are building an entire ecosystem—festivals, advances, touring routes, and brand deals—on a foundation of fake math.”

“Why does Artist A have 1 million listeners but empty venues? Because ‘listeners’ in 2026 are rarely active participants. They are casualties of the algorithm.”

🌎 Take a spin on the globe and play the Birth Lottery.

🙋 Does anyone use Day One (premium or unpaid) or Apple Journal? Any opinions? Feel free to leave a comment or respond to this email.

💌 Just a reminder that subscriptions, which contain all of my weekly essays, are on sale for only $25, now-my birthday, March 2.

🕹️ A history of Super Mario Bros., which revived the North American video game after an crash, defined the platformer genre, and established Nintendo as a dominant global force in gaming. Possibly the most important game of all time.

😡 Check and see what posts and articles are designed to make you feel rage.

🤬 Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin, one of history’s great haters.

🦫 On the Monogamy Scale, humans rank somewhere between meerkats and beavers.

🧅 Peter Askew writes about how he ended up building an online business selling sweet onions, a venture that began unexpectedly after acquiring the domain vidaliaonions.com.

✌️ Have a great weekend, and Happy Valentine’s Day. Keep the Hoping Machine running and your sunny side up.

Love,

Luke

When MTV landed on the moon1 it was just music videos, which in the early ’80s probably felt like the future.

Most of Gen X thinks of this as the pinnacle of the network and probably television. But by the mid-’90s, the future had evolved into something stranger and in my mind, much better. And mostly just to survive. The move into original, non-music programming wasn’t a sudden betrayal of its mission so much as an acknowledgment of reality.

Music videos were short, expensive, controlled by the record labels, and easy to tune out of, literally. MTV needed programming that could hold attention, create habits, and give the channel an identity beyond flashy delivery system for the music industry.

The first step was realizing that their real product wasn’t arguably videos, but youth culture. Music was just the most visible expression of it. The comedic game show Remote Control (featuring a pre-SNL Adam Sandler) quietly tested this theory by treating pop culture itself as content, while early specialty programs like Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes reframed the network as a curator rather than a jukebox, or what the kids might liken to Spotify on radio. Audiences didn’t just want songs; they wanted context, attitude, and a sense that someone on the other side of the screen understood them.

The channel began treating television the way it treated music, as something to remix, interrogate, and occasionally blow up entirely. That instinct is what made MTV in the '90s feel less like a network and more like a voice speaking directly to its audience. Or at least directly to me. By the early ‘90s and throughout the rest of the decade it seemed less something I watched and more something I lived.

It helped that mainstream rock arguably got temporarily great around the same time2. But between music videos, Jay and Silent Bob and an obnoxious cab driver talked about music videos. And before the top of the hour, anchors like Kurt Loder and Serena Altschul gave us MTV News, a segment I held in as high regard as my parents did 60 Minutes. It informed us of elections, wars, and whatever Guns ‘N Roses had going on. It all seemed pretty important.

Before streaming algorithms decided who we were, MTV did. I joke about getting teary-eyed thinking about Singled Out, but I’m only kinda joking. That show was absurd, people choosing dates based on whether someone liked pizza or believed in aliens, but it was also pure MTV logic, treating romance like pop culture trivia, which is how most teens and twenty-something were already experiencing it anyway. And 30 years later, I am still unable to put how enamoured I was with Jenny McCarthy. It was a weird time.

I choose to believe that MTV understood that goofiness could be a delivery system for something smarter, rethinking how dating shows worked. Like much of my favorite art, MTV didn’t draw hard lines between dumb and smart. It proved that the most radical thing a network could do was not take itself too seriously while still taking its audience seriously. Possibly the network’s boldest and most influential transformation would reflect that. Long before reality TV became an industry standard, MTV pioneered a version of it that felt intimate, unscripted, and culturally revealing when seven strangers were picked to live in a loft, have their lives taped, to find out what happened when people stopped being polite, and started getting real.

Debuting in 1992, The Real World was groundbreaking not because it was flashy, but because it was honest, or at least that’s how it felt at the time. By placing a diverse group of young strangers in a shared living space and letting the cameras roll, MTV created a forum for conversations about race, sexuality, politics, AIDS, addiction, and relationships that were rarely if ever seen on television. People also got into arguments about peanut butter and had sex in hot tubs. And that begat Road Rules, which begat The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, which begat a grown man getting carried on his back by another grown man in a shocking reverse-tug-of-war-feat of strength.3

But before it became admittedly more of a spectacle, The Real World trusted viewers to sit with ambiguity and conflict. The show proved that youth-oriented television could engage serious issues without sacrificing relevance or immediacy. Just as importantly, The Real World and Road Rules were a space for identity exploration. It offered visibility to LGBTQ+ voices and alternative subcultures rarely seen elsewhere. The results were imperfect, sometimes messy, but undeniably meaningful.

Other shows took their cues from the music videos. Rapid editing, bold graphics and experimental camera work gave the network an energy that felt closer to zines or music mags than traditional television. The aesthetic chaos mirrored how youth consumed, jumping between channels, sounds, styles, and ideas. Rather than fighting that fragmentation, MTV embraced it. It felt alive, constantly in motion. This would make perhaps the most sense with animation, perfect for a post Music Television, and post-Simpsons, world.

Liquid Television might be the single most important creative incubator MTV ever produced, an anthology of animation that would introduce us to a lot, including Beavis and Butt-Head, possibly the greatest thing to ever happen to television. Blurring the line between commentary and content, the animated duo didn’t simply introduce videos; they mocked them and gave voice to a specific kind of disaffected teenage humor. Occasionally Beavis and Butt-Head seemed almost too smart when watching music videos, likely a byproduct of creator and voice actor Mike Judge4 improvising over them for hours, his own opinions bleeding into the normally-abnormally dimwit’s minds.

Still, it made the channel self-aware, irreverent, and even subversive. Those qualities resonated deeply with Gen X, and helped shape the following generation (mine). That it terrified squares was a bonus. The show would produce the spin-off Daria, a deadpan counterpoint to louder MTV programming. It spoke directly to alienated, intelligent teens and became one of the most enduring portrayals of female adolescence on television5.

MTV’s comedy wasn’t all animated. Two of its biggest breakthroughs were The Jon Stewart Show, which gave us, well, Jon Stewart. And then there was The State, a sketch show that was aggressively weird without apologizing for it. Its influence runs through modern alt-comedy, ensemble-driven humor, and the idea that television could reward intelligence, repetition, and inside jokes rather than broad punchlines.

The MTV Music Video Awards were the clearest sign that MTV understood music videos as film and as culture, not just disposable content. The later addition of the MTV Movie Awards followed the same logic. The awards meant little in terms of industry validation6, but they created moments that mattered culturally, like having Quentin Tarantino present a lifetime achievement award to Jackie Chan or anointing Wes Anderson as Best New Director before either fit comfortably into traditional Hollywood hierarchies. A year after winning, Anderson would produce segments for the awards starring The Max Fisher Players, forever preserved in the Criterion Collection.

I won’t pretend television was better as a whole in the 90s than its been in the twentieth century. That notion is absurd and wholly rooted in nostalgia. We didn’t have Mad Men or Breaking Bad or The Wire. But MTV was.

2000 did give us Jackass, starring a nomadic band of fearless, pain-defying and some would say unwell jesters that taught us that if we are going to be dumb, then too we must also be tough. The show anticipated YouTube and viral videos, and influencer-era stunt comedy. Nothing on TV looked like it and a whole lot borrowed from it.

But then we started to see watered-down versions of what came before: Next, The Jersey Shore, and of course, Ridiculousness. The innovation didn’t disappear so much as the conditions that once made it possible unfortunately slowly eroded. Reality franchises were cheap, reliable, and easy to repeat, while experimentation became riskier and harder to defend inside a ratings-driven system. Innovation simply stopped paying, just like it had years prior with music videos. At some point it became cheaper and easier to just have less-cool hosts show people Internet clips MTV didn’t even have to make.

What’s most painful isn’t that MTV changed, but that it once proved television could feel like discovery. It trusted its audience enough to take risks, to be weird, to occasionally fail, even. That version of MTV is long fucking gone. And while culture has moved on, basically to TikTok, it’s hard not to miss the feeling of turning on the TV and believing, even briefly, that anything might happen next7.

Monday’s essays are free for now and currently half-off, only $25 for the entire year.