There’s certainly a cynic in me that doubts most ‘philanthropic’ ventures by the wealthy as a dangling set of shiny keys to distract the public from ideas like hiking tax rates by 25%. And there’s even more of me that has a distaste for celebrity press releases about doing good in the world. But when it comes to the $10 million that Olivia Rodrigo’s festival donated to ten women’s-based non-profits—matched dollar-for-dollar by Melinda Gates—I have to set my cynicism aside for a moment.

I have no doubt that there’s an extensive team behind Rodrigo helping to maintain a very specific public image, but that doesn’t change the fact her audience is predominantly young women and girls—a demographic that is facing an increasingly precarious, if not outright dangerous, future. While $20 million isn’t going to realistically do much in the real world of social justice, what the entire festival represents—from being an all-female lineup to supporting organizations that exist to help women in one way or another—is that if you’re a part of a group the system is after, the best thing you can do is take care of each other.

The concert was a cool enough idea, and donations are a good thing, but to me, this was a chance to show an entire upcoming generation that the best weapon against institutional power is organizing and camaraderie. When I was younger, there were organizations like Rock The Vote, but stuff like that still had that undertone of, Believe in the System, believe in America. Rodrigo’s efforts voice a distinct split from that, as if to say, The entire political machine is after us right now. (Which, well, it is.)

I remember reading an interview with Mark of blink-182 when they were first getting big in the late 90s. He replied to a question about them being a ‘punk band’ by saying he thought of them as Fischer-Price Punk—a band that could be someone’s first punk band, an introduction to the genre. It’s not untrue. While for me it was Green Day, there’s always some mainstream influence that can lead people down a path into the subcultures where political activism really starts to take hold, and that’s what I kind of think of this. It won’t create an immediate wave of neo-Suffragettes, but it could be a step in that direction for a chunk of that audience, and in this day and age, that’s good enough.

8th and Normandie

I would say intersections are where my biggest pet peeve of driving in LA takes place. There are plenty of lights that have dedicated left-turn lanes (an interesting thing about LA driving is that you come to learn after a light turns red, two cars usually still turn left). However, there are a lot of side streets that don’t.

There’s nothing more annoying than being behind a driver at one of these intersections where they don’t turn on their turn signal until the light turns green. You’re stuck behind a car that will have to wait the entire length of the light before they can actually make the turn, leaving you to stay behind them through the green light, then having to wait until the next to actually cross.

It would be nice if this was a minor, occasional inconvenience but this probably happens ten to fifteen percent of the time. Given how frequently driving is a part of life in LA, that’s an incredible amount of annoying drivers to deal with. I have about five major pet peeves of driving here and this one is at the top of the list.

I’m not gonna be one of those people who pretended to listen to Dolly Parton all along. She had plenty of fans of her music and I won’t pose as one of them. That being said, I was a huge fan of her.

She’s talked about her father’s illiteracy and in her fame started the Imagination Library as a result—an institution which has given kids worldwide over three hundred million books for free. It’s just a part of her extensive philanthropy—giving away so much money that, though she could have been a billionaire, she never reached that mark.

It’s rare to have a public figure in America almost always walk the walk without talking too much talk—but when she did speak about issues, it was always in a way that expressed a kind of belief in the human spirit and the understanding that we’re all just equal as human beings. Though her works that help people will be recognized and missed, to me it’s that she represented a quality of understanding and respect for all that is largely lost on those with power and influence in media and culture.

In an era of Kardashians, where amassing wealth and dismissing others and focusing on the self is paramount—embracing individualism and greed—Parton represented the polar opposite. She was an example that one could be both accomplished, loved, and rich without holding on to ideas that were exclusionary or discriminatory. If celebrity is an inescapable consequence of the collision of art and commerce, Dolly was an example that the role could be a path to mutual benefit (as much as something like that can be).

I think that’s the reason so many people are fucked up over her death. In a time when nobody agrees on anything, everyone knows that Dolly Parton was an amazing person. A representation of goodness, of what people could be. There’s something in the air now where we can all tell society has sunk so far into greed, selfishness, and sometimes outright evil, that we’re collectively losing the plot—that there aren’t really many people left to consider a role model for the next generation.

She will be missed, and perhaps her legacy will inspire the youth of today to see that society does recognize the good in people, and collectively lifts them up, giving them deserved recognition for being a beacon of what the human heart is capable of. The world will be a worse place without Dolly, but maybe because of her, people will end up a little better.

These two are five now

Sometime between today and the 28th is the cats’ birthday. It’s not really known, the first vets they saw after being rescued from the streets had to do an estimate when they were just days old and that was late August of 2021. Though I didn’t adopt them until after they’d been fostered for a few months, it’s now been close to five years, and so we’re having a three-day party. (They do not know this, they will just enjoy the benefits.)

Because they are cats, when I initially brought out catnip and treats to celebrate with, they both hid under furniture. They know that unexpected treats can mean being put in a carrier and taken to the vet (or, more recently, moved across town). Eventually they got curious and enjoyed the offerings, but I can appreciate their hesitation.

(Like everyone else, I review the films I see on Letterboxd, but I write about movies as a general idea here.)

Zach Cregger has made a Resident Evil movie and it looks awesome. I’m a big fan of both Barbarian and Weapons and have always enjoyed the games when I’ve played them, so I’m pretty stoked on this. Will it win Best Picture? No. Will it be fun as hell? Probably.

Here’s the kicker, though: I love Resident Evil. I don’t mean the IP or any of the specific games. I mean the original movie from 2002 starring Milla Jovovich. I enjoy all of its 100-minute runtime. I can totally admit it’s 100% a bad movie. It’s a bad script with terrible acting and some really awful special effects. Yet still, I love it. It’s a guilty pleasure.

There’s been online discourse of late saying there’s ‘no such thing‘ as a guilty pleasure, or we need to take away the shame of it. (NPR even took a look at the brain science behind the concept.) I would argue the middle ground is where we should land as a society—yes, there are guilty pleasures, but we should also not fear any kind of public shame for indulging in them.

The innocence of guilt

I think a person should be proud to admit they have a guilty pleasure in art or culture because at least they’re admitting to understanding the idea that there are echelons of these things produced in terms of meaning and substance. If you say a Marvel movie is a guilty pleasure, you’re admitting you understand that it’s corporate franchise slop written at a fifth-grade level designed for nothing more than a dopamine rush, but you just don’t care. And that’s fine. It’s the understanding that matters.

I’m not always watching arthouse films. Hell, Bad Boys II is a piece of capitalist copganda and I love the shit out of it. But I know that Michael Bay wasn’t setting out to ask societal questions when he had Will Smith dodging boats in a Ferrari while speeding across a Miami bridge. He just wanted to throw boats at a car on a freeway.

However, I can say that movie, or Resident Evil, is a guilty pleasure because I know there are arthouse movies out there that Ask Serious Questions About Life, that exist because a filmmaker wanted to make us leave a theater with a new thought or idea about the world around us. I know that, while entertainment can be fun and relaxing, art and the concepts that creatives process during crafting a film or writing a novel is where we actually discover things about our humanity. Any moral quandary posed by a Marvel movie has been vetted by the CIA, while a David Lynch film will leave a person wondering what morality originates from.

Go for it

I have a friend here who is a very good, serious artist. I was at her place once staring at this massive painting of a tree she had splayed out across the floor of her entire apartment. In the corner, her television showed one of her streaming accounts and all of the ‘Recently Played’ section was filled with episodes of one reality show or another. I asked about it and she proudly said she loved it all—she could work with them on in the background, not having to worry about her attention being distracted by something heavy or some plot point she had to pay attention to. Also, they were just entertaining. It made sense.

She and I both know plenty about Serious Art, but also that there’s plenty of reasonable occasions to indulge in whatever bullshit might exist for the sole purpose of vapid entertainment. I tend to think the issue of American culture is that we’re increasingly being pushed in the direction of that void of uncaring, incompetent slop. Stephen Spielberg and John Williams teamed up to create one of the most iconic films ever made in Jurassic Park, which is now just a recurring CGI-fest of absurdity and nonsensical plot lines. Our entertainment is getting dumber, and our society is culturally worse for it.

I think the danger of a guilty pleasure lies in not knowing that it is one, or why it is one. To not understand that the new Avengers movie and Zodiac might both star Robert Downey Jr but the latter is a significantly different type of film is a kind of cultural illiteracy that I think we’ve generally waded into as a society, and instead of trying to right that wrong, we’re trying to take away any stigma about the shame of preference—even though that preference is nothing to be guilty about, but understanding the holistic nature of why culture matters to humanity is an inherently important and valuable part of life experience.