When it was announced that Saturday Night Live would be expanding to the UK, my immediate thought was, Aren’t we suffering enough? I can’t remember the last time I watched an episode of the American version and laughed even once. Possibly not since the Gosling UFO bit. Generally speaking, SNL is unfunny because it is mostly toothless, safe comedy that tries to walk a ‘bi-partisan’ line.

Yet the UK version is proving to be everything that the American original has lost. Weekend Update is biting and smart—the recent mockery of Ed Sheeran and Robert Kraft is better than any of the Colin Jost and Michael Che reviews in some time. It wasn’t overly aggressive; it just wasn’t scared of offending a conservative audience.

The thing about the liberal idea of ‘playing it safe’ in entertainment as to not offend anyone in a right-wing country is that the moderate position on speech—and, well, everything else—increasingly moves toward conservatism if it isn’t pushed back against. American values have always leaned into white supremacy, but waving Nazi flags at public events doesn’t even make the news—though it would have been nationally admonished not 20 years ago.

The result is self-described independents running for office who largely represent conservative values, but from an earlier, 20th century vision. Less obvious racism, but no ambition for social policy that would help the underclass—and certainly no criticism of modern American foreign policy and the nature of being a superpower.

Shows like SNL are reflective of where the United States is at, because like liberal politicians, it still attempts to attract a large swath of the country, no matter how disgusting their values might be. So it should not be a surprise when there is a barbarically stupid monologue by a talentless oaf kicking off the show, because they’re trying to appeal to the demographic that defends the Cornell rapists.

Some might argue that the content of a 50-year-old comedy show and the current state of extremist right-wing politics are disproportionate in importance, and I agree there—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t connected. The way we represent ourselves, the dialogue that occurs within the context of media that can stir a national conversation, can absolutely steer public opinion.

Governance, like comedy, is trending toward punching down, focusing hatred on women and minorities, appealing to the worst stains of ideas within the greater social fabric, and represents a national embarrasment as representative of a dying empire and its influence both politically and culturally remains steep in decline.

Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel program

I was lucky enough to attend the sold-out performance of Rothko Chapel (among a few other, shorter works) that the Monday Evening Concert series put on tonight in honor of what would have been Morton Feldman’s 100th birthday (at least, earlier this year). It’s the second show celebrating Feldman I saw this week—last Friday, Oracle Egg had BlackBox Ensemble perform a similar event with different works.

Now, full disclosure, I knew nothing of Feldman before these concerts. While I listen to plenty of avant-garde music, it’s often in the shape of post-rock-adjacent bands or weird things I see at sparsely-attended local shows where someone has an array of objects they turn into something between a harmony and an unstructured wall of noise. The sort of high-brow, famous and studied crowd isn’t something I’m really familiar with.

That’s why I was particularly fond of hearing this performance tonight. I had no clue what to expect—it was honestly my love of Rothko more than anything that made me buy a ticket to begin with. But I left completely stirred by the music.

Performance set-up at Oracle Egg

This is the wonderful thing about experiencing art in general—there’s no telling how seeing Rothko Chapel will affect me or the work I make down the line, but it undoubtedly will, somehow, even if I am not fully aware of it. It feels almost stupid to write out—how taking in something creative can provoke inspiration—but we live in really stupid times when people are actively working against the idea that art made by humans has a place or purpose in life.

Beyond my ongoing laments about AI, though, seeing this made me both glad to be in Los Angeles but saddened by how capitalism all but ruins these types of performances for so many people by not allowing an avenue for them to be experienced at all. A ‘market’-based economy will always be cruel to the arts because it’s generally unpredictable what, if anything, will even break even with a financial investment (much less be any kind of success). Major cities generally have enough demand for a variety of cultural options that many forms of art can cultivate audiences; mid-sized cities are lucky to have one independent theater and a liberal arts college that offers annual concert series. Rural areas are basically fucked beyond anything that doesn’t play in a national, corporate movie theater chain.

Experiencing art helps develop abstract thought. When ten people see the same movie, even one that might be ‘philosophical’ in nature, they are all presented with the same basic concept in their heads because the plot of the film poses questions it seeks to answer. Perhaps it’ll make the people think about variations of that question, but all ten people will have fairly concentrated thought processes. Taking in an experimental concert, or looking at abstract paintings, makes the ten people come up with their own questions before trying to reach a conclusion. The experience itself provokes so much more than what entertainment provides for—it has the potential to spur on more conversations, develop greater ideas, and make people more open in general.

As ideas are being chiseled away at and culture that doesn’t embrace corporatism is stifled, it feels like we’re all losing out. Violence seems inevitable at this point, and I can’t help but think that’s partially due to the fact so much of what we see and hear and experience on screens of any sort keeps pointing in that direction. We all end up thinking in similar patterns of decay because that’s all we’re shown in the dominant forms of media. It’s all just so sad, and I guess the music was bringing all that up tonight.

(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.

In many ways, protest art doesn’t really make sense now. While one would think the rise of fascism would make for ample space for artists to respond, the truth is the parody Donald Trump and his cohort have made of media in general makes it difficult for any kind of traditional creativity to resonate. The ether of media has become a battleground where lines are drawn around political affiliation and people disregard or appropriate art for their own personal interpretations and could give a shit about the rest. Look no further than Elon Musk promising a ‘historically accurate’ AI version of The Odyssey.

Another recent case in point is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead, which cited the ‘official’ death toll in Gaza—at which point people supportive of Israel would go around ‘correcting’ the album. (Other modern ironies are conservatives who listen to Rage Against The Machine to the point where Tom Morello had to explicitly tell them the music was not intended to support their perspective, or pro-police ilk adopting the Punisher skull without understanding its true history.)

I think Olivia Laing said it best in Funny Weather—

Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis? In 1967, George Steiner wrote a famous essay in which he observed that a concentration-camp commander could read Goethe and Rilke in the evening and still carry out his duties at Auschwitz in the morning, regarding this as evidence that art had failed in its highest function, to humanise. But this makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganise our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

It is true that once a piece of art is finished, you can’t really control how it is interpreted by the audience—and while that has always been part of the beauty of creativity, in times when people use art in ways that are distinctly antithetical to its obvious intention in order to promote oppressive messages, it makes it increasingly difficult to portray an idea of dissent. Even as political affiliation has become entrenched in personal identity, people still don’t want to feel excluded from culture—however when your view of the world includes domination through violence, it’s tough to find art that supports that outlook.

Like everything else in the world currently in flux, it remains interesting to see how art responds to the progressively contentious political environment (and the world of art being increasingly intertwined with the capitalist systems that are obviously right-wing). Journalism has all but completely failed to hold the state accountable for its actions, and most art feels like it’s right there too. When all is said and done with this era, how art critics and historians write about what is happening now will surely be a good read.

Why even try to write about any of this now? There is so much happening on a daily basis that it’s difficult to keep track of, much less maintain a discourse on. The climate crisis? War? Artificial intelligence? Wealth disparity? Global fascism? Genocide? Wage stagnation? What’s the point?

I think right now that question—Why bother?—is more interesting to me than the sum total of all the issues being faced, because it points directly to the crux of the problem. There is a bottleneck between the outcry for necessary change and administrative action to set it in motion, and that stagnation leads to division, rage, and despair among the people. This does not feel unintentional.

In a 2017 town hall debate on CNN, Nancy Pelosi replied to a question regarding the popularity of a more socialist economic agenda with, “We’re capitalists.” When I watched that live, it felt like a real mask-off, with-us-or-against-us moment for the Democratic party. Regardless of who is in power, there will never be a political agenda that prioritizes the well-being of the people over that of economic growth (and, when it comes down to it, individual profits). Nearly ten years later and it feels like liberals still won’t acknowledge that when you play the tape of capitalism to the end of the line, you end up with a guy like Donald Trump in power every time.

But the fact is the Democrats have no interest in what their constituents want, regardless of what it costs them. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 due to her pro-Israel stance during a genocide. Instead of even acknowledging that, the DNC buried the campaign autopsy because it said just as much. The Democrats won’t admit why they lost, and by doing so, won’t have to change any policy that might prevent donations coming in from AIPAC. If they won’t change their tune on supporting a genocidal apartheid state, I can’t imagine they’ll turn against Wall Street.

And this is what we’re stuck with—a hyperactive social media machine, a lazy and dying fourth estate protecting corporate interests, and a government that could give a fuck about any of it. We’re just in a cycle of talking amongst ourselves ad nauseam while nothing changes—constantly gaslit into an echo of reacting to one crisis after another, being exhausted by the lack of response by anyone in power. This repetition can only go on so long before it breaks into fits of action, at which point I think we’ll see the iron fist of the state really begin to squeeze.

At the very best, it’s demoralizing and leaves a feeling of futility to any creative endeavor. If nothing else, all I can do is imagine that when the dust settles and whatever comes next finally arrives, there will be some kind of record on how it all went down. Sometimes bearing witness is all you can do.