Lately I’m in a self-imposed work cocoon, embedding myself in research, writing, and editing. Everything I consume—film, video, novel, album, memoir—somehow pertains to one of my seemingly ever-expanding list of projects and as such, I have begun to refrain from posting about them. They will become fodder here eventually, but for now…
September was, by my account, not bad. I traveled to the U.K., Palm Springs, and Mendocino. I saw old friends and made some new ones—a hazard of mine. I partied with Madonna, hung out with Slowdive, cried to The Cure, recorded some podcasts, managed to shop, did some psychedelics with friends and closed a film deal. I drove up and down the state of California which you already know is my favorite pastime. I ate at Melvyn’s, my favorite restaurant. I bathed in natural hot springs and got a tarot reading by the best astrologer in America. As my siblings were cleaning out my late mother’s house to put it up for sale I was treated to the psychically assaultive experience of being confronted by all the humiliating (in the proper sense of the word) photos and ephemera from my Petaluma childhood. All of this is to say that past, future, fantasy and reality have all been intersecting and colliding in erratic and slippery ways. I’m in the process of concretizing it (somehow) into a narrative film project I plan to make my next priority. In doing so, I’ve been forced to contemplate, perhaps for the first time personally, the way life and art reflect and distort one another, like a funhouse mirror on a revolving door.
I’ve spent about 25 hours, so far, listening to the audiobook of Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Mitchell Zuckoff’s authorized dive comprising interviews with Altman and 200 of his friends, collaborators, relatives, and critics. Many of the actors who were interviewed for the book—which employs a playfully overlapping, quasi-linear, casually oratory narrative structure—do their own voiceovers in the audio version. Some, conspicuously, do not, which gives the experience a unique tension between documentary and reenactment. It’s odd and addictive, the sort of experience I can fall into forever. I think the reason I return so often to both Kubrick and Altman is that one to me represents the apotheosis of style, form following function, executed with pristine precision. And the other represents a rejection of it, which is to say, a fanatical embrace of a certain realism, the execution of which is no less precise, but which necessarily invites spontaneity and a certain free-wheeling verisimilitude: an embrace of the documentary style, perhaps. Many films succeed in striking a balance between the two. What can a new version look like? I just saw the new Tom Cruise movie Digger and I don’t think, despite its attempts, that it has the answer.
I recently went on the Sexy Unique Podcast to talk about my favorite reality TV episode(s), the “Scary Island” arc of The Real Housewives of New York (Season 3, episodes 11-13). You can watch the podcast here. Or listen wherever. Some might have noticed The Real Housewives of New York was pointedly omitted from The New York Times’s 100 Best TV Shows Of The 21st Century feature, a shortsighted rejection by the anointed thought-leaders of one of the most psychedelic and entertaining spectacles of American society and female rage ever captured on film. Of course, reality TV somehow remains disrespected in 2026, despite dominating the cultural conversation for the past 30 years, easily. This is not to be confused with a rejection of the documentary form. Documentaries are conversely taken quite seriously, at turns, primarily depending upon the seriousness of their subjects rather than their own style and execution. I find both attitudes exhausting and beneath us all.
I hold documentary films and reality television both in the highest regard—especially when it’s trashy. There’s just nothing like the real thing in this life, I’m sorry. A documentary about a seemingly superficial or unserious subject can say as much about our humanity and the way we relate to each other as a documentary about famine, abuse, murder, or war. When these things can intersect, it’s even better. Much of reality TV is, of course, a construct, but that also is telling. It adds an extra layer of what people are willing to sign up for and how they choose to portray themselves, allowing a certain artifice to slip. I’m all about the slip.
