Post-Pourri: April 2025

'Dying for Sex', "Sunshine" La Croix, 'Scavengers Reign', and the ever-topical 'No Country for Old Men'

(This one will cut off in email! Click the header above to read directly on Substack)

On Saturday, my buddy Steve and I joined 36,000 of our fellow Angelenos to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the DTLA stop of their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Coachella, basically, for the over-30 progressive set! Over four hours, we heard from politicians, musicians¹, labor organizers, and regular citizens about the catastrophic actions of the Trump administration, a paella of incoherence and more importantly cruelty that, every day, is rendering America a bleaker and bleaker place to call home. Maybe you disagree with me? I don’t really care! (That’s how bad things are, that a lifelong people-pleaser who uses pop culture to shield himself from actual political thought is willing to write something so radical as “Trump is bad.” What can I say, they unleashed the fuckin’ beast!)

It’s an upsetting, scary time in this country, which made the chance to share in that feeling with so many other people all the more meaningful. You watch a president flaunt the Constitution, a billionaire unfurl Seig Heils; small, heartless men work to actively worsen the lives of people they were theoretically elected to improve. It all makes you feel incredibly helpless! So to see, even just for one afternoon, that there are a hell of a lot more of us (read: rightly concerned citizens) than there are them (read: evil, like dictionary definition evil people for whom they will have to invent entirely new circles of Hell) — well, solidarity counts for something!

I say all this as preamble to an April roundup I’m realizing in retrospect is fairly obsessed with survival, apocalypse, and death. But maybe each of them, in their own way, suggests the possibility for rebirth? There’s also a section about La Croix.

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Dying for Sex 📺

Have you even heard of this show? It’s hard to know outside of LA, City of Billboards, what is and isn’t on people’s radars. I mean hell, radar might not even exist anymore in a broken social media era that makes the Tower of Babel look like an utterly reliable communication center. So far as I can tell, this eight-episode Hulu series came and went last week with almost no fanfare. You’ll hear about it again come Emmy season, of that I’m 100% confident, but until then… well, until then, there’s Lifting Fog!

Quickly: ‘Dying for Sex’ follows breast cancer-relapsing Molly (Michelle Williams), who realizes that what she wants from her final months/years on Earth is to 1) leave Jay Duplass, her stifling plain potato chip of a husband and 2) truly discover what turns her on, an imperative she’d ignored her entire life. Molly will not die without achieving a partnered orgasm! She’s joined by her flighty best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate), who throws herself into end-of-life care even at the expense of her own wants and needs.

I would be lying to tell you this bucket list premise sold me on the show, mainly because you could construct the network sitcom version of it with your eyes closed. Think of it: every week, a new sexual partner, a new lesson as the clock ticks down (funnily!) to death. Maybe Molly goes into remission at the end of season one? Maybe she tries again with her ex? Maybe she dates an INCEL?? Molly’s going to find her orgasm. And maybe, just maybe, she’s going to find herself along the way…

It’s not that ‘Sex’ elides all of that; if anything, it kind of starts out as precisely that, Molly’s first sexcapades all some combination of wacky/sitcommy. But co-creator Liz Meriwether² (who also created ‘New Girl’, one of the last truly great sitcoms) knows exactly what she’s doing, and honors those episodic bones before, much like Molly and Nikki, growing past them. The characters and the show are both coming to terms with the finality of death at the same speed.

Michelle Williams — what is there to say? If you did know about (and were/are excited for) this show, I’m guessing it’s because of her involvement. At this point, I include her in the pantheon of Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Cate Blanchett: utterly dependable actresses with whom you always, always know you’re in good hands. It’s possible this even makes their work a little less exciting? I’m just saying I’m never surprised by any of them, the way I’m not surprised by, like, amazing sushi from Nobu. That’s why I went to Nobu!³

Who DID surprise me was Jenny Slate, delivering a genuine dramatic performance that leverages her innate charm to powerful effect. My feelings about her as, like, an actress have always been slightly hit or miss. She’s phenomenally talented, I’ve felt this for almost 20 years, but there’s a certain… quirky farty baby quality to her delivery that’s usually kept me at arm’s length, even if her choice of roles going back at least a decade — say ‘Obvious Child’, or the one after where her dad is played by John Turtorro. ‘Landline’? — suggest an artist of deeper depths, searching for something. Even if much of it annoyed me, I respected the hell out of her essay collection (‘Little Weirds’). And I’ve already written hundreds of words about ‘Marcel the Shell’, the best thing she’s ever done, which marries those quirky farty baby sensibilities to a story with — ironic for a movie about a sentient talking mollusk — real emotional weight.

In line with ‘Sex’’s overall subversive mission, Slate starts the series as the same flighty, overly theatrical friend we’ve always known her as. But she’s forced to grow the fuck up, and quick, as she serves as caretaker/secretary/family/parent to her dying best friend. Molly obviously undergoes a transformation here (death! The biggest transformation of all) but it’s Nikki who has to stick around, right? She’s the one who sees death, and lives.

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Sunshine La Croix 🌻

So last month we discussed Post Malone Oreos, a new kind of food partnership built on what I’d call “post-flavor vibes.” The flavor actually turned out to be, like, hella tight, one of the best new editions Oreo has put out in years. But that’s not the point! We’ve entered a grocery store era where brand recognition and marketability are doing way heavier lifting than the promise of taste alone, which is now almost a byproduct. Come for the prospect of social media engagement⁴, stay for the possibility you might actually like what you bought.

Anyway, enter: “Sunshine” La Croix.

Prior to now, La Croix peddled flavors like Lime, Tangerine, and the wildly misunderstood Coconut. Real fruits! Or, you know, rooted in something tangible; something you’d tasted before. Sunshine… maybe this speaks to a lack of spiritual curiosity on my part, but I’ve never tasted sunshine. Felt it, sure. Absorbed it, much like Superman, absolutely. But how do you hold the power of our solar system’s brightest star… in your mouth?

According to La Croix’s Wisconsin-based flavor engineers, sunshine tastes a lot like melted Skittles, with a hint of chamomile! I want to say there is indeed a brightness to it, but it’s impossible to separate that feeling from the can’s color scheme, or some unconscious hope that that’s what sunshine, in liquid form, would taste like. Maybe that’s every food and beverage interaction we have, no matter what kind of marketing has hijacked our brains? Maybe “taste,” in its final form, is just the interplay of expectation and sensation?

Listen, I’m no scientist. I’m just a Millennial with a Substack, easily swayed by pictures of sunflowers. But when it comes to zero calorie sparkling water, maybe that’s enough.

Score: 9/10

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L: Velvet Overground; R: Velvet Underground

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No Country for Old Men 📚

This may shock some of you for whom my ability to string together a sentence scans “remedial” but, like… I read. Not as much as I exercise my AMC A-List privileges (DON’T see ‘Novocaine’, or ‘A Working Man’) or various friends’ streaming subscriptions, but the habit’s there. Monthly, in fact, with the book club I’ve been a part of for the past four years! Since 2021, three white heterosexual guys have run the gamut on what is retroactively obvious to me a Reckoning with America. Some selects:

• ‘The Overstory’

• ‘Mother Night’

• ‘The Tortilla Curtain’

• ‘The Crying of Lot 49’

• ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’⁵

• ‘Light in August’

(Let the record show I had us read ‘The Vanishing Half’ in 2021 and regularly pitch non-white and/or female writers, because that is the kind of allyship I bring to our Zoom sessions.)

‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy was one of our most universally beloved reads, which we recently decided to chase with another novel of his, ‘No Country for Old Men’. Now at this point, ‘No Country’ is probably more synonymous with the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation, which brought us Javier Bardem’s Prince Valiant-looking sociopath and his terrifying invocation of the word “friendo.” It’s a great movie, unflinching and unsentimental, and one I’m so glad came out eighteen years ago and not today, where we’d be on month five of “Stop villainizing Anton Chigurh, he’s neurodivergent” discourse.

The movie’s an (almost) completely faithful adaptation of the book, which moves like a runaway train. Its plot is borderline elemental: guy finds money, guy takes money, guy hunted for money, guy killed for money. Like another briefcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’, the thing itself is beside the point, just an object of greedy fixation. What matters is what it unleashes, in this case an unstoppable T-1000-esque force (Anton Chigurh) ungoverned by any sense of morality, let alone human thought. There is no version of the story in which Llewyn (Josh Brolin in the movie) survives. He was dead the moment he grabbed the case.

What’s most interesting about the book is less the cat-and-mouse chase at its center — which is still, for the record, fucking sick — than the sense of helplessness it all instills in another character, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who follows Llewyn and Chigurh’s bloody trail all over the desert. The book is set in 1980, a time of great domestic upheaval; it was written in 2005, several years into our endless War on Terror; we just read it in 2025 which, see the beginning of this newsletter, feels like the beginning of another dark new chapter. ‘No Country’ meditates on a changing America that feels meaner, stranger, less knowable by the minute. Bell thought he’d seen some shit in his decades keeping the West Texas peace. He’d never accounted for semi-automatic shootouts in the streets, a drug trade that moves like the tide, or the unrelenting machinery of American capital.

Twenty years after publication, McCarthy’s words feel both prescient and wildly underestimating of where we’d actually wind up. I’ll leave you with three context-less quotes from the book:

“This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it”

“I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just don’t feel that way no more”

”What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has. Can it buy this one?”

MAKES U THINK

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Scavengers Reign 📺

What do you get when you combine the exploration of ‘The Legend of Zelda’, the environmentalism of ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’, and the visual style of French artist Moebius? A brilliant, little-seen HBO series that gets cancelled after one season!

I couldn’t tell you when, at this point, ‘Scavengers’ aired. Maybe 2023? Earlier? Much like the stranded astronauts who form the heart of its narrative, ‘Scavengers’ exists outside of time and space, detached from any earthbound trends or cultural expectation.

In fact, it frequently feels inhuman, like the four Demeter crew members we’re all hoping make their way off this hostile planet are ultimately far less interesting than the planet itself. Its huge roster of alien creatures⁶ don’t announce themselves, and certainly don’t have dramatic intention; they just… are, neither friend nor foe (okay there’s at least one creature that’s definitively foe), but representatives of an ecosystem our astronauts can adjust to or, you know, be killed by. Dealer’s choice!

The show’s gross a lot of the time. Goopy. Bloody. I might use the word “viscera” here, that feels appropriate. The art direction will knock you sideways and make you call an exterminator all at once.

The overall visual effect is one of awe and slow acclimation, just like our human characters are experiencing. Everything operates to humble you, recontextualize your relationship to the natural world (alien or otherwise!) and where you fit in it. Imagine, if you will, accepting that you’re lost and you’re scared and you know almost nothing. The only way to survive is to pay attention, and incrementally adapt. And maybe you get saved but more than likely, given the near-impossibility of interplanetary rescue, you just kind of learn to deal.

I mentioned at the start that ‘Scavengers’ was given only a single season. Fact is, this is one of those shows that might have actually suffered to continue. It could not be further in subject/scope/tone/anything to ‘Fleabag’ (stay with me! I’m going somewhere), but what made ‘Fleabag’ a perfect two-season show was the fact that, baked into its very presentational conceit, the show could not continue if Fleabag was getting better. Growing as a character necessitated jettisoning her relationship to us (i.e. the fourth wall breaks). To actually move forward in her life, Fleabag had to quite literally let us go. Brilliant.

‘Scavengers’ posits that ecosystems change us, and we in turn change ecosystems. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that by the end of the series, one of the characters undergoes a transformation of such magnitude, such paradigm-shifting, that the world we just spent eight episodes exploring has effectively been rebooted. You could do another season on the heels of that system shock. But it would be a new world — and by extension a new show — entirely. I’m happy enough to just witness the life, death, and rebirth of this one.

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Any other thoughts? Please, please leave a comment! By now you can tell I’m really trying to write more consistently this year, maybe more *healthily*. Part of the challenge for me has always been figuring out how to balance something like Lifting Fog with, you know, more overtly professional work. Locking that in involves knowing what you guys like, what you’re responding to — and by extension what I’m capable of delivering at a regular (but hopefully not predictable!) clip. I appreciate ALL 150 OF YOU and hope I’m writing stuff that only feels additive to your inbox, and not an easy delete.

1. Including Joan Baez, whose voice remains astonishingly crisp at 84

2. Kim Rosenstock’s the other co-creator, I should mention

3. I have never actually eaten at Nobu

4. which, you know… this is

5. …which I never actually read, the group knows, we’ve all moved past it

6. seriously, throngs; find the whole taxonomy here on Vulture