ReCOWmendations -- February 2023

A song for the ages, an unexpectedly entertaining new film, an essential newsletter to help navigate these dark times, and an HBO TV Series that deserves more viewers

Welcome back for a new month of ReCOWmendations!

I had hoped to have my longer earworm post for the week finished by now, but it’s gonna require some more fine-tuning to meet your well-deserved high standards.

So part 3 of the Famous People Proper Names In Song series will go live next week.

(I was really hoping for a better acronym than FPPNIS. I am opening this up to you for a rephrasing of this series with a new catchy acronym. Winner gets fawning accolades in the next newsletter in a large font!)

My disclaimer:

I know most of us don’t lack for options for media that we can be entertained and inspired by. But I do love sharing the things I discover that make me incredibly happy, so maybe one of them will peak your interest and add more happiness into your life.

Here are four reCOWmendations from four different types of media.

It’s likely that many of you have seen this video by now, as it’s taking the interwebs by storm.

It’s hard to know what to say about Ren Gill, as everything that comes to mind feels inadequate and/or reductive. This video speaks for itself. It speaks for the man performing it. And it likely speaks to millions of people in the world struggling with physical and mental illnesses.

It’s an absolute stunner. I can’t think of any work of art in any medium in recent years that has ripped open my heart and expanded it in a hundred directions like “Hi Ren.” My suggestion is to just play the video. The less you know about it the better. It is emotionally raw and thematically heavy, so don’t watch it if you aren’t ready for that level of intensity.

But when you are, come back and play the video.

In short, “Hi Ren” captures Mr. Gill’s more than a decade-long struggle with mental illness, exacerbated by untreated and undiagnosed Lyme disease. Originally signed to Sony records in 2010, within months Ren’s health would deteriorate rapidly, making it impossible for him to tour, let alone get out of bed. He tells the story at the end of the video, way better than I can summarize.

The song is a masterpiece. I cannot think of another song like it. There’s flamenco-style guitar, there’s rapping, there’s singing to the rafters, and it ends with a heart-wrenching monologue that puts everything in perspective.

Novak (left) as cocky New York podcaster in Texas, interviewing cowboy record producer (Ashton Kutcher)

A few days ago I was mindlessly flipping through the Amazon Prime channel on my Roku when the film Vengeance appeared in the “you might like” list.

The film stars and is directed by B.J. Novak, an actor most known for playing Ryan Howard on the fabulous American remake of The Office. For you baseball fans out there, this naming was wholly intentional, chosen to honor the great Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard (2004-2016), whose career overlapped and almost matched that of the iconic show (2005-2013).

Anyway, B.J. Novak is much more than an actor playing smarmy, deadpan characters in TV shows. He’s written the brilliant short-story collection One More Thing, and a children’s book titled The Book With No Pictures.

Vengeance is his feature film directorial debut and it’s a lot better than I expected. Terrible title, but that’s the worst part about it.

Quick synopsis. Hipster N.Y. podcaster (Novak) gets a call late one night from a man in west Texas, informing him that Novak’s girlfriend, the caller’s sister, was dead. Only Novak doesn’t have a girlfriend. But he quickly realizes that the dead sister was a woman he had a one-night stand with a few months prior. Seeing an opportunity for a podcast story, he agrees to fly out to Texas to attend the funeral.

To say more would spoil the story, which has a ton of twists and turns, but is less a thriller than a smart exploration on the stories we like to tell, the stories we like to hear and whether the truth lies somewhere in between.

"File:Maria Popova (2).jpg" by PopTech is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

I want to say that I discovered The Marginalian — originally called Brian Pickings — from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett. The Marginalian has been written and curated by Maria Popova for more than 15 years. In a way, Maria is the Godmother of the newsletter.

Combining philosophy, history, spirituality, art, poetry, politics and so much more into a thematic whole, Reading The Marginalian is the curious adult version of a kid being locked in a candy store.

Each newsletter’s ambitions are so vast — limitless really — that I’m constantly left dumbfounded at the way it can blow both my mind and my body. Maria’s ability to pluck out excerpts from essentially the entirety of recorded history and combine them together, creating new contexts and parallels is nothing short of astonishing. She links to the full sources of all the works she sources from and includes meticulous footnotes.

For me, reading The Marginalian is like reading the newspaper, if all of history is the source material.

You can go to the Marginalian website if you prefer that to her free emailed newsletter. Either way, I highly encourage you to donate. Maria is a global treasure and deserves to be supported and compensated.

With Netflix adding commercials while cracking down on subscribers sharing logins and passwords, and HBO slashing series from their archives like an angry, drunk ninja, the era of all-access, prestige TV is seemingly coming to an end.

Many excellent, smaller series are vulnerable to disappearing, due to these streaming austerity measures. So I want to highlight one show that deserves a much larger audience and critical acclaim.

Sort Of (what an awful name for a show that is way more than ‘sort of’ great), is the sort of (pun intended) show that the right-wing nationalists would call ‘woke’ because it dares to portray people from marginalized communities in genuine, complex and human situations and contexts.

The Wikipedia entry for the show describes it way better than I could:

Sort Of is a Canadian television sitcom, released on CBC Television in 2021.^[1] Created by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, the series stars Baig as Sabi Mehboob, a non-binary millennial trying to balance their roles as a child of Pakistani immigrant parents, a bartender at an LGBTQ bookstore and café, and a caregiver to the young children of a professional couple.^[2]

In February 2022, the series was renewed for a second season, which premiered on November 15 on CBC Television and CBC Gem in Canada and on HBO Max in the US on December 1.^[3] In December 2022, the series was renewed for a third season.^[4]

It warms my cockles (I really need to explore the history of this idiom) that the show was renewed for a 3rd season. I so hope that HBOMax doesn’t back out of that agreement. It’s a show that I feel like should be essential viewing for all human beings.

And of course it’s a Canadian production — Canadians are awesome — but it is not a sitcom. That really downplays the very real and serious themes the show tackles. I would say, if I had to compare Sort Of to anything else on television, it has elements that remind me of both Ramy (HULU) and the Bridget Everett dramedy Somebody Somewhere (HBOMax).

Okay COW-heads. Now it’s your turn. What songs, albums, films, TV shows, books, YouTube channels or other forms of media have brightened your week?

Have you seen the Ren video? What did you think? Have your watched Vengeance? Already subscribe to The Marginalian? Are you excited to check out Sort Of? And what’s with all these TV shows and films with awful titles? Is it just that I’m too old to know what appeals, title-wise, to audiences?

Click the “Leave a Comment” button and join the conversation! And share this with your friends and colleagues.

Thanks!