🎯 One thing Instagram has taught me is that girls in big hats love looking off into the distance:

On the other side of the rainbow is a pot of wide-brimmed hats.

🎯 Why is art becoming so homogenous? One reason is the death of record stores and video stores. Those dorks behind the counter were the first line of defense against the hacky bullsh*t algorithms love. Now it's a free-for-all and no one’s in the crow’s nest to call out the tyranny of the majority.

🎯 Money is just the most obvious type of currency. Beauty, time, affection, and effort are also currencies – and equally subject to the laws of supply and demand. Also, we're all prostitutes in a way. We all do stuff we don’t want to do in order to get something in return. The people we call “prostitutes” just don’t bother to mask it.

🎯 One thing that irrationally irks me is how much people now seem to think Nirvana was more important than Guns 'n Roses. Appetite was earth shattering, Nevermind was glossy, overproduced punk schlock. Slash was a filthy melodic genius, Nirvana was a lot of root notes plus distortion. Axl was dangerous, Kurt was obtuse kvetching. Yawn. Goes to show you how much dying is a great marketing move.

🎯 All video game characters with unlimited lives are Buddhist – that’s just gamer reincarnation.

🎯 Can't get over Desantis’ idea that the evilness that must be stopped in our society is...DISNEY. Jeez, how basic and neutered do you have to be!? Sums up our era of exaggeration: Mouse ears are the new devil horns.

🎯 Trump offers excitement and unpredictability. And we've been trained, via television and social media, to value those traits above all others. Desantis will never beat him because he offers no blood, guts, shock, or awe. He's just go-go boots after a hurricane.

🎯 Men have superhero origin stories. Women have "So how did you two meet?" stories. "We were both bumped from the same flight and decided to get a drink" is "bit by a radioactive spider" for women.

🎯 We keep acting all confused by "AI vs. humanity" as if we don't have decades of seeing what happened with drum machines vs. drummers. A.I. will be the cheap/easy/techie solution used by most people. And that will make the human/real version even more valuable and special.

🎯 All you really need to know about AI: The people making it went to Congress and begged to be regulated – something that never f#^&% happens. It's like the fox asking the farmer to put up some barbed wire around the henhouse. Hey, us humans had a good run. Robot overlords, please be gentleGPT with me!

🎯 The George Santos story is mostly con man nonsense. The meat on the bone is how it represents what happens when we lose our local media ecosystems. With the watchdogs gone, the wolves slip through.

🎯 Found a neat acting class in LA. Operating Thespian, here I come!

🎯 I propose we change the name of therapy to doomzooming.

🎯 Remember Chatroulette? It taught us an important lesson: Go deep enough and the internet always winds up at the same place, with a guy alone in a room masturb@ting at you.

🎯 Sean Murphy touts the Rubesletter: “Comedian Matt Ruby is essentially a one man newspaper, so go ahead and unfollow everyone else; including your mom…The Rubesletter is one of my favorite emails to get, and is essentially the closest thing to an old school newspaper experience you can find these days…The Rubesletter pokes fun at the metaverse, AI, and your favorite Big Tech conspiracy theories in biting and witty ways.” I’m blushing. 😊

Sign up, babies. Or tell a friend. Or mention on social media. Thanks! 😘

10 thoughts on Succession

Skip this section if you don’t want Succession spoilers (or don’t care).

1) First, let’s look in the mirror and examine our own hypocrisy as viewers of shows like Succession and White Lotus. These mock-the-rich shows let us bask in hating the ultrarich while simultaneously funneling all their yachts, castles, and trips down our greedy eyeballs like hungry Hermés hippos. We want to have our cake and eat it too – all while hating on their "let them eat cake" attitude. Us: “Screw the 1%! Now show me every little detail of their entire lives.” How heroic.

On to the finale…

2) It was totally giving vibes of two all-time great flicks: The Graduate (the bus ride stare at the end)...

3) …and Godfather 2 (Michael hatekissing Fredo).

In the end, the Roy siblings were all Fredo.

4) There are almost zero actual business lessons in Succession except for the most important one of all: GET IT IN WRITING. Why these putzes kept making wink-wink deals and expecting them to pan out was bizarre.

5) Pain sponge! That’s actually the best description I've ever heard for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's job. NFL owners: "We need you to take the heat for every rancid decision that will make us more money." Roger: "Woof woof."

6) People have been ranking the Succession characters but I’ll give you my top three most underrated people involved with the show:

1. Nicholas Britell, the guy who wrote the score (best ever in TV history for my money). So many variations and moods. “My sort-of thesis there was that I would be very serious with the music, and inhabit this mixture of oversized beats and very late-18th-century classical music harmonies – everything would be a little too big for itself, a little out of proportion – the way the Roy family sees themselves,” he told Billboard after the second season.

2. Michael Schulman, who wrote that scorching New Yorker story about Jeremy Strong. That (and the ensuing dialogue around it) was like a bonus half-season in and of itself.

3. The cinematographers who shoot the show (Patrick Capone, Christopher Norr, and Andrij Parekh). Why? The camera acts like a player in the game being played on screen.

   The cinematography of Succession is full of flaws…imprecise framing, characters who block other characters and awkward focus pulls…The show is consciously shot as though a real camera were in the room, often at the expense of ideal compositions, and a big part of why that is has to do with how the show treats its camera like it’s a character…The camera crafts a character that doesn’t exist consciously on screen, but one that sits in the unconscious mind of the viewer that aids in the telling of the story.

7) Re: the meal fit for a king smoothie, it never got eaten. And did we ever see any of the Roy siblings actually eat? They skip every meal: they meet for breakfast and just talk. their mother’s dinner goes uneaten, etc. At least Tom and Mattson actually ate fish at their sitdown. That's how we were meant to know they would EAT.

8) After that Desantis/Elon launch, I guess we’re just lucky the Succession finale didn’t feature a "Mencken goes on GoJo Spaces" scene.

Btw, after the finale, love-to-hate-him Venture Capitalist Jason Calacanis, wrote, “There is no way this is over. And if this is over, I'm funding a startup just to make AI episodes of Succession.” This sounds exactly like what Kendall would do next: “I'm funding a startup just to make AI episodes.” Also reveals how these VC types think anyone willing to leave money on the table must be making a huge mistake that needs to be corrected. (Update: He claims he was joking.)

9) Speaking of “jokes,” I posted this (below) recently and the finale kinda backed me up?

10) As for takeaways from the whole series, this notion has stuck with me: The trauma of poor people only affects those in their immediate circle. The trauma of the rich and powerful is able to spread far and wide. It’s the difference between a grenade and a missile.

Comedy

Shoutout to all the comedy show producers who alwaaaaaaays find the 7 year old photo for the promo flyer. It’s impressive. On with the shows…

😈 Los Angeles: Come see the west coast debut of Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby: A Mindful Comedy Show on Thursday, June 1 at Oeno Vino. (Rubesletter discount code: tunein)

😈 Full L.A. schedule this week:

5/30 - Neal Brennan and Friends @ Westside Theater (8pm)
5/30 - Belly Room @ The Comedy Store (10:30pm)
5/31 - Totally Comedy Show @ Bar Lubitsch (8pm)
6/1 - Misguided Meditation @ Oeno Vino (8:30pm)*

* extended set

😈 NYC: Misguided Meditation comes to Brooklyn on 6/9 at Gaia Nomaya (discount code: tunein). It’s an amazing space and this show will feature live visuals and ambient music too.

😈 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Here’s me finding out the secret to a happy marriage:

5-spotted

🗯 Derek Thompson’s theory of Optimal Onlineness:

Good politicians are optimally online: They're aware of Internet discourse but not captured by it. They ignore outrages du jour to focus on the bigger picture.

Said it before/I’ll say it again: Too many people make the mistake of thinking Internet discourse is reality. Go onstage and talk about the Twitter outrage of the day and you’ll be greeted with a roomful of blank stares.

🗯 Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away and before he did he compiled a 33-song playlist for his own funeral.⁠ Feels like we should all do that! Sakamoto’s team:

We would like to share the playlist that Ryuichi had been privately compiling to be played at his own funeral to accompany his passing. He truly was with music until the very end.”

🗯 “How many times can you see the Grand Canyon?” On getting bored with psychedelics.

Many rock musicians rejected LSD and returned to country, R’n’B and blues in a conscious rejection of acid fantasy. Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, having spent much of the recording of the panned album Their Satanic Majesties Request high on LSD, wrote their back-to-basics and superior 1968 single ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ as a declaration of post-psychedelic freedom: “It’s about having a hard time and getting out”, he said. “Just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.” Others developed progressive rock, or ‘prog’. More directly, other musicians like The Beatles, Pete Townshend and Donovan followed the classic ‘post-psychedelic’ path, spurning the drugs to pursue meditation and Eastern mysticism. Others, like Dennis McKenna, reject the Wattsian model and commit to an “ongoing conversation” on the psychedelic ‘phone’. There’s no right answer: really, it depends on each person’s preferences. 

🗯 Mark Fisher: No One is Bored, Everything is Boring.

For the most part, we’ve given up any expectation of being surprised by culture – and that goes for ‘experimental’ culture as much as popular culture. Whether it is music that sounds like it could have come out 20, 30, 40 years ago, Hollywood blockbusters that recycle and reboot concepts, characters and tropes that were exhausted long ago, or the tired gestures of so much contemporary art, the boring is everywhere. It is just that no one is bored – because there is no longer any subject capable of being bored.

🗯 Wesley Morris: American Culture Is Trash Culture. He discusses Pauline Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies” written for Harper’s in 1969.

Her antennae had picked up on some primal, intangible signal of moviegoing ecstasy that felt ancillary to (if not the opposite of) art and separate from the basics of storytelling. She surmised that the joy of going to the movies arose from “meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.” And when you meet them, “you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies” — movies that behave badly.

I ❤️ Morris’ writing and podcast. Always stellar stuff.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt

P.S. Check out my podcast for more like this: Kind of a lot with Matt Ruby.