An excerpt from Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno to help set the mood. Here is Virgil, speaking to Dante:
Therefore I think and judge it for thy best
Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide,
And lead thee hence through the eternal place,Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
Who cry out each one for the second death;And thou shalt see those who contented are
Within the fire, because they hope to come,
Whene’er it may be, to the blessed people;
//
Every year on American Thanksgiving, a new episode of my favorite podcast of all time is released. Read on, and you’ll be glad you did, or possibly you’ll feel like this writer for Esquire: “[this annual podcast] is my shame. It is my curse.”
Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans
To set the table, Till Death Do Us Blart is an “annual, eternal” review podcast of the 2015 film starring Kevin James: Paul Blart Mall Cop 2. Only one episode of the podcast is produced and released each year. The movie the hosts must watch and review has a rating of 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been variously described by critics and audiences as "pointless,” “mediocre,” and “for the lowest…fodder,” while having “[s]urprising notes of meanness and bitterness.” By contrast, the podcast about this bad movie is by turns both repellant and attractive, boasts a nearly flawless five star rating in Apple Podcasts, and displays some of the tenets and structures of a proto-faith. The podcast has been dubiously mentioned under the “Legacy” section of the movie’s Wikipedia page. In anticipation of this year’s holiday pilgrimage to Blart, I wanted to produce something of an introductory guide for new initiates.
For many years of the show’s run, the hosts of the podcast refused to watch Paul Blart Mall Cop 1 (it being unnecessary to the task at hand, and probably not canon). In preparation for the release of episode 10, portions of the fandom are also engaged in a re-listen to all of the prior episodes. This is likewise unnecessary, but it’s a kind of religious rite (to wade waist deep through way too much Blart content in imitation of the hosts). Their grim task of putting out the show every year is only enhanced by the audience’s unreasoning continued engagement with it. This is advanced, performative fandom. If you’re new to the show, you could just as easily listen to only the newest episode, or choose one at random. Tracking the desperation and regression of the hosts year over year by binging the series is a task best reserved for us zealots. I have completed my re-listen just in time (no small task, with its 9 episodes running twelve and a half hours, end to end). If you stop to remember we have free will (and possibly only this one life), this podcast (or any repeat listens to it) is pure madness. It is also participatory surrealist art on a grand scale.
What is it like to watch Paul Blart Mall Cop 2? I cannot say (I am in the sect of listeners that will never watch the film). The movie’s title reads like a string of curse words, and the clip below can give us some idea of the film’s bleak conceptual landscape. In it, Kevin James fights a crane while a mysterious man knowingly smiles and accompanies the fight on piano. No explanation is offered by the film for this scene.
A good portion of the podcast’s run time is dedicated to savaging the dubious creative choices of the movie. Is the podcast also an exercise in meanness and bitterness by the hosts in this regard? I think the targeting of Happy Madison and Kevin James is all fair play here—they’ve been duly paid to produce and release this content, and the bizarre, dogged nature of the podcast’s fandom means the long tail of this otherwise irredeemable movie becomes slightly more valuable. This oddball podcast not only keeps a mediocre, poorly drawn character in the consciousness of the Western World and saves it from the rubbish heap of history to which it would otherwise rightly be consigned, but also generates a small but steady amount of revenue from its irony-chasing viewers in the form of sales of the film and residuals for its actors. I like to imagine the world’s most obscure tab in a spreadsheet on the servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment that dutifully notes this inexplicable but continuous rivulet of revenues (that there is an accounting, even for the unaccountable).
A Hagiography of Hosts
The rest of the podcast’s tenets are simple. There are five hosts. In theory, the podcast will continue to be made and released on its current pace/schedule forever. When one of the hosts dies, they have named a successor in advance to take over their duties. A new host successor must also make the eternal pledge and take on the “life debt” of watching and hosting the podcast until they die and their named replacement in turn takes up the mantle. The current and original hosts are two comedians from New Zealand (Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt, hosts of the equally audacious podcast, The Worst Idea of All Time), and three brothers from West Virginia (the Brothers McElroy, Justin, Travis and Griffin, hosts of My Brother, My Brother and Me).
Guy and Tim’s other show is a curious bit of stunt programming and informs some of the structure, longevity and suffering inherent to the Paul Blart project. Appropriately and accurately named The Worst Idea of all Time, Guy and Tim’s weekly podcast features them watching and talking about the same movie every week for a year. They began with 52 watches of Grown Ups 2, starring all the luminaries of the Happy Madison/Adam Sandlerverse. Their most recent undertaking is a reverse chronological slog through the Fast and the Furious franchise, watching Fast 9 for 9 watches, Fast 8 for 8, etc., until they can finally rest having watched the first film once (at which point the films’ lore, plotting and characterizations should all finally make sense to them). Their penchant for this unusual kind of suffering allows them to serve as guides to the other 3 Blart hosts for their yearly descent into what is seemingly podcast hell.
One of the guiding ideas behind Guy and Tim’s show is that a given season becomes more about the passage of time and how the hosts handle the despair of repeat media viewings rather than the movie itself (what can you say about Sex and the City 2 on a 30th or 45th rewatch?). I sometimes wonder if their minds have not been pickled, and their souls irreversibly degraded, by these (wholly unnecessary) labors. As performance artists, this podcast is a feat of strength and a pinnacle of achievement in the surreal arts. As a lived reality, it seems dire beyond words.
The Brothers McElroy are also something of an acquired taste, but their weekly podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me is built around frivolity, rather than suffering. Two of the brothers were founding members/writers for Polygon.com, which gave us internet darlings such as Monster Factory (I’m still subscribed) and Car Boys (for many reasons, 2016 truly was just a simpler time). The McElroy brand of humor works best when they lean into their chemistry as brothers (they started their podcast in order to spend more time with one another, but can easily aggravate each other in ways anyone with siblings will recognize and enjoy). Nominally, their long running podcast is an advice show (its formative years coinciding with the rise, stagnation and disappearance of their source of questions to discuss: Yahoo! Answers). They put out one episode a year I consider appointment listening—the selection and naming of a rhyming conceptual theme for the upcoming year. The theme for 2023 was “Twenty Sun and Sea: surf the vibe,” a rad Capri Sun fever dream of a catch phrase chosen by the brothers for its aspirational chillness and sheer incompatibility with their general demeanor). On the Blart show, they are newcomers to the existential powerlifting of forcing yourself to watch bad movies without end, and the brothers function as modern stand ins for Dante. Perfect foils to Tim and Guy, who function as the show’s knowing Virgil.
Steadfastness and Toiling in Vain
So the first episode of this show was released in 2015, 7 months after Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 was released in theaters. The movie, to hear them describe it, gives its viewers little to enjoy—the hosts can count the funny moments in this alleged comedy on one hand (yearly stand outs consistently include Kevin James fighting a bird, as linked above, a character eating a very old banana, and a hotel employee being punched by Kevin James squarely in the abdomen).
For each year’s rewatch the movie successively generates fewer laughs from the hosts, and for some of them a rewatch now produces no laughter. Now there is only wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Having exhausted the ability to discuss the plot after the first two years, new and experimental ways of watching the film are put forward by the hosts. In 2017, one host presents the new work Blart Side of the Mall, which can be performed by playing Pink Floy’s Dark Side of the Moon album over the film. There are some pleasing synchronicities (for the curious, a highlight reel is linked below). For 2019, another host watches the film on LSD while wearing a VR headset. His laconic review: “waste of a trip.” This experiment also coined one of my favorite descriptions of the show’s dynamic: watching this film on LSD is like shrinking down to the size of a punctuation mark, and trying to inhabit that space and critique it, such is the nothingness of the Till Death Do Us Blart exercise. The episode released in 2020 saw the hosts provide a formal director’s commentary. 2022 introduced a one time lottery and something of a whodunit—one of them was allowed (and think about what that word choice signifies here) to watch the Kevin James movie Here Comes the Boom instead of Mall Cop 2. The hostility and resentment of the group at the idea that one of them was able to skip watching the film for one year gives the first half of this episode a madcap, paranoid energy as they all accuse one another of lying about being the incredibly lucky lottery winner.
This all raises the question, which is very much on the mind of the hosts 9 years into things: is an annual review podcast about Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 a mistake? Is all of this just nothing? Tim and Guy’s experience from their other podcast provides a helpful lens. First, they have conceded watching a movie over and over again is nothing. Even talking about the same movie for a while is nothing. But eventually, a milestone is reached (“10 to 20 years from now”) where the project becomes “pretty interesting” again. Watching Sex and the City 2 for 20 weeks is nothing—but watching it for an entire year makes the endeavor count for something again. Rewatching bad movies becomes a kind of scaffolding that enables the construction of ever more interesting art from the hosts. The only way out is through.
This hopefulness that the project might have some artistic or other worth is constantly in tension with something on the show TVTropes.com calls the “despair event horizon.” The hosts are all visited by a creeping feeling that they have agreed to do something pointless, or possibly disfiguring to their personhood, for the rest of their lives. If one of them has 50 years left to live, it means they will have to watch Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 50 more times. In the 2022 episode, Justin McElroy started to contemplate how he might explain such a project to his grandchildren, or that what little cultural relevance the show originally had will surely evaporate over time (it’s possibly gone already). Guy Montgomery (who seems to be chief sadist among the group) reassures Justin that at some point in the upcoming years the podcast will start to mean something again. Not just for the milestone episodes (after all, 10 or 25 years of Paul Blart reviews will feel like something), but for the passage of time. Four of the five hosts are now fathers, and they’ve all seen COVID come and go. The mid-2010s when the show started already feel like a simpler time. Today, a movie about a mall cop feels like an artifact of some late stage capitalism society we’ve already left in the rearview (we’re more into the steady construction of a techno-futurist dystopia in the 2020s). It’s an even harder project to defend if you stack it up against the real suffering happening everywhere in the world (but this has never been, and cannot be our test for whether art should be made). So where might the podcast go from here?
Raptured
Much like the movie it reviews, the podcast claims to be a comedy, but is freighted with sinister elements. There is the despair about the cyclical nature of time and the exasperated acknowledgements they have probably talked about some trivia or aspect of the film in a prior year and already forgotten about it (respectively, they have, and they regularly do), but death is the only way to get out of watching the movie and putting out the annual show. This necessarily means new hosts must take over the show at some point. Appointing your successor carries a grim amount of weight—who in your life would you condemn to watching and talking about this movie for the rest of their life? In 2021, Guy Montgomery named co-host Tim Batt’s infant son as Guy’s successor. The other hosts were particularly outraged by the decision. It seemed to them an immoral act.
The melodrama is all part of the fun, but hosting the show is nonetheless an obligation and an encumbrance—by all descriptions and measures, Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 is an unpleasant viewing experience. Often, the hosts are at their lowest point right after they’ve pressed “play” on their annual rewatch—they are overtaken by an unshakable feeling of dread that they must again watch this 94 minute movie (as it is a film with “so little artistry,” bereft of appreciable craft or charm, they will feel all 94 of those minutes).
Of Adherents and Apostates
But what do listeners think of it? The staggering number of 5 star reviews has already been noted. Many who leave written reviews also relay an important sentiment: this podcast is now more important to them than the Thanksgiving holiday. I read these sorts of reviews and can only nod in agreement. I always enjoy the new episodes as soon as I can (in the morning at a hotel before heading over to a family gathering, or more often, while hanging up Christmas lights in the days after Thanksgiving).
Should listeners watch Paul Blart Mall Cop 2? There’s a schism in the doctrine about this. Purists (like myself) are adamant that watching the film is not necessary and probably tarnishes the listening experience with your own impressions of the film. The most exposure I can recommend is the clips I have linked here. The vivid impression rendered by the hosts of the rest of the film otherwise surely surpasses what the actual movie can be. Daredevils, heretics and others have made it a point to watch the film, arguing it was seemingly (actually) endorsed by the hosts in an update to dogma with the release of their director’s commentary track in 2020 (I would argue not watching the source material remains a kind of moral imperative and a play at purity in the absurd world the hosts have made for us).
The hosts also sometimes speak of potential Paul Blart 3 plots and the expected arrival of a third film. This seems an increasingly unlikely occurrence (even if the film exists in the world of Bojack Horseman), as the hosts expected it to appear sometime around 2021 (citing 6 years between the release of the first two chapters of the duology), but there is a Change.org petition you can sign if you are feel like performing charitable works.
The Procession of Faith
I sometimes have trouble keeping the years of the show straight, so I thought I’d leave some highlights here to help guide me or any other prospective celebrants in any future revisits to these holy relics. God, I hope I never listen to all of these again. Even my fervor for this material has limits. With this write up, hopefully I’ve finally gotten my arms around it, as each subsequent revisit to the series as a whole extracts an increasingly long tithing of time (it was 3 hours to take in the entire series in 2017, perfect for a plane ride, but it would probably take 13.5 hours to undertake the same preparatory rites for episode 11 in 2024, a cursed ritual I will leave to others).
2015
The energy and excitement of this inaugural episode is a wild contrast to the later episodes (where the hosts are increasingly despondent about the existential millstone their annual project has become). Four out of five hosts “did not hate” the movie. One of them catalogued a (gobsmacking) 11 laughs during the film.
The group is quickly fascinated by a metatextual reading of the film that makes it something other than absolute pablum: Paul Blart is possibly a Job-like figure, being tested by God and his agent, the Shadow Man (their name for the mysterious pianist in the bird-fight clip above), who are the architects of Blart’s pain and visit torments upon the world’s least likable protagonist. The film is also notable to the group for (i) demonstrating a critical lack of understanding around some of its main plot elements (e.g., what an art heist is, or what the purpose of a keynote speaker is at a conference) and (ii) the poorly drawn, contradictory character aspects of Paul Blart (there is constant dissonance from the film’s ask that the audience root for this disreputable man).
2016
The hosts begin by naming their successors should they die and be released of their eternal obligation (Guy refuses to acknowledge his mortality and does not name one). The hosts are also still somehow excited to be reviewing and discussing the movie. At the mid-way point of the episode, the group seizes on the bird-fight scene as one freighted with a deeper meaning (the lore of the Garden of Contemplation and the Shadow Man theories are laid out in detail).
Given how much they are struggling with just one yearly watch, the McElroy Brothers come to the conclusion that Tim and Guy are absolute lunatics for their other project of watching the same film on a weekly basis (Griffin suggests they have voluntarily constructed their own prison). Tim responds that “if you can’t change the circumstances, you must change the internal” (a joke only made funnier by the obvious fact that Tim and Guy are in complete control of things and could in fact change their circumstances at any time).
The group reaches a consensus that certain gags in the film will always be funny to them—time will demonstrate they are wrong about this.
2017
A weird year, but a pretty good time is had by all. The hosts all enjoyed the film more than any of the prior watches (this may be attributed to 4 of the 5 hosts all watching it together in person, requiring about 18 hours of air travel for each of Tim and Guy). First mention of the possibility that the listenership now has the ability to binge the show (with there now being 3 available episodes).
The hosts enjoyed the movie on its own terms to the point that they did not require the “escapism” of metatextual readings. Playing the movie in sync with The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) gets a good amount of air time. The hosts end with a prophecy that watch number 4 will not be as pleasurable.
2018
Justin McElroy (correctly) predicts at the top of this episode that listeners are now binging the podcast. Though a year has elapsed for the hosts between each episode, it’s now mere seconds for the listener—a curious kind of time dilation. Guy Montgomery predicts he is the first “tri-country” viewer of the film, having done his 4th rewatch from Goa, India.
The show has sponsors now, including an early shout out to Avery Trufelman’s podcast, Articles of Interest. As predicted a year prior, the magic has mostly gone for the 5 hosts on this rewatch. The “weight of the commitment” has started to loom menacingly around the edges of the exercise. A review of deleted scenes from the Blu-Ray adds little to discuss (the scenes that were cut that are only a few seconds long—re-described in subsequent years by the hosts as “inert” and little more than “establishing shots”). The blooper reel is characterized as joyless and like a funerary procession (in an amazing bit of word play, the hosts surmise they are proper “Paul Bearers”). Secondary characters get the spotlight in the discussion this time around (an actor says the line “shoots glue fOaM” in a weird way, another character’s name is inexplicably spelled “Henk”). The film is confirmed as not passing the Bechdel Test (to the relief of the hosts, as a new version of the test would be needed in that event).
2019
Five years in. The annual watch is now under duress. The intro song on this year’s episode really sets the tone: “Bottom of the River” by Delta Rae (“hold my hand/ it’s a long way down to the bottom the river”).
A snapshot of the mental states of the hosts:
Justin: “Fuck. I did just watch the movie…”
Griffin: “…the Holy Spirit was not moving me…”
Travis: “…I could not bring myself to hit ‘play….’”(he did, but also overcorrected by self-flagellating with an unforced, additional watch of Paul Blart 1, setting his Blart content total prior to recording at over 3 hours—his co-hosts are not sympathetic)
Tim, having taken half a tab of acid an hour before starting the film (!) and watching it in a VR headset environment:
“it was cool to clear the calendar for something so frivolous…”
watching the film on LSD was “like diving into a question mark… like on a page… looking at a tiny little detail and inserting yourself. Traveling to the inside of an atom and saying ‘hey man, I don’t know if the acting is any good in here…’”
As noted earlier, his verdict for the exercise: “a real waste of a trip”
Guy invites the group to focus on how the podcast will eventually “take an incredible turn” and become an “exploration of [their] mortality…” The group has little reaction to this, other than Tim (who perhaps knows to expect this POV from Guy based on time spent with him on the other podcast) and says he certainly wasn’t thinking about that “this year” in his altered state.
Towards the end of the episode, Justin appeals to Tim and Guy for advice on how to keep watching the film (which is conceivably 60-70 more times) based on their considerable experience from their other podcast. Guy, playing his best Virgil here, cautions them that “5 watches of a movie is nothing, it’s breakfast…things get dark in the 10s, the 15s, the 20s, those are you darkest days…”
The world would produce darker days much sooner, and with little relation to Paul Blart.
2020
The hosts find themselves, like much of humanity in the fall of 2020, in times that are [to borrow Guy’s Kiwi accent]: “unpressidinted…” The first year of COVID sees the production and release of two episodes: a bonus, one-time only watch of Paul Blart: Mall Cop (1) in April, and the normal Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 show released in November, taking the form of a director’s commentary track to be synced with the film.
The April watch of the original film achieves a temporary correction of perspective. The hosts now long to watch the sequel instead. This show was a welcome surprise one month into pandemic lockdowns, but I consider this bonus outing non-canonical (it served an important and much appreciated purpose at the time, but is very unnecessary for those struggling to complete the series).
The November 2020 episode is the beginning of the watch vs. don’t watch doctrinal schism. Justin reminds his co-hosts they have “stridently preached against” viewing the source material, advice now undermined by producing a track to accompany the film. Griffin contends that people who listen to the podcast, or their director’s commentary, for a film they’ve never seen are “foaming at the mouth lunatics.”
Tim is coming into this watch from a 50-mile, 4 day walk through the bush, an experience he describes as “quite incredible, it’s like going to the moon and then getting in a submarine as soon as you land.” He is also recording from the attic of a rental home, which is full of dolls. This haunted energy will permeate the rewatch.
Guy remarks that the podcast should no longer be about Paul Blart, but should instead be about trends over time (on the subject of the technology in the film, which includes a star turn for a preposterous laptop with 3 screens that fold out). The film’s extras get the spotlight this year (including “cocaine guy,” who is “dialed in” in the background of a scene, and some people during a dinner scene, notable to the hosts for their portrayal of joy in a film that otherwise has none).
A showcase of the many non-lethal weapons used by Paul Blart hits the group differently in late 2020 (in the wake of the year’s social and civil unrest). Resigned to the play-by-play engagement with the source material that a commentary track requires (and the inability to look at their phones), the “wry smile” of the Shadow Man accompanies the hosts this year (rather than Paul Blart) as they fight with the film itself. The hosts find themselves at “low ebb.”
Paul Blart Mall Cop 2: A Taxonomy of Sin rules as Griffin’s proposed alternate title for this movie. Guy closes things out by admonishing the group again that the podcast next year “cannot be about Paul Blart any more…” His 6 watches of Paul Blart now feel worse than his 52 watches of Grown Ups 2.
2021
Paul Blart Mall Cop 3: Hardline (or any other title to make the series a trilogy) has failed to come into its predicted existence this year.
Justin has watched the film dubbed “en français.” Various clips are played in French to the delight of his co-hosts, who must guess what scene the audio is from. He then takes requests, but there is amazement and concern around Justin’s uncanny ability to instantly scrub to requested timecodes/scenes on demand. Tim has re-listened to the 2020 episode and declares “it was not a fun listen…” It’s revealed that the subject line among the hosts to organize the recording of this year’s show just reads as “fuck,” the exact same subject line used to organize the recording session the year prior.
The veneer of the film’s story has completely dissolved and Justin is enthralled with how the artificiality of “people trying to make a movie” leaps from the screen. He now only sees “electricity and flesh.” Tim and Guy’s response (enthused): “now you are speaking our language.” Travis laments the film changes not at all on his repeat rewatches—only he has changed between viewings. Griffin is concerned that the “single digit number” of laughs the film elicits from him could drop to zero (and who might he be then?).
Guy has run some numbers. He is 33. They will not have seen this movie 52 times (like some of their other projects) until Guy is 77. Tim helpfully points out that the podcast is now a “strange time capsule” to leave for friends and family. Guy: “it’s such the perfect prism through which to view society…”
Mid-way through the episode, Tim recommends Sex and the City 2 as a kind of “psychological pinprick”/test to establish an empirical baseline of enduring personhood (for those who have watched a movie so many times, they ask “am I real, can I still feel pain?”). Guy recommends Tom Hooper’s Cats for similar reasons. A Paul Blart musical is discussed, along with various pitches for a 3rd installment of the film franchise. With fifteen minutes in the episode left, Griffin pitches the concept that will become the conceit for the next year’s episode.
2022
The co-hosts, who want to watch anything else besides Paul Blart, have all drawn lots for the chance to watch the Kevin James film Here Comes the Boom (2012) instead. The winner of the drawing is kept a secret from the other 4 co-hosts and they all must present a front to having plausibly watched the film until the group’s mole can be discovered. Various levels of fury, accusation, paranoia and self-pitying play out as the hosts all accuse one another of having broken their “sacred vow” and receiving the golden ticket. There is a “sinister and untrusting undercurrent” to the proceedings as each host is interrogated about what they thought of Blart this year. A mild amount of relief is eventually found with the admission of new content to discuss from a different film. The other co-hosts all crowd around Justin, who was saved by the lottery, as he unspools the plot of this other movie and gives alms in the form of trivia. The other hosts are enthralled.
Travis, who needed 3 viewings to finish the movie, has fallen from his implausible height of 11 laughs in 2015 to zero this year. Tim points out hating the movie is easy—he claims it’s “a richer way of being a person in the world” to look at the movie and say “‘great movie, let me figure out why.’” Guy asks Tim to elaborate. He declines. Justin observes for the first time that the film is “anti-police.” Griffin forgets, for possibly the third year in a row, the identity of someone being held at gunpoint. The hosts say they are “done apologizing” for repeating themselves/forgetting things discussed in years’ prior—it’s inescapable if they are going to discuss the movie every year.
Justin feels by skipping Blart this year, he is “out of the pool” and is now dry. The prospect of returning to the film after 2 years off is terrifying to him. The voice of future show host Remy Batt (who is under 3 at this time) is heard on the recording. It’s possible this lottery mechanic will be codified as an arcane every 8th year tradition (7 Blarts to 1 Boom, or “once in a blue Boom”).
2023
Not available as of press time, so I’d like to present one possibility: a light rewatch for the suffering hosts, and an episode where they find the strength to climb out of their self-imposed hell and discuss the film as little as possible.
By that hidden way
My guide and I did enter, to return
To the fair world: and heedless of repose
We climbed, he first, I following his steps,
Till on our view the beautiful lights of heav'n
Dawn'd through a circular opening in the cave:
Thus issuing we again beheld the stars.-Canto 34, Dante’s Inferno
No Exit.
Can a podcast be eternal? The human experience suggests it cannot. Who will mess things up and break the streak: the original hosts, or a resentful replacement host? An end of our world could also mean the hosts are all released of their obligations and go out with a perfect record.
It’s fun (and ideally worth the suffering of the hosts) to imagine what this podcast (an audio review show about a movie chronicling the misadventures of a mall security guard at a convention in Las Vegas) could even mean to a listener in the year 2,500 C.E. Even the drifting of language and storage format mediums will need to be considered if the program is to endure as an institution. The dream scenario is something like a scene out of Cloud Atlas—where the society telling the story is unrecognizably different from our own, but aspects of the myth produced by our age endures. There is some early evidence that the gospel is spreading (a stage play mounted in Wisconsin this year presents Blart as exactly this kind of unlikely legend, in a world where malls and security guards are distant memories).
In the interim (and without the release of death), the hosts cannot leave the conceptual desert they’ve voluntarily marooned themselves in. Blart makes for a poor oasis, but it’s all they (and the listeners) now have. The unyielding passage of time will reveal whether the whole show is actually a cruel mirage. Are they slaking their thirst with water, or is it sand?
Holiday Vesture
And now we ascend from the podcast inferno. Sublime Prosaic is still about menswear sometimes. For this American Thanksgiving, we expect temperatures in the mid to high 70s in Los Angeles, so here’s the outfit:
Navy Teba (City Hunter II by The Armoury) - something between a cardigan and an overshirt—I have loved this article since I purchased it from the Tribeca location in 2019 (and it has a lot of wear on it at this point, so it’s reasonable to wear on a holiday for the parenting of messy eaters; it’s also hot out, so this will be draped on a chair much of the time, including for cooking, dishes and other activities). It has a beautiful drape and lets me pretend I can afford to shop at Adret.
Plaid trousers (Brooks Brothers) - I’ve had these dress trousers for a bit. Made for Brooks Brothers by an Italian mill in 2016. I think plaid pants have taken a drubbing in menswear, so I selected these for two reasons: (i) I need to get rid of them if I don’t wear them at least once a year; and (ii) the pattern gives me some mid-century Norman Rockwell-style nostalgia.
Light Blue Polo (Sid Mashburn) - lightweight and breathable, with a properly constructed collar, short sleeves for the weather when I’m not wearing the jacket.
Suede Belt and Tassel Loafers (both Sid Mashburn)
