My 2 Bits: God Speaks Through 'Better Call Saul'; Why Facebook Is Such a Nun
An orthodox atheist explains how he handles divine synchronicities, and why Sister Meta of the Immaculate Algorithm has gone overboard by being overcautious.
There was surprisingly healthy reader engagement for my binary Oscar post about All Quiet… and Triangle of Sadness. Short, pithy-but-still-shallow, “he’s not going there… oh, he did!” pieces work for most of you guys.
In light of that, I’m introducing a new regular feature, My 2 Bits. Each post will feature two unrelated items that I’ll somehow rig together thematically, no doubt with varying degrees of success.
As always, Substack is strongarming me into pushing my beloved readers for an upgrade to a paid subscription — it’s still 20% off an annual subscription until April 1. I don’t actually need money: I pay for everything with my Platinum White Privilege Card from The Bank of the Upper East Side, rent included. And so,
FIRST BIT: IN WHICH I FIND AN EASTER EGG
This past weekend was one of those that was like waiting for HIV results back in the 80s: pushing paranoia about reader reaction to Part Two of ‘The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood’ to the back of my mind, and projecting a divo’s fatalism. I’m used to not getting feedback or reactions on my more disruptive pieces, but not hearing from Vanessa Crane after I’d just introed a piece that dismisses modern antiracism and Black grievance as a hypocritical addiction to victimhood, using her as a Black person to springboard into eviscerating Dave Chappelle, had me all it’ll be fine; you weren’t sure where you were going with it, and she’s shooting in bumfuck back-of-beyond; you asked for permission to use the Josephine Baker picture, and you told her you were introducing her into the memoir narrative stream… Jesus, fuck! I hope it’ll be fine… what if she’s like, “I’m calling Spike Lee and having him picket your pimply white ass…?”
See, Spike really did picket a White director friend in 2001 for an arguably lesser, though far-less-thought-provoking transgression than mine, thinking that because he was married to a Black woman nobody would care. But Spike forced Ridley Scott to fire him.
Sufism and other atheistic Eastern esoteric paths believe that when it speaks to us, we should listen to Existence, which I capitalize in the same spirit as ‘the Earth’ or ‘the Universe’ in acknowledgment of it being the only thing we know, not because I consider it sacred. In this case Existence gave me a pat on the back to reassure me while I was catching up with the final season of Better Call Saul, during a sequence in Episode 7 that starts with series regular Camera Guy — the neurotic, know-it-all, small-city filmmaker who shoots Goodman’s commercials — teaching film school.
Camera Guy launches into a typically condescending, eccentric speech about elite versus shitty cameras, art and auteurism, and how the students are all too hopeless to use the elite package. I smiled in recognition — it was hearing too many of those snarky comments from teachers that made me lose interest in NYU Film School after a single semester.
A young woman deliberately groomed to represent the sort of well-healed airhead crawling over film schools everywhere, the kind who thinks filmmaking is glamorous and therefore something she’s entitled to do and do well, despite not having the intelligence or talent to pull it off, interjects with, “But Professor Tanis said we could use the good cameras.”
What?! No way…
This was an Easter egg homage to legendary Tisch film production teacher Nick Tanis. Even though his character isn’t called Professor Tanis — just ‘Camera Guy,’ itself a reference to characters in scripts that the writer can’t be bothered to give a name to — I realized that he’d been representing the real Nick Tanis since this spinoff of Breaking Bad debuted in 2015.
As an occasional Redditor and YouTuber, I’m aware that there are Easter eggs put in shows and movies deliberately to tickle fanboys. I’ve rarely found them myself; the only show that comes to mind was the shamefully canceled Raised By Wolves, which was several baskets of Easter eggs that nodded to Ridley Scott’s entire canon, but especially Kingdom of Heaven; the Romulus, Remus, and the She Wolf creation myth of Ancient Rome; Mithraism and the Book of Genesis.
Here’s where it got metaphysical with Existence: I spoofed Nick Tanis once, too, in a short film I directed and edited during my single-semester stint at NYU film school in ‘85. I loved him but he was ridiculously PC/Woke. I decided to thump him in the most effective way I know: with satire that mocked what I perceived to be his excessively overprotecting, infantilizing policies. You don’t make good art and entertainment by not being subversive in some way, a major reason I find American indie films to be so much safe pabulum, for the most part.
The rest of the class was lagging behind me, so I took the initiative to march off and do my first sound film two weeks earlier than scheduled. The film starred none other than Vanessa as the opera singer from Jean Jacques Beineix’s crossover 80s cult hit Diva, and my first mentor in the Ways of Gays, Carlo Saraceni, as a gay skinhead who falls in love with her, disrupting assumptions about his sexuality that I established myself: I built all of the required films for the course around a single character, as chapters of his life.
After shooting the bulk of the film, I quickly grabbed reaction-shot inserts of Tanis one day after class. I didn’t tell him what I was using it for. He didn’t care.
Skinhead Gets a Girlfriend opened with Diva’s signature ‘Casta Diva’ aria by Bellini over images of Vanessa looking prim and aloof under that iconic umbrella. Then the soundtrack suddenly lurched to 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which had just come out and was everywhere in thoroughly boom-boxed New York.
After bugging out with lust upon seeing Skinhead, Vanessa dropped the iconic Diva umbrella, and Skinhead ripped off her top and skirt, down to nothing but a black thong and heels; Carlo was already in black speedos and high tops. They launched into absurd simulated sex on a classic New York rooftop — lunch meats, dry humping, and whatever other rollicking, woke-taboo-spoofing stuff we could improvise, with Vanessa as the top/dom in the relationship. I cut in Tanis' increasingly horrified you-can't-do-that reactions as the action got crazier.
Step aside, John Waters, and go do a bump — I've got this hippy.
Word got around school after I did a level check in the theater the day before the screening. When I got to class, it was jammed, standing room only. While he hadn’t yet seen the film, Tanis strode into class and pushed his way to the front, clearly furious at the uproar I'd caused; now that I put myself in his shoes, he was probably apprehensive that he was in this bit of outrage, his teachings about treating gays, women, Blacks and Jews with special care mocked: Skinhead was gay; Vanessa is Black, Jewish and a woman, and had no problem getting her tits out on camera, Euro-style. When he got to the front of the class, he barked, "Killough's film goes last! Everyone else’s film deserves to be seen by this audience, too."
My earned privilege/merit from whacking woke gets to be shared by all, a good example of Whac-a-Woke: You will never win; might as well enjoy the process.
At the end of the screening, Tanis leaped up and said, "I feel like I've been goosed!" Then he flipped open his notebook to scribble, "There's only one grade for that." I got an A+ for the semester. Woke as he is, like too many academics — and that’s perfectly fine, as long as it stays in academia and doesn’t influence culture, which is what it’s done over the past two decades as Millennials graduated with a mission, any mission, even if they had to construct a few out of thin air, like so many fraudulent tailors spinning invisible fabric for the vain emperor that is America — Tanis is a great guy and a better sport.
After the Camera Guy sequence in Better Call Saul was over, I paused the episode to reflect on the encouragement I’d just received from Existence. Having had so many of these uncanny synchronicities along the course of this long, eventful life, I reached the conclusion long ago that there was no point interpreting them as anything more than something I needed to hear at that moment. Sufism might encourage dervishes to listen to Existence, but it also proscribes magical thinking as a needless distraction from clarity along one’s path.
I was reminded of a couple of things about myself and my relationship with Vanessa, and all of my high school friends, both from St. Stephen’s and Trinity in New York. The first is that I've always had a mocking approach to social and philosophical beliefs that make no sense to me, or that I find irritatingly redundant in a sort of adolescent “I know, Mom!” way that I have.
I’ve come to realize in the course of deconstructing Wokeism that a lot of that irritation has to do with being an OG New York Anglo-American Yankee: we take these DEI thingies for granted, which is why Wokeism has flourished in our finest schools. But there is a balance that is missing, which I’ll explain in upcoming posts about Yankeeness. In the meantime, my fellow Yankee Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist for The New York Times, is in sync with me on that, albeit with more clarity; he’s a Harvard man, and I’m a Wesleyan dropout.
Like I say to other Americans: “Know us, know yourselves.” But they don’t know us because we don’t talk about ourselves. As unseemly as it is for me to do — you don’t correct other people’s manners or behavior, unless it’s dangerously transgressive, and never comment on their beliefs — I don’t think well-meaning patrician aloofness is particularly helpful right now, even though I know from the many cycles of these social skirmishes over the past four hundred years that “it will all come put in the wash, pet,” as Julie from Melbourne says.
I finally heard back from Vanessa on Monday morning. She’d been organizing a company move from the deep south of Italy to Morrocco; given that she works mainly on epic historical productions or fantasy/sci-fi, that means moving a small warehouse of costumes.
“You can always speak to me about these issues,” she said. “There might be more to learn than it seems. I’m proud of you and I love you.”
Her words connected me to the second realization from Existence’s pat on the back: the reassuring depth of my relationship with friends like Vanessa. Reading her message through bleary morning eyes, half past First Coffee, I plunged into that moment in the student-faculty lounge just after we first met, when she took my hand in hers and pulled me into a complex dance that was also a nonverbal dialogue so articulate that words are too limiting to convey the fullness of its meaning. We didn’t stop dancing together back then, and won’t as long as we’re both still alive and they’re still making and playing music.
That dance between kindred “souls” meant I was pretty sure from the Tanis Synchronicity that Vanessa wouldn’t be calling Spike Lee to picket my pimply white ass — a ludicrous proposition written for effect after the fact for this piece. Still, it has a basis in something, namely Vanessa’s attitude about Spike Lee prior to the BLM unrest in 2020 versus after it.
We’ll have to leave it there; she’ll get it, and as much as I try to be as forthright and honest as I can be, expanding on it further would needlessly transgress on her personal process. And Yankees of every race don’t do that.
SECOND BIT: EVERYONE HATES SISTER META
Another expression of my occasional lapses into middle-aged adolescence is how fascinated I was playing with SEO metrics when I first began writing a WordPress blog, Pure Film Creative, in 2011. I could see a breakdown of what was guiding people to the site via Google searches, and that was a ball of yarn my inner kitty couldn’t resist getting playing with and getting tangled in.
I’d be writing about something mundane like my struggles with my horrible landlady, deliberately ruining a Google search for her unique name forever, and then veer off to insert a screengrab from a film of Amanda Seyfried’s side boob with the keywords “Amanda Seyfried’s breasts,” just to see what Google searchers liked and what they didn’t. Pure Film Creative handles the branding, marketing and content creation aspects of my work — waiting around for film script commissions would be insane, especially after thirty-five years.
A few weeks later, I wrote a piece about SEO, questioning whether it might be worth it to insert salacious phrases if it meant boosting your searches and your website’s rankings with Lord Google the Omniscient. (It isn’t.)
It wasn’t all strictly childish: while revenge blogging about my landlady might seem cruel, it was another SEO experiment that actually worked: the comments section on those posts became a gathering place for her other victims led there by Google to vent their unheard grievances.
As part of the same experiment, I wrote a piece entitled, “Mark Zuckerberg Has a Small Dick” that opened with,
Yes, this is a deliberately provocative title. No, I have no idea how big Zuckerberg’s dick is, but with a bank account that hung, who cares?
I didn’t disappoint searchers: the post was really about a book launch party for Taschen’s jaw-dropping-and-cramping The Big Penis Book. For weeks, then months, I monitored SEO and marveled how reliably searches for Seyfried’s breasts and Zuckerberg’s dick brought in hundreds of people to the site. Twelve years later, they still rank among the top SEO keywords for the site. As mildly pesky as that reminder of my occasional Bevis and Butt-Head behavior is, I can’t bring myself to delete the posts.
Zuckerberg also has it coming, frankly. Just after the launch of this newsletter on February 8, my Facebook account, including the four professional pages I manage, was “restricted” for 30 days. I couldn’t post, promote, or comment. My posts are still being sent to the bottom of people’s feeds for the next 12 days:
This is the maximum penalty, levied after a series of other infractions that are just ridiculous. The first was when Facebook rolled out this Nurse Ratched of algorithms in 2020, when the maws of Hell opened and unleashed Woke Cerberus. I quickly fell afoul of it for reasons Facebook no longer has on record — maybe it’s embarrassed by how stupid they were. The earliest record they have of my enfant âgé terribleness is when I was making a joke with the chair of the Classics Department at the University of Chicago in May 2022, in reply to her comment on a post about Ukraine and Zelensky:
University of Chicago Classics Department. Really, Zucky? This was the punishment for a bit of silliness so esoteric that I can’t remember what it referred to:
The next infraction was when I posted another image in a comment to a post in a fashion group I belong to about my friend Leonor Scherrer, daughter of French couturier Jean-Louis Scherrer, lifted from a spread in French Vogue:
I was given 3 days of no posting for that, which I appealed for cultural reasons: naked boobs aren’t viewed the same way in Europe — see Vanessa’s toplessness in Skinhead Gets a Girlfriend. Also, it’s Vogue. Nope: the human neo-Puritans who supposedly review appeals stood by the decision to ban me.
The next one was for yet another comment to Dr. Lowrie about gender-queer activism. It would be extreme and justified had it been a photograph of two women engaging in tribadism, more commonly known as bumping snatch, but a) it’s a WikiHow illustration from the subject’s Wikipedia entry; and b) I had no idea that Facebook would pick it up as the feature image — I post so much content and so many comments so quickly on Facebook that I often just hit return and move on.
I was given 7 days of the same restrictions.
The final straw that got me the maximum ban in February was when I posted a photograph of an Indian temple wrestler in Varanasi that I art directed and produced for Marcus Leatherdale thirty years ago, with another WikiHow illustration of how to tie a langoti loin cloth, with cute remarks about tighty-whities. I made sure I wasn’t in violation of Facebook’s rules, first; I didn’t want to sabotage the launch of Quibblers & Scribblers with another weeklong ban. As I said, they gave me a month, plus an extended lowering of my posts in people’s feeds that is ongoing.
Not to mention that it’s educational. To my non-India readers: Were you aware there were wrestlers in Hanuman temples all over India before you read this? Did you know what a langoti is and how to tie one? As usual, no appeal worked — I’m beginning to doubt they have humans reviewing appeals to the canings of its excessively prudish algorithm.
As a silver-lining optimist — as opposed to a positivist-optimist, the kind who posts positivistic quotes while looking gorgeous, framed by a sunset in Bhutan, in an attempt to add a humanistic spin that excuses flagrant displays of uncommon beauty and wealth — the upside is that I was finally forced to begin building up my presence on the sewer of social media, Twitter, per Substack’s recommendation. As a result, I’m starting to expand to a broader and more diverse audience than I would’ve had I stayed within the bubble of my friends and colleagues on Facebook.
So: what connects my two bits? I’d say a few things, but mainly the message I received from Existence over the Tanis Synchronicity: If Facebook’s content-filter algorithm is an extension of Tanis’ Wokeist beliefs, then I’ll forever be in a dance with it, goosing it by cheekily representing those very Yankee free-speech and truly diverse, equitable and inclusive values, which I’m cherishing more and more as America sinks deeper into “culture wars” that are blamed on conservatives when it’s really Progressives desperate for social change of any kind who started it, even if American society is no longer broken. What’s that saying, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it?” Yet here we are, juggling 37 Baskin Robbins flavors of gender. Pushing back is an act of patriotism, heroism, and bravery, if I don’t say so myself. I do.
Thanks for reading.
Substack is tapping me on the shoulder and coughing before I hit the ‘publish’ button. One more time, with feeling: