The Best Background-Noise TV

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost, who is also the director of the film-and-media-studies program at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s recently written about how the first year of AI college ended in ruin, and whether Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are jocks or nerds.

Ian is currently struggling to get into a new video game his friends love, learning how to tattoo (sort of) with the help of a reality-TV show, and relishing the complexity of the kids’ show Bluey.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”
• Stop firing your friends.
• The comic strip that explains the evolution of American parenting

The Culture Survey: Ian Bogost

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: I run in video-game-design circles, and the biggest recent release in games is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This title has two features that really light gamers up: First, it’s a new Zelda game by Nintendo, and that franchise is 37 years old and hugely popular, which makes a lot of people very happy. Second, the new game is absolutely massive, and the player can do all manner of things in it, including constructing elixirs from raw ingredients and fabricating machinery and vehicles.

Unfortunately, the only tears shed in my kingdom are those of boredom. I used to love Zelda, but I just can’t get into these games anymore. For one part, it’s because there’s so much lore to keep track of—the creators have done fantasy-narrative somersaults to keep justifying new titles. But for another part, the in-game creativity that so many players seem to love leaves me cold. I find it remarkable when people make huge carnival-wheel vehicles to traverse seemingly impassible geology or dog-petting machines to attempt to endear themselves to the in-game pooches. But hell if I want to do this myself.

I think it’s because my work demands creative production. I have to be—I get to be!—creative in my job(s). But that means I absolutely do not want to be creative for my leisure. [Related: Coming of age with The Legend of Zelda]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Television used to be different from cinema. It was more ambient, taken in along with breakfast or while vacuuming, pursued as a ritual activity more than a narrative one. I miss that. When we get exhausted by high-quality scripted shows, my wife and I turn to a season of Ink Master, a tattooing-competition show.

This show has been around on various networks since 2012, but I’d never watched it until a couple of years ago. All 14 seasons stream on Paramount Plus. I love reality television, and anyone who claims not to is lying or deluded. But I find special affinity with the shows about creative practice. I don’t want to craft things in video games, but I love watching people perform a craft, especially one I’m not familiar with or adept in.

Lots of shows in this genre are popping up these days. The Great British Baking Show is great but has become a little too wholesome, to the point of being cloying; The Great Pottery Throw Down is a touch too emotionally overwrought for its decidedly mid subject, ceramics; Blown Away, a glassblowing show, is a bit too fine-arts cosmic for dumb television; Forged in Fire (bladesmithing—everything has a reality-competition show) is overly edgelord-creeptastic for me. Ink Master strikes a good balance.

The big problem with these shows is that they never really explain anything. They’ll introduce you to terms of art, but not to technique or style. I guess the producers feel that that would be boring for most viewers—better to court drama between competitors instead. No need for that, though; it’s why we have Selling Sunset. [Related: The Great British Baking Show’s technical challenges are a scourge.]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: The quiet song is hard, and I think I know why: Today, people do a lot of ambient listening—headphones while working or studying, whole-house audio in the evenings, on a portable speaker on the deck or by the pool. Brian Eno had to coin the term ambient music because the concept of listening to enhance an environmental situation wasn’t codified, despite precedents. Now, thanks to streaming-music services and their playlists, it’s super easy to find enhancements to any mood or vibe. But that also means that individual songs become de-emphasized, for better and worse. My pick for a quiet song is really a pick for a quiet playlist: The Synthwave—Night Drive playlist on Spotify. Put this on in the car next time you need to run to Target or CVS after dark, and it will turn your errand into a moody 1980s vaporwave antihero affair.

The loud song is easier: It’s definitely Metallica, probably “Battery” but maybe “Master of Puppets.” Metallica has enjoyed a bit of a pop-culture revival in recent years, with notable features in shows such as Stranger Things and Billions. But those mainstream resurrections make it easy to forget just how fringe heavy-metal music was in its heyday. If you listened to Metallica or Megadeth or Queensrÿche in the 1980s or early ’90s, you were socially ostracized for it. This was not a polite or accepted thing to do. Glam metal (like Poison) and hard rock (like Guns N’ Roses) somewhat tamed that sentiment, but they did so at a cost—a lost edge. I can’t believe I’m calling Guns N’ Roses more palatable, but isn’t that the truth? It’s revisionist to pretend that heavy metal was just a normal, mainstream thing. I guess it’s good that it became so, but it’s also a little sad to forget the forces that pushed people to enjoy it at the time. [Related: Five lessons in creativity from Metallica]

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: It’s definitely Bluey, an animated series from Australia about a family of anthropomorphized heeler dogs and their dog friends. The titular Bluey is a blue-heeler girl, and the show follows her antics along with those of her younger sister, Bingo (red heeler), and their parents, Bandit and Chilli.

The show is both charming and problematic, and maybe that’s what makes it such a draw. Bandit can exemplify the best kind of fatherhood, but he can also be kind of an asshole (like when he doesn’t tell Bingo he’s leaving the country for six weeks? And leaving tomorrow?). Bluey is creative but also a bit of a hellion who gets her way even when she doesn’t deserve it, and Bingo is existentially bereft and tragically misunderstood by her parents and sister. It’s refreshing to see such layers of honesty and complexity in a show for very young children, who lead lives far knottier and more layered than adults give them credit for.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: A fragment by the seventh-century-B.C.E. Greek lyric poet Archilochus. Here it is:

εἰμὶ δ’ ἐγὼ θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο ἄνακτος

καὶ Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος.

And thank you for giving me a reason to exercise my comparative-literature doctorate by offering this brand-new, translated-just-for–The Atlantic rendition:

I am war’s wingman

And art’s willing puppet.

Here’s a more typical, literal take:

I am a servant of lord Ares,

and of the Muses, familiar with their lovely gift.

That’s all that history preserved of this poem. We don’t know if there was more of it. That’s why classicists call it a fragment.

Some of them have read these lines as striking in their paradox, others as utterly normal—war and poetry were complements for the ancients. Whatever the case, these two lines are burned into my brain for some reason. I think in part because Archilochus was easy and fun to read in Greek, unlike the Homeric epics from a century or so before our man Archie here. But also because here’s this dude from almost 2,700 years ago who feels so contemporary: the mercenary with a soft side, scribbling lines like these about reality and expectation, and others about getting drunk enough to fight, because how else would you find the will to bother? Very relatable. People just aren’t so different now than they ever were, or ever will be.

The Week Ahead

1. Owner of a Lonely Heart, a memoir by Beth Nguyen that explores the author’s escape from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War—and the mother she left behind (on sale Monday)
2. Joy Ride, starring Stephanie Hsu and Ashley Park, a raunchy comedy of self-discovery set against a business trip to Asia (in theaters Wednesday)
3. Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, a pan-African sci-fi animated series executive-produced by Peter Ramsey of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (debuts on Disney+ this Wednesday)

Essay

Dave Grohl’s Monument to Mortality

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Twenty-nine years ago, Dave Grohl, then the drummer for Nirvana, lost his singer, the band’s brilliant and vexed leader, Kurt Cobain. Last year, Grohl, now the leader of Foo Fighters, lost his drummer, the dazzling Taylor Hawkins. And then, a few months later, Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died. She was, among other things, the ne plus ultra of rock moms, a teacher by profession whose support for her charismatic, punk-loving, unscholarly (her gentle word) son was unfaltering and absolute.

One blow, then another. It was all a bit much. Grohl is an unreasonably buoyant person, but it was hard to imagine how he would pull himself out of a trough dug by such concentrated loss.

But he did. And he did so by writing his way out.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

• Olivia Rodrigo’s big, bloody return
• The juicy secrets of everyday life
• It’s hard to be mad at Indiana Jones.
• Can movie fans ever have a nice thing?
• Short story: “The Posting”
• Sara Freeman on how marriages implode
• A strikingly honest reality show about sex, money, and health
• Thank goodness for Jennifer Lawrence’s R-rated rom-com.

Catch up on The Atlantic

• Russia has reached a dead end.
• Scientists found ripples in space and time. And you have to buy groceries.
• America’s most popular drug has a puzzling side effect. We finally know why.

Photo Album

An Eid al-Adha festival in India, protests in France, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.