![]() ![]() “We never intended to make a political podcast,” Rose explains. “Kevin’s” hosts spoke to me on the date they recorded their season one finale about the pod’s aims and future. Their podcast, “We Need to Talk about Kevin,” exists to, in the sarcastic words of Drinkwater, “Seek the complete annihilation of Kevin Smith and his films and reputation.” “Kevin,” now in its second season, has become a “dark horse” of left-wing podcasts, featuring guests like Matthew Christman of “Chapo Trap House,” “Murder Bryan” from “Street Fight Radio,” the hosts of the left-wing pop culture podcast “Struggle Session,” as well as Tim and Eric alum Vera Drew. The left-wing Twitter provocateurs Rose and Trevor Drinkwater and their friend and producer, Ted (TedAnon), take a completely different tack. Today Smith obsessively waxes sentimental over the latest offerings by Marvel Studios and other Disney conglomerates on podcasts with titles like “Fatman on Batman.” Parallel to Smith’s foray into podcasting, a number of leftwing podcasts analyzing political culture and writing emerged in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. By the time Jersey Girl rolled around, it appeared all but clear that Smith had a commercial interest in maintaining proximity with the Hollywood system that had ignored him. In Roger Ebert’s review of Smith’s second film, the sex comedy, Mallrats, he recounts, “The year that Clerks played at the Cannes Film Festival (…) Kevin Smith cheerfully said he’d be happy to do whatever the studios wanted, if they’d pay for his films. Yet, this movement away from his “authentic artistic vision” was foretold, perhaps most tellingly by Smith himself. His last few films, including 2019’s “return to form,” Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, could not find widespread theatrical distribution-a far cry from his early films’ status as pathbreaking works of brutally honest low-budget cinema. Strike Back struck a different chord from his previous “serious” works, Clerks and Chasing Amy it was obnoxious, filled with gay jokes, and startlingly vicious towards online critics of Smith’s films. Smith spent the nineties in Harvey Weinstein’s stable of rising “auteurs,” but 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back promised to place an end to Smith’s comedic depictions of working-class Jersey miasma. A new populist filmmaker whose low budget films offered a vision strikingly as familiar as the petit bourgeoisie haunts I inhabited as an adolescent had appeared.īut even by the time I watched Clerks for the first time in 2003, Smith’s reputation was in a state of decline. Echoing many of the conversations I had with my friends, Kevin Smith appeared as the voice of the everyman. 1994’s Clerks on VHS shone forth to me a promise of a cinematic universe bound by pop culture ephemera and Star Wars references. It wasn’t since I first saw Pulp Fiction on HBO that I was so enamored by a film. For the ignorant, “Chapo Trap House” is a weekly podcast, best described as “the dirtbag left,” sort of the Bernie Bros’ more radical non-voter buddies who may have met at Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street (which they never mention – we’ll get to that).I was hooked. Matt Christman, Will Menaker, Virgil Texas, Felix Beaderman, and Brendan James sashay across the pages like the bearded hipster dudes bouncing from the loft in Bushwick to the Pabst watering hole in Williamsburg (their universe), who one fine day, as Hillary Clinton shoved Her Genitalia Down Our Throats decided to record their drunken choom sessions, then got rich. The hosts now earn over $120,000 per month by crowd funding what the average American would call “talk radio”, but on the internet. Like right wing talk radio, it is a small, but very lucrative, niche market that sustains Chapo Trap House. The good news is that market dynamics in early 21 st century America can (and do) sustain hard left political media, and the Chapo boys are pioneers in this niche market, which will no doubt explode over the coming decade. Their 2018 book, “The Chapo Guide To Revolution,” read to me like the generation after mine’s “J’ACCUSE!” If your GenX response to a millennial rant is “guilty, your honor”, the Chapo book will read very rapidly to you, too. It’s a fine screed, whose pace accelerates the more a reader understands their own role in leaving a total shit pile plundered husk America Inc. for the generations after us to clean up after they manage to guillotine a few hundred billionaires. ![]() That is, if the generations after GenX can survive the Mad Max Hunger Games Heironymous Bosch painting of 21 st century late stage capitalism my generation, and those before me, carefully crafted with our own hands for a tiny feudal oligarchy to feed upon us all. ![]() ![]() The problem with the Chapo book is its hopelessness, which I guess is a function of it being satire. ![]()
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