I have five copies of the 2nd edition of Pain Don’t Hurt now on sale on a first come, first served basis. Hustle your bustles! 

2023 was the first full year of my adult life in which I did not suffer from depression and anxiety. That’s pretty much the story of my year, full stop. I spent 365 days feeling happy. That’s unreal to me. I literally didn’t think it was possible for me. Yay!

My depression/anxiety had become quite debilitating in retrospect, and before I took a new med (ask your doctor if Rexulti is right for you!) starting in June last year, one of the biggest problems it caused for me was an inability to feel safe and comfortable experiencing new art. I’m a TV critic, and I’m determined to keep a roof over my family’s head, so I gutted through quite a bit, but this is the first year in a long time where I feel like my heart is open again.

So first I’d like to show off my favorite music of the year: ABSOLUTE BEST OF DAVID BOWIE: STARDUST EDITION, a 110-song playlist I made as an exercise. It covers every era and album, plus the major singles and collaborations, with an emphasis (of course) on the things I like best. I’ve listened to it nonstop since I made it. David Bowie is my favorite musician and the most life-changing artist I’ve ever encountered. I adore him so much but spent years away from his music. It felt like coming home.

(Just note that the original 1965 versio of “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” the all-in-one medley version of “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise),” and the Tin Machine song “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll,” which are on the playlist as it exists on my computer, aren’t available on Apple Music and they’re hard to find anywhere else. He’s really purged Tin Machine II for some reason!)

2023 is also notable for being the first (and second, and third) time I watched Cabaret. This film hit me like a freight train, from out of nowhere, like Nightbreed did in my teens and Velvet Goldmine in my 20s. I have never, never, never seen a musical theater performance like Liza Minnelli in that film. She makes even the other greats look like Clapton coming on stage after Hendrix. They’re not even playing the same instrument. I know that I’m corny and sentimental and lachrymose and prone to hyperbole, but watching her sing that final song is like looking at the face of god to me. Utterly poleaxed by this. Can’t get over it.

Since I started watching new/new-to-me movies seriously again late last year, I’ve been keeping a running list. Not Letterboxd, that feels like homework to me and I need at least SOME of my media consumption to be a pastime, but it helps me keep track of what I’ve seen and what I’d like to see. My favorite movies of 2023 are:

1. The Zone of Interest
2. Skinamarink
3. May December
4. Godzilla Minus One
5. Killers of the Flower Moon
6. Oppenheimer
7. Barbie
8. M3GAN
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
10. probably The Outwaters (very mixed on this one but that ending is like nothing I’ve ever seen)

Still haven’t seen Poor Things though, which really seems up my alley.

Which brings us to the thing I’m qualified to talk about: television! Here’s my top 10 for the year. I’m very proud of how little it looks like any other critic’s (none of the big consensus faves are on mine bc i either don’t like or don’t watch them lol), but in general there was a ton of variety this year on critics’ best-of lists, which I think can only be good for TV and criticism. Everybody loves dramedies but me though.

1. Dead Ringers (Prime)
2. The Idol (HBO/Max)
3. Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix)
4. Foundation (Apple TV+)
5. Billions (Showtime/Paramount+)
6. Fargo (FX/Hulu – reserving the right to raise this if the ending kills)
7. The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
8. The Wheel of Time (Prime)
9. Perry Mason (HBO/Max)
10. Silo (Apple TV+)

I have a piece coming out in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the lurid tone I like in a lot these shows, so that will be exciting.

I also watch AEW wrestling all the time. I don’t really care about its ups and downs, I always have a ball.

Finally, in terms of my own work, here’s what I’m proudest of:

My Los Angeles Review of Books debut, which is also the first time my wife Julia Gfrörer and I have collaborated on a prose piece together. It’s about one of our favorite genres: the sad sex movie, or to use Julia’s term, the Erotic Bummer.

Got my first film-related pitch into the Times, with this piece on Killers of the Flower Moon and Scorsese protagonists.

I got a pretty consistent essay-writing gig at Decider — here I am on Oppenheimer, Barbie, Hostel, and Angus Cloud.

Also for Decider I did a list of ten great recent horror TV shows to check out. I love making up the canon as I go.

I interviewed several showrunners of my favorite shows: Billions’ Brian Koppelman & David Levien, The Wheel of Time‘s Rafe Judkins, and Foundation‘s David S. Goyer.

I wrote about Godzilla a lot, for some reason, in Blood Knife, Welcome to Hell World, and Decider.

I got into Defector with this piece on queer and trans wrestlers dealing with regional anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as practitioners of a traveling business. 

I helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project strike support campaign for the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes. 

Finally, one day I read a New York Times piece on trans kids at school, thought of my own kid at school, got real fucking mad, and sent a DM to the great organizer Eric Thurm. As a result, NYTLetter.com happened and humiliated the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world into (not completely but largely) knocking it the fuck off, no matter what the suits fucking say about it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Happy new year everyone!

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

Due to a lost credit card, a crowded inbox, a lackadaisical hosting service, and a piece-of-shit squatter, I no longer own boiledleather.com, the address of much of my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones writing since 2011. Fortunately all the content is actually hosted at boiledleather.tumblr.com, so it’s not a total loss. I sincerely apologize for the linkrot that’s now setting in, though. I’m mortified I let this happen and gutted I can’t afford to buy the domain back from the people who snaked it out from under me.

The name…is Sean T. Collins. I’m a writer and critic who’s appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vulture, Decider, Grantland, the AV Club, and more. I’m also the co-founder (with Stefan Sasse) of The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, a podcast about Game of Thrones & A Song of Ice and Fire, and the co-editor (with Julia Gfrörer) of Mirror Mirror II, an anthology of horror/erotic/gothic comics and art published by 2dcloud. I’m The Original Bad Boy of TV Criticism. I gave this nickname to myself as a joke but it stuck so it counts.

Also, I love Road House, the 1989 Patrick Swayze action movie. Road House is the story of Dalton, a famous bouncer whose quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney will lead directly to the deaths of over half a dozen men. I love Road House so much in fact that in late 2018 I decided I would write an essay about Road House every single day for an entire year, that year being 2019—on top of the TV recaps, album reviews, film and television recommendations, and broader essays and deep dives I write for a living.

In the words of Road House, I’d like to make a better life for myself.

By subscribing to my new Patreon you’ll make Pain Don’t Hurt a paying concern. If you’re a fan of my Road House stuff this sells itself. But the beauty of getting paid to write about any one thing is that it makes it possible to write even more about other things. If you’ve ever enjoyed anything I’ve written, subscribing here is the best way to see more of it—both through tiered rewards that give you access to bonus stuff and simply by helping my family and I stay afloat so I can do more of the writing I love. (I love to write even more than I love Road House, though it’s obviously close.)

Friends, it’s time to be nice. Join the Jasper Improvement Society today! Thank you for your support!

Today new interviews came out with both Julian Casablancas (ex The Strokes) and Jack White (ex The White Stripes) in which they said a variety of dopey things. Because of this, half of my twitter timeline took victory laps about how they never liked the Strokes and the White Stripes, that the Strokes and the White Stripes were never good, and so on. It’s a low-grade version of how people fall all over themselves to announce that they always hated the work of the latest man to be exposed as a sexual predator, and it’s just as goofy here as it is there.

I understand the compulsion to seize any available opportunity to advertise your distaste for a passionately disliked artist. Couple that with the catharsis of dunking on people who’ve revealed themselves as fools or creeps under any circumstances and it’s like you’re playing socio-critical tee-ball. But in every case, this unspoken logic behind these comments is that only fools and creeps can make shitty art, and you had the perspicacity to see through the act from the start. It’s a totem wielded against the nerve-wracking uncertainty involved in investing your time and energy and emotions in art, a field in which being a smart person, being a good person, and being a good artist often have little to do with one another.

I’ve disliked a lot of art made by people who turned out to be pretty awful; Louis CK is the most obvious example here. But I also love, and continue to love, a lot of art made by such people as well, though I don’t love the people themselves. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to learn that other artists I love are awful people in the future. And god knows that any number of artists I both love and hate are doofuses. (One of the “I never liked them anyway!” comments I saw about the Strokes and the White Stripes unfavorably compared them to Britney Spears; I like a lot of her music too, but is the implication here supposed to be that she’s never done or said anything unfortunate or asinine?) I’m hard pressed to think of a single case in which my feelings about their work and the truth about them as people had a connection I sussed out years in advance, and therefore now deserve to crow about publicly. Critics, of all people, should know better.

Yes, I wrote a review of episode 3 (which has not been posted by Decider yet) as well as episode 4 (which has)! But I was badly delayed in handing it in due to the flu. Given how long ago it aired it’s understandably not a huge priority for my editors to get it edited, formatted, and posted, but I’ve been assured that they will eventually. My hope is that it will be up prior to my review of tomorrow night’s installment, episode 5. Once it goes up I’ll link to everything in order the way I usually do, but I’m waiting until then just to keep things straight. Thank you for your patience!

Here’s the Patreon. Yes, it’s technically for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, and yes, I split it half and half with my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse. But a) Stefan’s cool and deserves the scratch too, and b) you needn’t be interested in BLAH or the perks associated with becoming a patron to donate this way. Every bit helps.

And here’s the PayPal. This goes directly to me and you can make it a monthly subscription-type thing if you feel like it. Again, every bit helps.

I have big plans for this year and money is a constant worry, and I’m uncertain as to how my absence from Twitter will affect me professionally. Your financial support at any level means the world to me.

Thank you for your consideration.

Like, for real. I haven’t deleted my account because I don’t want to contribute to the plague of linkrot, but I have used arcane methods to make it impossible for me to even log in anymore. You can find me here or at boiledleather.com for the duration; my email address is easy enough to find in both locations. Thank you for your support.

All of the books by my brilliant partner Julia Gfrörer are 25% off at her Etsy store, today only. This is a filthily obscene deal for incredible work. For the record, this sale includes three collaborations with me: the anthology MIRROR MIRROR II and the pornographic Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (!) IN PACE REQUIESCAT and THE HIDEOUS DROPPING OFF OF THE VEIL. If you enjoy my writing you may like them as well!

Also, everything in Julia’s Threadless store (t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, and more) is 20-30% off today only, with free shipping on orders of $45 or more if you use code “CHEER83687d”. Again, this is an insanely good deal!

I’m a guest on episode 7 of Wonderland, a new podcast series about popular culture as a potential vehicle for political change. I spoke with hosts Bridgit Antoinette Evans & Tracy Van Slyke and my fellow guest Nayantara Sen about the storytelling pitfalls television falls into, and how climbing out of them is an opportunity to both tell better stories and do better political work within them. The conversation is a lot of fun, and the whole series is up all at once, so if you like what you hear, binge the whole thing!

Great TV is characterized by the same thing present in all great art: a sense that you’re reading an open text, with parts you can’t pin down but which nevertheless add up to a greater whole. The best shows are all challenging and, for want of a better word, “weird” — that is, there’s stuff going on that a plot summary or a recitation of the dialogue can’t capture. I don’t want to come away feeling comforted, reassured, or satisfied that I’ve solved what I just saw. I don’t want to be let off the hook.

Did I not mention that Kyle MacLachlan read and enjoyed my weekly Twin Peaks reviews for Rolling Stone?

One thing I’ve noticed since I stopped using Twitter regularly is that the compulsion to tweet is most often associated with complaint. I think all of the times I’ve actually broken my self-imposed embargo since it began and tweeted something other than promoting work by me, my friends, or people I admire have been to say something negative. I complained about commenters who don’t understand how criticism works. I complained about “grade inflation” among critics who overvalue heartwarming work. I complained about an article that outed an anonymous tumblr weirdo just because this person may possibly be a little too weird. I complained about Chuck Schumer praising George W. Bush for “bringing the country together” after 9/11. I complained about the billionaire fuck who shut down a whole raft of journalism sites he’d purchased a few months ago because the employees voted to unionize.

All of these touch on my career, my politics, or both, and these things are important to me. But it’s noteworthy, I think, to isolate the emotion Twitter seems to count on to drive you back to that empty white box. Yesterday, for example, it took all I had to stop myself from kvetching about people saying Mad Max: Fury Road is the greatest action movie ever made when it’s, maybe, the third-best Mad Max movie ever made. (Now I’m doing that here where you suckers have to see it instead.) Again: career-related, sure. But my desire to use Twitter is directly correlated to how much I think my career fucking sucks at any given moment. Can you think of any other business or activity that functions in this way?

In my time on twitter during early October, an anonymous account responded to a photo of my six-year-old daughter by calling her a bitch and a cunt, adding “I hope nothing bad happens to her.” Despite multiple reports, the account was not banned. When I responded to the first wave of accounts of Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes by saying I felt special solidarity with Asia Argento as a fellow horror person (to get very specific, Troma Studios distributed her film The Stendahl Syndrome the summer I interned for them), a handful of accounts opted to interpret this as me saying I didn’t care about other victims. A similar thing happened when I expressed horror about the climate of fear Weinstein must have established if figures as powerful as Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow still felt unable to speak out; I was told I only cared when it happened to powerful people, while on the flip side I also received many responses saying they were cowards at best and complicit at worst for not speaking out. Such responses continued even after I said that I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse myself, and my responses were shaped by that shared experience. Effectively, I was told I was being a victim wrong, an experience that triggered traumatic memories of the abuse itself that cost me two solid days of work. This had never happened to me before. Finally, anime Nazis, who’ve dogged me on and off since G*merG8te and flared up during pile-ons orchestrated by right-wing media figures after comments I made about Trump’s election and inauguration and the health-care debacle, told me they were glad I was sexually abused as a childhood, because I deserved it.

After that I decided to drastically curtail my use of the site. I’ve limited my interactions, I’ve tweeted almost but not quite completely just to promote my own work and that of friends and heroes of mine, and I’ve cut back really hard on reading time, favoriting, retweeting, replying, and so on. While I’m still on there more than many people who’ve simply established a less extreme usage pattern and are continuing as normal, for me it represents a radical reduction.  It’s improved my life for sure, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is this: After that final incident spurred me to start detaching myself from Twitter, I realized that I’d fallen victim to its business model, which is nothing more or less than to (theoretically) profit from inducing me and everyone else to write up as many of our thoughts and feelings as possible, without pay, on a website where racist fascists up to and including literal Nazis and the President of the United States of America can and do attack other users and spread their filth with impunity. I can’t think of any real-life circumstance where I would voluntarily subject myself to that kind of labor exploitation and emotional abuse. I’m going to start applying that standard to what I do online, and to where I do it.

I know it shouldn’t, but it shocks me how people who devote time to criticizing arts criticism can understand so little about arts criticism.

BTW, not that you should go by letter grades, but my averaged-out grade for the show I tried really hard not to like for some reason? B.

(PS: That’s not really Nev from Catfish)

I’ve been off Twitter since the beginning of the week and will remain so until further notice. I do log in occasionally to post links to my work, and I expect I’ll do the same for my partner Julia Gfrörer’s work as well, but that’s all. If you need to reach me I can be contacted using the information to your right.

Julia Gfrörer and I will be guests at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus October 13-16th! We’re also hosting the afterparty for the final night of the show. Please come say hello!

You can get great deals on graphic novels from me & Julia’s merged collections by visiting our spiffy Amazon store! Titles for sale at bargain-basement prices include books by James Jean (a really rare one at that), Neil Gaiman, Darwyn Cooke, Jack Kirby, Ulli Lust, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, Blaise Larmee, John Stanley, Paul Dini, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Dennis Eichhorn, Paul Gravett, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Raymond Briggs, Dave Cooper, Jenn Manley Lee and more. Check it out!