Writing with Monty (about Painting with John)

 

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

In Writing Creative Nonfiction (2001), which serves as a guide to writing in the genre, the book’s editors, Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, define “creative nonfiction” in their introduction:

            “Creative nonfiction has emerged in the last few years as the province of factual prose that is also literary—infused with the stylistic devices, tropes, and rhetorical flourishes of the best fiction and the most lyrical of narrative poetry. It is fact-based writing that remains compelling. . . . It is storytelling of a very high order—through the revelation of character and the suspense of plot, the subtle braiding of themes, rhythms and resonance, memory and imaginative research, precise and original language, and a narrative stance that is intelligent, humble, questioning, distinctive, individual and implicitly alert to the world.”

@@@@@@@@@@@@@

It’s night on the farm where I live. To my right, outside a window, is the pitch-black night—a luxury I sometimes forget is not universal. There are people who live in cities where the lights never actually go out and where thin walls and thin ceilings and thin floors make everyone’s business everyone else’s, be it the frustration of tax season or the passion of physical intimacy. Out in the country, it actually gets dark and quiet. A friend of mine once told me that it’s one of those “no one can hear you scream” places, which certainly made me feel good about driving her out there, just the two of us, let me tell you. It’s a pretty empty place now, where our only livestock are the things that elect to live here: a whole society of wild turkeys hiding out in the woods somewhere nearby and generations of deer that have forgotten their fear of humans and come right up to the house. It was early morning—3 a.m. or so, maybe—the other night when I looked to my right and saw that it wasn’t dark anymore because the motion light was on. I looked out, expecting to see nothing, which is usually the case, but that time there was a deer by my basement door, just grazing away like it belonged there. Pale brown and white made paler still by the harsh light, it might have been a scrawny ghost—a pale echo of the cattle that used to live on the property.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

When I first saw the trailer for HBO’s Painting with John, a sort of conversational and seemingly personal miniseries starring the actor, musician, comedian, and painter (and maybe other things? Fisherman?) John Lurie, I thought it was the perfect series for this moment in time. It’s essentially just set in Lurie’s house and on his property, and even if it wasn’t actually filmed during the pandemic—since I have no idea, despite noting that it was a small enough production that it could reasonably have been—it felt like the sort of media you might expect from this period in time: practical and small-scale. Sort of… of a kind with the spirit of the times, either out of necessity or simply by random chance of design: intimate, overall. A man in his house talking to a camera as a perfect match for the social situation of many people right now. The only actual mention of the pandemic that I noticed, though, is in the title of one of Lurie’s paintings displayed during the ending credits of the final episode. Apart from Due to the pandemic, the bar was empty, Painting with John the series is not destined to be an explicit artifact of the COVID age the way some media inevitably will be. In spirit and size, however, it still fits. The part of that initial impression that I don’t still feel as comfortable with, having watched the show itself, however, is the sense of its intimacy. While it is true that almost all of Painting with John is John Lurie painting and talking to the camera in a way that certainly resembles intimacy, the show still holds the viewer somewhat safely at arm’s length in this parasocial, contact-starved age thanks to the artificiality of its construction. “Constructedness” is not a word, but it’s a term I used a lot in my notes.

            There is a lot of painting in Painting with John, but it’s often not talking about painting. This might come as a surprise to someone who watched the trailer, which is edited in such a way that it feels like the show would do the obvious thing and mix open discussion of the art form with some other stuff, perhaps evenly. Instead, while Lurie paints, he tells stories to the camera that may or may not have some association with specific paintings (like one featuring Gore Vidal) or with his approach to art. The vibe in the end reminded me a lot of art class in high school. While art requires focus sometimes, there are also periods where you’re just filling in a background or something where your hands are busy but the work is mechanical enough to not require your whole brain. These frequent scenes in Painting with John where it’s night and Lurie is working on a meticulous strand of foliage while talking with the camera while the sounds of night creatures can be heard in the background remind me of that experience. In one of those high school art classes, I became close with two tablemates, and we’d talk a lot during class. Our teacher compared it to a radio show, and while we probably didn’t say anything as interesting as Lurie, it was an experience I recalled while watching Painting with John. Lurie’s remembrances or meditations on life are the sorts of things your mind might turn to while working but still also somewhat freed up. Where the constructedness and artificiality enter into the equation here is that very little of this stuff is explicitly about painting, while the title of the show is Painting WITH John, like we’re supposed to be painting along with Lurie or receiving some sort of instruction. It feels, in part, like a subversion of expectations.

            In part, Painting with John is actually about the making of the show, with a recurring element of a drone crash in the opening when Lurie is ostensibly trying to film shots of trees and foliage and the landscape for an opening to the show Painting with John. In the first episode, there’s an extended bit where Lurie reflects on the situation with the destroyed drone and asks what he’s supposed to do instead. Open by welcoming people and smiling politely? His polite smile scares people, he says. This sort of meta-commentary and punchy self-reflection sets the tone for the rest of the show. Lurie has a way, with his deep, somewhat gravelly but also melodic, voice of drawing the audience into whatever story he’s telling or thoughts he’s sharing. Often, these bits go on a while within the context of a series where the average length of an episode is a lean twenty minutes, including the opening and closing credits. What is included in that short length of time matters a lot, then, proportionally. In the sixth episode, for example, there is a lot of fourth wall-breaking, including another extended bit where Lurie tries to get the person filming him to laugh by insulting them. He then talks about the process of filming the show and about how he would tell the stories in advance during rehearsal. In terms of constructedness, of course, these bits remind the audience that what they’re watching is a show. They have rehearsals and multiple takes and editing. This isn’t intimate insight; it’s just more art (in a sense).

@@@@@@@@@@@

The farm here has been in a steady but slow decline over the years, from what you might have called its heyday—or hayday, right?—back when my maternal grandfather ran it, back when my mother was a child. Over time, the number and type of animals and the amount and sorts of work have scaled back to the point that for years my mother called it a “hobby farm” in the family Christmas card.

            You sometimes see these cattle around, sometimes loose in the road where they’re not supposed to be, with little tags in their ears. I guess those could essentially be the equivalent of “If lost, please return to…” but I was thinking of them the other day as like name tags, and I thought about how we never had any such thing in our cows’ ears back when we had cows. The cows were all named and kept track of, but they were more like pets than product, at least by the time I came along. We stopped sending them to the butcher ourselves when I was extremely young, though we still sold them to other people. I always thought of them as big and scary, even when I wasn’t so small anymore, but to my parents they were like pets.

@@@@@@@@@@

Each episode of Painting with John opens with the drone crashing as a fourth wall-breaking refrain of sorts. In the second episode, Lurie says he’s stubborn and that when he paints, he refuses to let his paintings be bad. He just keeps working on them until they’re good, presumably incorporating or iterating on mistakes to make them into something successful. The opening, then, with its inevitable drone crash, mirrors this process—something good from something seemingly bad, with an emphasis on repetition which could be seen as not giving up in a sense. The meditative music and the cascading visuals of lush vegetation of the opening are ultimately made more interesting and unique by the way the buzzing of the drone becomes audible and then quickly overwhelming as, soon thereafter, the drone crashes. There are variations in some episodes, with less buildup to the crash in certain opening sequences, but the crash always comes. The “failure” is more interesting than a typical opening and pushes the audience away from a feeling of immersion in a false sense of verisimilitude. It stresses the artificiality of the sweeping shots more than anything. The viewer is made to acknowledge rather than forget the presence of a camera.

            On another level, this opening fits perfectly with Lurie’s whole shtick in the series—the mix of poetic and perverse musings, his interesting and even beautiful work contrasted against the “fun” activity of rolling old tires down a hill, how he opens hard with the catchy, punchy argument that “Bob Ross was wrong,” which is also prominently featured in the trailer. It’s all the drone crash among the beautiful trees. The opening encapsulates the modus operandi of the whole show: to be beautiful and then undercut that beauty in some way, maybe by reminding the viewer that it’s all intentionally constructed on some level.

            Painting with John is ultimately free-associative in a way that makes it hard to talk about comprehensively because what I have are a bunch of notes and impressions that kind of make sense when approaching the show from an interpretive perspective but that maybe aren’t fun to actually read as a list. The show facilitates this problem with its structure, with how it employs a vignette-like approach to storytelling. It reminds me a bit on some level of Sesame Street or maybe The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends with its segments and its “Now, here’s something you’ll really like” sort of attitude, with running themes or motifs but with a looser focus on plot. Those other series have more of it than Painting with John does. Take a particularly noticeable example: The final episode title and preview draw attention to the journey to find an old acquaintance of Lurie’s named Rudolph, but finding him hardly takes up any time in the episode. It’s called “Finding Rudolph” and is framed in the preview like it will be a big sort of quest to wrap up the season, but then they find the man almost immediately and Lurie kind of just says, “Yep, there he is.” The rest of the episode is mostly meta-commentary on the making of the show instead.

            The vignette approach is apparent in the frequent use of montage and the way that each short episode is divided up into broadly defined categories—namely, Lurie paints and tells a story of some sort and… not that, a category which would include other scenes with Lurie, like him rolling tires down a hill, as well as sort of transitional and sometimes nonsensical mood bits potentially featuring the aforementioned montages scored with music. Lurie is a well-known artist, so Painting with John could have just been him for 30, 50, or more minutes recounting stories like the one about trying to find an eel in the right condition to use for a last-minute album cover. Instead, the stories are spare, with only six twenty-ish-minute episodes to fill, and the time is filled as much with music and art and experimental imagery as with what might be the expected introspection and personal insight for the audience’s entertainment. In episode three, for example, these breaks from Lurie talking to the camera mostly focus on him walking around with a trunk-like branch, making elephant noises while exaggerated stomping sounds play. This elephant-Lurie returns in episode five, maybe using some of the same footage from the earlier episode, which makes it an odd mystery or a sort of refrain. There are other moments like this.

            Within a single episode, for example, there’s an informal-feeling segment with Lurie’s staff where he has a conversation with them about not loving him enough. We then get a brief montage of some foliage with music before going back through the previous scene again but now with an audience laugh track over it. A similar moment with the two women in Lurie’s employ comes up in a different episode when he asks them, “Do you mind telling the people at home what a good and fair boss I am?” This exact question is then repeated in a different setting in a later episode so that it is an uneasy echo of the previous version. The footage, including multiple takes, of the second version of that scene comes up again in the finale when the women are shown in the kitchen going back over the footage and worrying over how it will make people think that Lurie is terrible to them. In keeping with the decidedly meta focus of the finale, this scene in the kitchen goes on for a while as the women talk and watch back the footage, and the combination of the two shows just how involved in the construction of the series they are (or have become). They’re getting into it in the old footage especially, thinking about things like the expressions they’ll make for a take and where Lurie should stand for maximum effect. It serves to make clear the constructed nature of the show. The two women, Nesrin Wolf and Ann Mary Gludd James, aren’t just doing what they do while this wackiness goes on around them. They are, at least in some part, actors and creatives in their own right. We’re not seeing Lurie’s day-to-day interactions with them. We’re seeing a fictionalized version of those interactions.

            I have a lot of notes in this same vein. See, for example, one short break from storytelling where there’s a real rain shower shown but with what sounds like old timey movie rain sound effects over it. There’s a self-consciously artsy vibe to the whole production that comes across thanks to the elements of “random” (from a viewer perspective) eccentricity that lead to a feeling of artificiality. In the episode primarily about fame, for example, there is a scene where Lurie talks to the moon. The moon is positioned towards the top and right of the frame, while Lurie’s head is toward the bottom and left. Both are isolated and suspended in a perfect black void. Maybe this is some sort of commentary on the isolation of fame, but it’s also a Sesame Street-esque diversion and resembles nothing like the sort of shot or beat you would expect in a “docuseries.” Once Lurie is finished speaking with the moon, he withdraws, and we watch the moon rise through the now starry sky for a bit while music plays.

@@@@@@@@@

Of course, the problem with pets is that pets get sick, and pets die. Back when I was a junior or a senior in high school, we had a calf that caught blackleg, which is a disease I’ve known the name of for years casually but just had to Google to find out what it actually is since I’m not actually a farmer (I just live here). For about a week, I had to actually sort of live like a farmer. In a desperate bid to save this calf, the whole family had to get up early and go down to the barn in the predawn cold and help it stand up and try to get it to eat from its mother, who was confined in the same barn. The closeness of that setting, with the low ceiling and the old boards of the walls with the many cracks and creases through which the light of the outdoors would enter, constrained and stifled, was made worse by the nature of the work and by the mother cow’s lowing all but booming in that space. I’m not a farmer, and I never will be one, though that hasn’t stopped me over the years from trying to write sort of rustic characters (I feel) badly. I like to think, though, that I have an appreciation for the work, mostly because of direct and indirect exposure to family and friends of family and assorted neighbors actually trying to make a living at it.

@@@@@@@@

In a recent blog post about Nicolas Winding Refn’s film The Neon Demon (2016), Monty Terrible discusses how that very intentionally artsy film might communicate its nature to an audience:

            “There’s media we interpret, and then there’s media that asks us to interpret it. [This movie] is one of those pieces that asks. It’s constructed in such a way that it clearly announces its intentions to operate on both a literal and symbolic level. It’s an off-putting stance for many, and [the film’s] mixed review scores speak to that. It can’t be said, though, that the movie is coy about what it is. . . . [The movie] has sequences . . . where it just holds on a moment and, in holding, demands that the audience think about what they’re seeing. For some, this is the call to interpret, and, for others, it’s a big middle finger to their desired film-watching experience (to be entertained in an immediate sort of way).”

            After Lurie tells a story about strangling an eel and a song called “The Beast” starts playing, you can’t help but take notice. Something similar happens when he tells a story about an old guy riding a bike uphill in extreme heat and the editing of the show has Lurie’s question “Why is he doing it?”—presumably about the old man—fall on a close up of his own work in progress on the table. You see the repeating stuff and constructedness of it all and feel a little compelled to starting thinking about what it all means. What’s the connection between this and that?

@@@@@@@

Lurie’s paintings have names that don’t so much recall their nature as paintings outright but do call attention to it by being very strange. They have names like The elephant started floating again and Aww, get your foot off the table. In keeping with the strange names, the art itself is often strange and surreal and sometimes more or less (often less) representational of anything concrete—or the name will suggest a concrete scene that is actually abstractly portrayed. While often surreal, there is a beauty and obvious craft to Lurie’s visual work. His ability to really capture the ideal, in a sense, beauty of thick, vibrant, twining foliage really stuck out to me. This seems like both a skill of his and an extension of the medium of water-based paints. In the close up shots of Lurie’s works in progress, we can see how the paint almost naturally seeps onto the canvas in foliage-like ways, with frayed, splitting, fibrous edges where it creeps from a single blot or stroke as it tries to spread out and grow beyond the “root” of that initial position on the canvas. Thematically, the running quality of water makes water-based paint an appropriate medium for capturing plants, many of which “run” in the planty sense. It’s also appropriate since, of course, water feeds plants in the real world. It feeds plants on the page here.

            While some of Lurie’s paintings make more use of negative space, others have a staggering level of intricate details. There’s often an amateur- or child-like simplicity to figures, but then you’ll see something like the way the elephant of one painting is sometimes a solid elephant and in other spots seems composed of a delicate lattice-work of vines you can see through, with a strong sense of depth and interiority. It’s in the fine details that Lurie’s control over the seemingly wild medium becomes clear. I don’t recall ever being able to get any kind of paint, even oil- or acrylic-based, to do what I wanted, much less water-based. Maybe the nature of the paint to run fits with Lurie’s approach to painting with what he calls intuition. If the paint runs a little beyond what you wanted, maybe you just intuit and/or improvise around it.

@@@@@@

Monty Terrible is me. It’s the name attached to each of these blog posts. It’s a version of a pseudonym I’ve toyed with for years now that I thought about the day I made this blog and needed a username. I don’t think it’s actually visible anywhere on the blog itself. It’s kind of nice to be able to write with no name or a fake name. I sometimes worry about what will happen if I write something really stupid or bad, and then I realize I can kind of cut and run by just ditching the name and starting over.

@@@@@

In the second episode of the series, Lurie talks about how he thought the show could teach people something, but he isn’t so sure now since he paints using intuition and thinks that’s hard to teach people from a distance. He then tells a story about accidentally blowing up his oven and using intuition while unwell and burnt to walk down to where he had planted an Aloe vera plant and then cut off a part of it to rub on himself to treat the burns, which helped prevent worse injury. If painting is like a drone crash, then it’s also like doing damage control after an explosion.

            For most of the series, Lurie says little about the process of painting. We see him paint, and each episode’s credits showcase his work, but much of the series’ statements about art would have to come from interpretation of the associations it creates between various images or ideas without necessarily drawing a clear line for the audience—between a bird trapped in Lurie’s room that can’t figure out how to extricate itself as it becomes increasingly stressed and with Lurie’s musings about the problems with fame, for example. In another episode, he discusses the music of tree frogs and “pygmy musicians” and how they make music in ways that run contrary to western traditions, where we obsess over counting. As Lurie talks about this seemingly tangential subject, I was reminded of his earlier focus on intuition over a specific, codified approach to painting. The way that Painting with John positions the various elements it considers in this loosely associative way reminded me of the sort of creative nonfiction I read and wrote years ago.

            Lurie does eventually return to painting instruction in episode six of the series, and he does so in a way intentionally constructed to feel like an after-thought almost as he says, “You know? You should try this.” It’s a statement made casually in a way that recalls the payoff for his search for Rudolph from earlier in the episode. For the first time in the series, he focuses on painting for a bit, offering advice: Expect to be bad. It is both fascinating and relaxing, Lurie says, unless you expect amazing results immediately—in which case you’ll just be miserable. Instead, he says to just put the paint on the canvas/paper and see what happens: “mess around with it”; “put the color down.” Critically: “And don’t let anybody see it.” He is essentially teaching intuition, in a sense, along with vaguely gesturing towards something I occasionally see discussed in online artistic circles. Namely, at what point do you show someone? Lurie currently is, though he started out doing it just for himself and got deeply into painting since he was too sick to make music, only realizing with time that painting could replace music for him. So he stresses the looseness of it and how, presumably, he only arrived at painting as a professional artistic outlet after time spent doing it in private.

            This period of private growth and decision-making about what you want from art is something I see discussed online periodically, as there is concern from older artists about the push to immediately monetize and seek public engagement that the current cultural, technological, and financial landscape makes seem like a necessity for young artists. Engagement is required from the get-go for monetization, and monetization is a necessity if you want to make a living doing whatever you’re doing, but if you’re not getting that engagement, what then? Or maybe everyone tells you your work is shit. Maybe it is shit. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this right now? These questions and issues tie in with thoughts I’ve expressed here before about needing to understand the scope of creativity and what level of engagement with art and potential success through art is acceptable to someone as an artist in order to find actual, meaningful fulfillment.

@@@@

I saw my father and mother do what comparatively little farming they did when I was growing up, and there’s a dairy farmer down the road who lost his milking help a while back and had a lot of trouble finding somebody reliable and with the work ethic to fill the role. I believe farming is hard work, and I had a very small taste of it for that awful week where I, a soft-handed teenaged solipsist, had to drag myself out of bed earlier than usual to go do this heart-breaking physical task in the cold, knowing that I’d have to do it again that evening and then again the next morning and so on. All I wanted to do was sit around and play video games—I think Devil May Cry 4, though it doesn’t really matter—but I had this obligation instead which bothered me, maybe because of what it actually was (repetitive and very sad regular encounters with an animal essentially doomed to die and its fretful mother), but also because of a general fear of obligation because, by extension, I fear that I will fail in those obligations or that I’ll get bored and become petulant or something like that.

@@@

I originally had a whole big rant in here that I wrote late at night after watching the first three episodes of Painting with John about recent arguments I saw regarding art versus “content” and about that monetization push I mentioned. There’s a definite push online, even if your so-called brand doesn’t revolve around your face, to essentially monetize yourself, to use parasocial relationships with an audience to generate more revenue. It’s a reality television approach consuming the world down to the individual now. I’m resistant to that thought but also drawn to it. I often find myself thinking about the movies I watch or things I read and about what I could say about them on here. I “owe” my audience a post a month, so I’m always on the prowl for things to write about. It’s easy to fall into the content-making trap and to see everything as potentially lucrative and marketable in a public-facing way when that shouldn’t be the case. I could write about this or that, everything I read or see or do. If I was a “proper” blogger with more regular, short-form posts, I guess that’s what I’d be doing. However, I try to resist engaging with things as sources of content.

            I actually feel a little bad writing about this show—a little insincere, even, on some level—since I went into it planning to write about it because it looked interesting. I took notes after episodes and sometimes during episodes because it felt so dense that I didn’t want to forget things, but that made me feel skeevy, like I was engaging with the material in a less than sincere, unideal way. It felt (and still feels) perverse. Awful. Sacrilegious. Painting with John ought to be savored, thought about. Banging out prose like there’s some kind of deadline just sucks, man. Like I’m some kind of journalist. I watched the show in two sittings—three episodes per sitting—and it felt wrong. I imagined what it must have been like to watch the series during the original airing, with one episode per week, and how that must have felt, to have this strange little gem of a 20 minutes come into your life on a regular basis for a short period of time but still over a period of time.

            The brevity alone feels like a statement. Maybe it’s in keeping with what Lurie says at the beginning of episode three about how weird it is to talk to a camera and how someone would have to be a sociopath to do it (and that it’s made him a worse person as he’s gotten better at it while filming the show). On some level, Painting with John feels like the perfect work for the pandemic as a follow up to a beloved short-form series trading a bit on the nostalgia, about a man in isolation reflecting on life and making art. As I’ve noted, it had plenty of opportunity (maybe even reason) to do more of what’s expected of it in this world of reality TV mentality—to be longer, more “natural,” to lend a sense of authenticity to its material, the sort of flavor that draws many viewers to Friday night crime reenactment series—but it refuses with its brevity and its weirdness. It is and isn’t a close look at Lurie’s life. As much as he shares, he shares very little. He barely talks about his chronic illness, for example, though it becomes clear from a brief mention in the finale about how little time he has where he feels well enough to be productive and film the show that it has a major impact on likely every aspect of his life. Painting with John is self-consciously and very explicitly a curated experience in a way that both conforms to the expectation that life be monetized but also pushes the audience away with its constructedness.

@@

Giving up on writing as anything I’m actively pursuing actually brings me peace of mind of a sort. I’ve lapsed into these periods over the years where I acknowledge to myself that, yes, I could probably do something with it, but, no, I don’t actually want to do it. It’s one less expectation clogging up my life, freeing me to just… relax. It’s a comfort to have no expectations of you whatsoever—to just consume what other people produce and not put anything out there into the world. It’s hard work that requires you to do a repetitive task that sometimes doesn’t yield anything worthwhile, and sometimes you have to do it at odd hours when you rather wouldn’t since the rest of the world has demands of its own. Not even really trying to make anything yourself frees you up to watch more TV and movies, play more games, read more books (ironically, in my case), maybe work out more. The quote-unquote problem is I always feel compelled to return.

            Unlike my many unfinished creative projects—video games, novels, comics, music, one nonfiction research-based thing about Beowulf, and so on and so forth—there was no escaping the obligation of trying to help that calf and, ultimately, feeling drained and sad when our efforts didn’t save it. It still died, and my mother credited that experience as a critical point where she started to lose interest in farming, even as a “hobby.”

@

Painting with John ends with another artistic flourish rather than a deep, personal revelation, though we can read into it as with everything else. In the end, Lurie finally perfects the opening drone shot. In that shot, the drone flies over the countryside and into Lurie’s house, where he welcomes viewers to the show as canned applause plays. Then the drone immediately exits, pulling us back just as we were getting close, before the words “The End” appear onscreen. It’s the perfect beat to end on—all the crashes through stubbornness finally leading to beauty; a series ostensibly about painting that barely discusses the craft openly and ends with its opening. It’s “Yep, there he is” all over again. Hello! Then, immediately: Goodbye! The series’ brevity essentially summed up in one sequence. It really does feel like it could have been an art film rather than a “series” as we’ve come to understand that term in the age of endless, algorithmically-curated content, yet it makes sense as a series with the way that it repeats itself, with the little variations in the opening credits and the way that the end credits show off different paintings each time.

            The episodic nature, with its built-in expectations of repetition and novelty balanced against one another, calls more attention to the refrains and variations and makes each individual piece feel more constructed, more carefully considered in isolation. Each is presumably designed to be a unit of sorts to watch one week and then mull over before the next unit arrives.

            Unit. What an awful way to think of art. Content is a symptom of the hustle culture of “side gigs,” which are rapidly just becoming the backbone of our economy and of people’s livelihoods, infecting society in such a way long-term that the idea of them as an infection is actually true to the way that people’s literal health and lives are impacted. Got a car? Make some cash on the side by driving around strangers. You’re an artist? Monetize that art, the sooner the better since you need to build an audience to stand any chance of profiting from it. There’s a desperation to it all born out of the reality that most of us are on an economic level deeply, deeply fucked and looking for any way forward. It’s still corporate content-creation pushing its value system from the top down and passing it off as a path to success, but we’re now driven to it more and more, not so much by a desire for fame but simply for survival. The folks that brought us synergy now bring us a slurry of digital content we don’t even own for a monthly rate and now would like the rest of us to pursue the same agenda. Painting with John exists sort of on the fringe of this mentality. It ultimately still is that—that monetization of the minutiae of the self—but it also defies the expectation with its artificiality. The last episode drives this home: It’s Lurie in his home, at work, with the people from his daily life, just like you content-hungry animals want! But also not really. You may leave now.

The full, un-mangled poster for Painting with John, which is the property of HBO, Lurie, and probably the Devil, can be found here.