Updates – Kevin Smokler

Listening to Every Song I Own (Songs #3831 – #4081 out of 14161)

Kevin Smokler on May 1, 2026

The latest update to my mystic project to listen to all 14, 161 songs in my iTunes library straight through, no skipping (called Abba Zappa Zoo, thank you to Mike Gluck for the name) takes us from…

“High Horse” by Kacey Musgraves (Song #3831) To “Hot Thing” by Prince (Song #4081)

The Math:

Songs: 250
Completion Percentage: 28.8%

Cold Facts:

The most common words in this block are “Hold”, “Home” and “Hot”

Strange Bedfellows: (Same name, different songs)

Did you know Wilson Philips, En Vogue, Santana and the Alabama Shakes all have songs called “Hold on?”

Buried Treasure (i.e. a song you haven’t heard of by an artist you have heard of):

“Honey Bob” by Wanda Jackson.

The “Queen of Rockability” is a tragically overlooked pioneer of early rock n’ roll. You probably know her best from her biggest hit “Let’s Have a Party” (which has a great cameo in the movie Dead Poets Society) If her growling, hurricane inflected two minute masterpieces are your bag of bananas, try “Honey Bop.”

Your new favorite song:

The lead off track from the second album of legendary Chicago punk band Naked Raygun (name is an homage to “Sex Pistols” ) “Home of the Brave” reminds of both how punkand how different this group was. Note the absolutely precise lead guitar on the melody, the almost prog rock speed on the drums, the singalong doo-woppy backing vocals.

All in less that 3 minutes!

Photo of the Day: “Red Lion Lantern”

Kevin Smokler on March 23, 2026

San Francisco, Thursday, 9:52 PM, March 6, 2026.

A Few Thoughts on “One Battle After Another”

Kevin Smokler on March 20, 2026

One Battle After Another movie cover

A few thoughts on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER which we watched last night and enjoyed very much despite being a flawed movie that probably should not have won the Best Picture Oscar last week…

This is Paul Thomas Anderson‘s third best movie behind BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA which for a director of his level of ambition is saying quite a bit.
Liberal activism in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is portrayed as (i say this as a committed liberal).

a. Viewed as a state of perpetual war similar to how Nanisca in THE WOMAN KING advises Dahomey to not be in the war captives business (i.e. signing up for perpetual battle always means losing eventually)

b. All passion and no strategy. The movie having the equivalent of 90 minute chase scene in the middle comes from the characters unwillingness to be strategic and their addiction to being loud and performative.

As such, PT Anderson is very into self-destructive characters (See BOOGIE NIGHTS). We are supposed to pity not sympathize w/ characters in this movie, who mistakenly think activism = glamorous battlefield activity instead of occasional victories and many loses.
Its flaws are the same that haunt this filmmaker perennially. Namely…

a.He does not know how to do villainy without it seeming outrageous and cartoony. See Daniel Day Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and whatever the hell Sean Penn thinks he’s doing in this movie.

b. Too long by 40 minutes

c. Shamelessly wastes resources. The list of great actors in this movie who have too little to do includes Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Paul Grimstad, Teyana Taylor.
Very glad I watched it, would watch it again. Would have given BEST PICTURE to a good three of the other contenders though.

Prodigal Summer: The Workhorse of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels…

Kevin Smokler on November 14, 2025

So PRODIGAL SUMMER is Barbara Kingsolver’s 5th novel, published in 2000 which I just finished reading. Kingsolver’s currently 9 novels into her career with 2022’s DEMON COPPERHEAD being the most recent.

PRODIGAL SUMMER is not as well known as BK’s first book THE BEAN TREES (1988) i.e. the debut that made her famous or THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, her 4th novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sold eleventy quintuplion copies and was on every book club’s roster for a solid decade.

But ya know what? SUMMER, which is three interlocking stories of people living in the mountains of Western Virginia over one summer, is damn fine reading. It may have not been epic and sprawling, a 3 hour movie of a novel directed by Sydney Pollack or something like that. It may have not been the debut album that made us fall in love with the band. It’s a workhorse, that shows us what the artist can do on a typical day, instead when they are brand new with nothing to lose or giving us their career’s biggest flex.

AFTER HOURS is Martin Scorsese’s workhorse movie. LITTLE WOMEN is Greta Gerwigs. I think history will show that THE AGE OF PLEASURE is Janelle Monae’s workhorse album. The very good movie CRAZY STUPID LOVE is a workhorse role for Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell.

What is your favorite workhorse movie/books/album/tv show? And whose workhorse is it?

Thank you from the end of my book tour.

Kevin Smokler on October 27, 2025

Boy, was this special. I got to complete my tour for BREAK THE FRAME: CONVERSATIONS WITH WOMEN FILMMAKERS in Chicago at the incredible neighborhood bookshop Jarvis Square Books run by the equally incredible Kate Harding alongside the legendary Mo Ryan , author of BURN IT DOWN, a huge source of inspiration for my book.

A dozen events in seven state over one summer. I am not as young or as unstoppable (if I ever was) when I first went on tour 20 years ago. But my work and I are still welcomed in, we still have friends from far away to visit (in attendance were among many, my old friend Andrew Huff who took this photo) and meet, and I can still go places all over this country and spend time with people who believe art and equality and dialogue still matter.

Grateful for it all.

Home now.

American Psycho at 25: My Interview with Director Mary Harron in Salon

Kevin Smokler on July 7, 2025

“We both got fired off the movie, and I put a lot on the line for casting him, and I remember thinking before we started shooting, “God, I hope I’m right about this.” It was a big leap, but really from the moment we first talked about it I could see that, as with Guinevere, that we had the same sense of humor about it, that he thought it was funny.

I had met with a number of young actors who thought Bateman was cool. No, no, no, he’s dorky. He’s absurd. I wanted an actor who could see the ridiculousness of it and could have a distance from it.”

— Director Mary Harron on her enduring faith that Christian Bale was the right actor for the protagonist Patrick Bateman. The role launched Bale’s career as an adult performer. He would win an Oscar 5 years later.

Full Interview

SAN FRANCISCO LOVES LOS ANGELES, AT LEAST THIS SAN FRANCISCAN…

Smokler on January 17, 2025

Los Angeles has its issues same as San Francisco. You don’t have to love both equally but I ain’t going in for no imaginary rivalries when our brothers and sisters down south are suffering.

As the late, great Nikki Giovanni said “We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning…we will rebuild the future…no one deserves a tragedy”

I will do what I can to help. This shit is bad. Real bad. (image via Broke Ass Stuart)

EMILE DURKHEIM AND SELF HELP:

Smokler on October 14, 2024

Emile Durkheim was French Jewish sociologist in the 19th century, the father of modern criminology and a hero of mine.

Occasionally I am asked for advice on productivity and how not to let your mistakes get in your way. I often answer with Emile Durkeim.

Who? And why?

Emile Durkeim was French Jewish sociologist in the 19th century, the father of modern criminology and a hero of mine. Why is directly relevant to our mistakes and sense of embarassment and shame around them.

Durkeim gave us two very important ideas (among many). 1) That crime is the problem of society and not just individuals 2) that problems are value neutral. They are simply there to be fixed. It does not mean our feelings about them are unimportant just that we work better if we view something we do badly (aka the problem) as say, a leaky faucet rather than a character flaw. It’s easy to fix a leaky faucet if you don’t get caught up in what having a leaky faucet says about you as a person.

Crime therefore, is not the failing of individuals but a checklist of what society can do better. And fixes are value neutral.

Therefore, not being able to say, get to work on time says nothing bad about you as a person. It is a leaky faucet ready to be tightened. So tighten it, be proud you are the person who saw the leaky faucet and fixed it. But let go of the fact that it is leaking. Faucets leak sometime. That is life not you not being able to do life.

ON OCT 7: ONE YEAR LATER

Smokler on October 7, 2024

A yellow Star of David against a black background.

Today is October 7.

We are proud of being Jewish, want all 101 hostages safely home, weep for their families and weep for the horror perpetrated wrongly in their name and memory by the ignorant lunatics who sit in power in Israel.

Both are true.

Both are deserving of our hearts.

THE MEMORY OF MURDER: 40 YEARS SINCE THE SAN YSIDRO MASSACRE

Smokler on August 2, 2024

This summer is the 40th anniversary of the worst mass murder in the history of the state of California.

On July 18, 1984, at about 4 in the afternoon, a man carrying an Uzi and a bolt-action rifle walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro California and murdered 21 people, employees and customers, senior citizens and kids, a 6 month old child.

That McDonald’s was torn down a month later and community of San Ysidro raised the money themselves for the building of a memorial at the corner of San Ysidro Blvd + Averil Rd, where the tragedy happened. To this day, the memorial is adorned with flowers, candles of photographs of the murdered every July 18th and every Day of the Dead, so that the community may never forget them.

I have thought about this tragedy since I read about it in a Newsweek magazine at age 11. This is the most serious subject I have ever had the honor of writing about, here, in an essay called The Memory of Murder, about how we remember terrible things, how we must, and how it is never enough.