Back in ye olde LiveJournal days, people used to do this memetic “Friday Five” thing on their blogs where they’d answer the five questions posted weekly on a website solely created for providing such writing prompts. I suppose you can compare that to Inktober?
Far as I can tell, the original Friday Five website is long-defunct but the general spirit of posting five things on a Friday lives on without a prompt. I can rock with the broader approach. I may try to do these one Friday a month. We shall see.
Without further ado, then, here is my Friday Five for January 17.
One: Joe Pera Talks With You
This precious little masterpiece ranks at, or very near, the top of my all-time favorite TV shows. It’s a clever and subtle slice-of-life comedy as gentle as a warm mug of lavender-and-chamomile, like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for neurodivergent millennials — very much my cup of tea.
Though Joe Pera Talks With You was canceled in 2021, it lingers top-of-mind for me this week because the series was just pulled from HBO Max on January 11. Last week I joined hundreds(?) of my fellow Pera-heads in binging the entire show before its removal, sending it off with our algorithmic love. It felt a little like a group prayer, a ritual plea to an unseen and unsympathetic god. Can you quantify our devotion now? Will you reward us with a DVD box set??
All three seasons and two seasonal specials are all still available to watch on Adult Swim’s website at this time. I highly recommend “Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements” (season 1, episode 6) to any first-timers.1
I will likely write a longer love letter to this show in a future post, so keep an eye out for that (or be warned, I guess).
Two: Rogue River Blue
At the peak of what I sometimes refer to as my “LA hipster employment” period (aka my mid-late 20s), I worked as a cheesemonger on the Westside.2 If cheesemongery paid a living wage in this city and provided healthcare, I’d do it for the rest of my life. But alas it does not, so all I have is a wealth of cheese knowledge with no application.
One thing I know is that Rogue River Blue — a gorgeous cow’s-milk hunk streaked with Penicillium roqueforti, cave-aged in a cloak of pear-brandy-macerated grape leaves — is the sexiest cheese on the planet. FACT. Her wonderful pudgy-fudgy paste tastes of buttery crème fraîche, mineraly saltwater taffy, and tangy boozy fruit. She’s magically babe-licious! Schwing!
Alas, I haven’t yet quested for a slice of the 2024 Rogue River Blue. Despite my current intense craving, out of respect for LA's current state I likely won’t do so before the end of its seasonal availability. So I may just be blue-dreamin’ about the 2025 batch, eagerly awaiting its release on the autumnal equinox.
Three: Tyler, the Creator
When Tyler first broke the scene some 15 years ago, I was clearly not the target demo for his whole “antagonistic edge-lord teenage boy” vibe. I easily dismissed his early works and never felt a need to circle back even as his artistry and public image matured. In 2025, however, I’m giving him a fair shot.
I admit that what changed my tune was Tyler’s absolute shredder of a freestyle titled “THAT GUY” — more specifically the music video, which was filmed throughout the city of Hawthorne and is filled with shouts out to LA’s South Bay neighborhoods. The video dropped on Christmas Day, a gift to his hometown. Having also grown up in the area, I’m able to pinpoint virtually every location featured in that video. My husband and I watched at the edge of our seats, squinting and pointing in recognition at all the references like Leonardo DiCaprio.3
LA hip-hop has been having a bit of a renaissance, and I am humbly reminded that Tyler, the Creator has put in the work for it, too. He’s out here representing the South Bay and I ought to be here for that at least. I’ll be diving into his discography over the next few weeks. Might still pass on those first two albums, though…
Four: Swan Boy
My first real introduction to Branson Reese’s works was the Swan Boy animated shorts that appeared on the fifth season of FX’s Cake anthology series. I was delighted to have recently discovered that Swan Boy exists, fore and aft of the animated series, as a web comic. A very stupid, very wordy, and very referential4 web comic.
While a lot of what I loved about the animated Swan Boy — hysterical voice acting and fast-paced, grade-A cartoon slapstick — is obviously missing from the web comic format, in its place are lengthier and more detailed jokes written for a narrower audience. For instance, every tiny element in this text-dense, 22-page saga of absurdity cracked me up even though I don’t know shit about fantasy baseball.
As of this post, I still have yet to read all of the Swan Boy strips. I look forward to getting caught up over the weekend. I’ll probably devour all of Branson Reese’s other web comics in a single sitting as well.
Five: Meow Wolf
Last month I had the pleasure of visiting Meow Wolf’s super-surreal Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Our cab driver en route warned us with the biggest grin, “You will not be able to explain what you are about to see in there. You will not.”
And ya know, the guy’s partially correct. I can distill the explanation down to “a big labyrinth of art installations woven together by a cool story.” But such a simplified description undersells the actual experience and undermines the depth of the narrative. One could simply wander the site for an hour or two like an art gallery, like I did, or spend a whole day examining the details and unraveling the whole story — like I wish I did.
I walked out of Omega Mart that day with a hunger for more of that sumptuous lore, and I’m thoroughly annoyed that I now have a reason to return to Las Vegas.5 I’ve even been fantasizing about traveling to each of the four (so far) other Meow Wolf locations across the US and fully exploring each of them. Damn you, experiences! Damn you for requiring money and time and effort!
And so concludes my very first Friday Five of 2025. Thanks for reading!
Or for a little bittersweet existential despair, try the Relaxing Old Footage with Joe Pera special created and released during the quarantine in 2020.
I also worked as the cheese shop owner’s personal assistant while apprenticing at his grassroots PR firm, and I further supplemented that with DJ and pet-sitting gigs. This is what I mean when I say LA hipster employment, my dude. Story for another time, though.
His frame of reference does skew pretty “white post-punk hipster in his 30s or 40s” — so I suppose if you enjoy The Hard Times you’ll probably get a kick out of Swan Boy.
To be clear, I’m not one of those LA people who “goes to Vegas.” The place gives me existential creeps. But things do happen there, so I should expect to find myself there on occasion.