End of summer roundup
A call to abolish quote tweets, a theory on trend pieces, cats, movies...
Labor Day, college football, US Open…before living in New Orleans, these things signified the end of summer. Now, they work more as a promise that summer is a season that might one day end. A better framework might be ‘start of the schoolyear.’ Any way you cut it, I’ve been a delinquent blogger this summer. How to atone? A grab bag blog will have to do…
Below, a collection of thoughts on what I’ve been thinking (not much), writing (even less), reading (eh), watching and listening (hell yeah):
Writing:
A few weeks ago,
of No Bells fame launched a new project, , that I’m thrilled to be a part of. Good writing—good writing that you pay a cup of pre-tip coffee a month for—nothing better. My first piece there is a sort of reported story live from Power Slap in New Orleans. Sports media, American carnage, The Jungle but for the brainrot mines, Hoop Dreams with CTE…it’s a good piece, and I hope you enjoy if you haven’t yet read it. First half free, second walled.
Thinking:
I think Twitter is making me sick. I mean this literally—my eyes hurt, my humanity curdles, I feel unfocused and hateful. I spend a tremendous amount of my time at work scrolling Twitter, doing what the kids or the psychiatrists might call ‘dissociating’ from the nasty shit I see and hear in the courtroom, and in so doing I feel nasty in my own right. I’m not the first person to feel this way, and this is neither a Medium-style breakup letter (I’m addicted, brother, I’ll keep drinking that garbage) nor a thinkpiece (it’s a blog, there’s a difference, and also sorry, I’ve been…uninspired). And still it’s worth taking seriously the exact location of my newfound spiritual rot.
Twitter is the type of service that drives you insane on its best days—we shouldn’t be hooked up an eternally replenishing torrent of contextless, catastrophic information—but since Elon Musk’s takeover it has degenerated in too many ways to count. Like, the impression-chasing Sopranos screenshot guy is a British Nazi apparently. It’s bad, and the ways it’s gotten worse have been pretty comprehensively covered. The For You page is a mess, everyone’s racist, I don’t think any of the young women offering to introduce themselves to me are actually young women, you name it. These things bother me, because I’m a regular guy who wants people to be less racist and thinks bots are bad news, but it’s not clear that I can locate my intense malaise in them alone. What’s driving me insane is all the quote tweeting.
I can’t recall whether Twitter became a quote tweet factory before or after Musk’s takeover; I tried doing some research to that end and it appears nobody has covered it. But if this semantic shift did barely predate the “X” era, Musk’s vulgar Redditization of the website has accelerated it exponentially. Over the course of Twitter’s descent into a monetized industrial engagement farm, the primary mode of content has shifted from tweets themselves to quote tweets. On the timeline, every other post is a response to some cynical quote prompt, a blowhard editorializing above a sensationalized news hit, or another blowhard editorializing above the first guy’s response to the cynical quote prompt. The type of shit that used to happen in replies (or, better yet, in internal monologues) has been externalized into a sort of constant jostling for the last, final, best word. It’s a shift that seems trivial—typing this feels bad, like really bad, like why are you writing about this bad—but also one that has fundamentally rewired the brains of people who use that website. More than ever before, Twitter is a take factory: guys trying to make rent loft prompts into the ether for their X stimulus checks, the algorithm tees up quote-tweet answers in your feed, and before long you’re sharing a thought that’s been spat out countless times by people captured within the same feedback loop and, worse yet, feeling quite satisfied about it. Elon’s bot-infested Twitter has more or less devalued the thrill of banger-hunting—we’re playing in an inflated-stats era, basically—and shifted the meta such that the new dopamine hit is located in the feeling of smug satisfaction one gets by pronouncing the final word on a subject. The net effect, of course, is a timeline full of final words, myopic certainty, and a total lack of curiosity. It’s turning me misanthropic, stupid, and reactionary. And so, a call to arms: this fall, no more quote tweets. Reject the modality being pushed by the world’s first Soy Billionaire.
Reading:
Feels like we’re in an interesting moment right now where the main discursive trends are entirely resistant to being written about insightfully. Take Kyle Chayka’s semi-recent New Yorker essay on labubu, all that matcha shit…at his best, Chayka is a perceptive synthesizer of Internet-adjacent culture for an audience that, like James Harden, does not have Internet. This piece exemplifies how those tendencies can turn mushy fast. It’s too easy to list a series of co-occuring buzzwords, retrofit some unifying aesthetic principle atop them, and then half-heartedly gesture at the unknowable nihilism of Gen Z. We have Substack for that. Part of my trouble with the piece is that it’s full of pull-quote ready, sweeping assertions that don’t stand up to even light scrutiny (“We are the Labubus, grinning ecstatically amid the wreckage of our rapidly dismantling, recombinatory era. They are our unbeautiful avatars of overexposure.” I certainly don’t feel that way!). The deeper failing, I think, is the not-uncommon tendency to assume that our culture follows from memes, a perspective that haunts the bulk of Internet-y trend pieces. Perhaps transcending the trap of Just Listing Things requires taking seriously the possibility that real culture and material conditions set the terms of memetic conversation rather than the other way around. The best pieces, of course, are the ones able to diagnose and wrestle with the secret third thing shaping both the world around us and the one on our screens. But the older I get, the more exhausted I am by the copy-and-paste approach to writing about society’s most compelling concerns: what do Labubus mean? Is it manipulative for a man to listen to Clairo? What political valence might we attach to being into sandwiches?
To the extent that I’m going to keep reading about things legible only to people who spend too much time on their phones, I’d rather these pieces look more like Patrick Redford’s quick hit on Michael Porter Jr.’s distinctly Nelk-ian obsession with These Females. I’ll obviously be writing more about Michael Porter Jr.—I’ve been in a suspended state of disbelief about the future of the Brooklyn Nets that is perhaps better blamed than anything else for my complete inability to write this summer—but Patrick smartly applies his signature (Redfordian?) style to the sort of modern moron he so frequently diagnoses. Here, Patrick’s able to walk a tightrope, capable of both treating dumb shit like dumb shit while also mining for meaning the cultural apparatus that so frequently elevates dumb, harmful shit to its swampy surface. Culture is getting uglier, stupider, and distinctly more chauvinistic, and today’s best culture writers are the ones able to look that degeneration in the face without having to hedge their bets on the possibility of an aesthetic plan just outside of their view.
At the end of the day, though, your phone is best used as a means to see videos of cats. Tao Lin’s essay on his cats, which ran in the most recent Harper’s, is a delightful and deliberate meditation on the wonder of caring for and living alongside a pet. The piece works specifically because it does not have a point—anyone who’s lived with a cat knows they have souls. It’s just a well-written, expertly paced product of deep reflection that has enhanced my relationship with my own cat as profoundly as did the tweet I saw the other day where a cat who wanted lasagna burned its human with the Kubrick Stare.
Watching:
Pretty quiet summer at the movies, and I haven’t yet played with the Vineland characters in Fortnite. I did watch the monkey pop star movie on a plane recently and tear up a little bit: it’s hard to explain, but the monkey works, though I still couldn’t name a Robbie Williams song.
Between Weapons and Eddington, it’s been the summer of schizo-cinema. Neither Eddington nor Weapons are formally challenging movies—even Eddington’s third-act disintegration holds your hand a bit—but both seem preoccupied with rendering the phenomenon of mass delusion. I’m lukewarm on Weapons, which did as admirable a job in recent memory of trying to hold together the plot mechanics of a buzzy horror movie once the mystique of the central monster wore off, but which held itself back a bit by leaning on its one-character-at-a-time episodism. Once the wind-up ends and you more or less know what you’re getting, Weapons is most interesting as a primary document of right-wing psychosis: parents sicced on nervous teachers, hapless administrators blind to abuses transpiring underneath their noses, child sexual abuse, children with agency, period, basements. Weapons challenges the “prestige horror” vogue that renders the actual mechanics of a plot secondary to their allegorical purpose, and it’s stronger for it. The film could have been tighter, more propulsive, and a bit more psychotic, but if nothing else it gets credit in my book for portraying, rather than cheekily inverting, the stuff of reactionary suburban nightmares.
Anybody who’s seen Beau Is Afraid understands the extent to which Ari Aster is preoccupied with, well, Oedipal concerns. Eddington, then, is Aster’s attempt to represent the primal scene undergirding contemporary neurosis. At the risk of contradicting my distaste for trend pieces that simply name signifiers, I found Eddington’s tight first half delightful even if it amounted to little more than a barrage of “remember whens?” Filmmakers like to pretend that COVID never happened—hell, half of them are still too afraid to make movies will cell phones in them—which affords Aster a bit of a first-to-market advantage. It’s quite possible that I only have the appetite in my life for one film that depicts a tense masking standoff, but my guess is I’ll never find out.
A lot of hay has been made in an attempt to perfectly diagnose Aster’s ideological designs in putting together this film, a conversation I find tiresome and misguided. Art is meant to be interpreted, not solved. To that end, it feels like a testament to successful design that ideologues across the political spectrum can apply an interpretation to Eddington that results in the film confirming their priors. I’ve read accusations that Eddington is a display of both-sides-ism; I’d respond that it’s actually just indeterminate. Eddington works as a movie about 2020 because it effectively and lightheartedly stylizes a moment during which intense uncertainty, pressure, and isolation transformed even the most level-headed people into conspiratorial zealots (as a conspiratorial zealot in remission, I say this with love and understanding); I view it as a mark of success, then, that the film appears to have re-activated these instincts in the hearts and minds of its viewers. Eddington is not necessarily a psychotic film, but it is a film about a moment in time during which many acted psychotically that has the effect of making its viewers feel psychotic. It succeeds on these terms.
Listening:
Everyone’s a dad or in love now, it seems. My favorite dad record of the summer is Earl Sweatshirt’s Live Laugh Love. My favorite love record of the summer is Chuquimamani-Condori’s two-part wedding mix “ILY Travis (Chuqi Chinchay Is God & God Bless America)”