Ask me about how to tire of undertakings of your own creation. Installment 9.
In text:
- I finished TIME IS THE THING A BODY MOVES THROUGH, logged it to my uneventful and quiet and new Goodreads account, where I found the top review, a weirdly offensive take on how bad the book is because the author seems traumatized and unsure of themself. I suppose this review made me like the book more, retroactively; and it does locate a truth about the narrator (not necessarily author) as fundamentally unsure, moving through time and space without a sense of resolution about the future. My opinion diverges from the reviewer here, obviously, as I found this a working function of the book, and totally intentional. The narrator moves through discussions of art and lovers and friends, making yet another case (queer/gay writing tends to make this case, in my experience) for the communal version of a human(ity), where a person can't exist without multiplicity that is, yes, overwhelming, confounding, and sometimes alarming, but also beautiful and exciting and overwhelming in a good way! But really this is all to say: Goodreads is a bad, bad place, like Letterboxd in its quest to turn everyone--even the most vapid among us (definitively myself included)--into critics.
- MOMUS somewhat belatedly to the trend cycle published a piece on the gauche Brooklyn Museum exhibit of twitters past (Hannah Gadsby's _It's Pablo-matic_), entitled "We're Alive, Pablo is Dead". The piece is so good maybe because it's not singularly locked into Pablo-matic, which was the mode for the briefly viral critiques of the show in ARTNEWS and the NEW YORK TIMES. Thusly, the piece is engaging primarily with Picasso as a lauded figure, then with the various shows which display his work in New York, landing ultimately on Pablo-matic, and leveling it pretty swiftly: "At an art show as in life, insisting that violence is inevitable when it is not feels like bullying." Elisabeth Nicula (the author) is herself an artist (more specifically, a printmaker) which adds to this whole thing beautifully; her proximity to or reception of specific works of Picasso's ultimately positions her to write about him (or, to write about thinking about him) with a depth that should be the minimum for writing or thinking about art. Adjacently, the piece got me thinking about humor, using it to certain effects, what the various affects of humor are across arbitrary generations of people, so forth. I feel like I keep seeing stuff about how conservatives are so unfunny online, which, fair enough. But what of this other brand of humor--Gadsby's bullyish callout platformed at a known establishment? And, what of the response, humorous in an opposite direction? I don't have the answers... but it's a weird problem--Pablo-m, as one critic would put it.
In video format:
- OLDBOY got a remaster and theater run, which Dylan and I saw at The Prytania, one of the greatest independently owned little theaters in America right now. If you have not seen the movie I do not suggest reading the rest of my review, which is just that it's terribly silly to punish someone for ousting you for incest by making them do incest without their knowing it. But it's a great movie for all of the action, one that I think maxes out on watches at three (this was my third and perhaps final time seeing it, at least for several years), and one that deserves a movie theater viewing.
- It's been months since I started thinking about and attempting to reflect on #corecore, the TikTok trend which smashes together all kinds of videos frequently to no end. It's really difficult to explain, and I wouldn't have even mentioned it except that this week I started seeing a new type of corecore video which is arguably more ridiculous than previous ones. The old version of these videos stuck together clips which seemed disparate but were connected by an obscure or very general theme (for example, a video of a woman putting on makeup, followed by a woman in a spat with her boyfriend, followed by a woman doing a TikTok dance would all seem to vaguely gesture towards a conclusion about feminism or the degradation of women). Now, they're just straight up mush: this one shows clips of movies and videos in three second intervals, just enough time to watch and comprehend each, without even a semblance of connection. I've tried to replicate this experience--of watching a video like this, which is also weirdly a version of the experience of scrolling itself, so, a double-scroll?--in writing but it always comes out super contrived and flat. What is this shit??
Other stuff:
- Dylan and I spent a few nights in New Orleans, clearing up the remaining personal business we'd left there in his hasty move and our expected eventual return. It felt like a billion degrees the whole time, notably including when we paid a $20 entry fee each for a private pool that was the temperature of a tepid bath. I don't know if I'm getting old or boring or both, but New Orleans has lost some of its charm for me. Maybe it was staying in the Marigny, a spot that's fun to visit and less fun to reside in, surrounded by millennials puffing on Elf bars and sporting stick-and-pokes from 2013, all of us paying a little too much for drinks and meals. Or maybe I'm just too used to dry air for my own good.
- On the road to and fro New Orleans Dylan and I listened to a lot of Kanye West and Grimes albums, which in theory should've provided ample cultural critical thought from both of us, but instead turned out to be mostly us listening to music we like and lamenting the loss of the form of artistry those two embodied "back in the day." This week I've found myself feeling like I am getting old, a feeling I truly despise, and one that's directly bolstered by my "back in the old days" feelings towards Grimes's VISIONS, or whatever. Is this my destiny?
- I got a haircut inspired very directly by the actress who plays Naomi Pierce in SUCCESSION, the first haircut of my life where the stylist did exactly what I asked and not anything fucked up. And yet I find something to be preoccupied about, this time that my hair frequently looks exactly like the reference photos I showed the stylist, but the rest of me obviously does not, while other times my hair looks boyish in a way that shocks. I knew from the moment I saw the haircut in SUCCESSION (I think it must have been the second or third episode) that I'd get it eventually, as it's a perfect mid-length cut for someone with straight hair... but it's taking some getting used to anyway. And it's really silly to get the same haircut as a celebrity, as it then poses all of these weird points for comparison, e.g. I am not blonde, I am not skinny--who am I relative to Annabelle Dexter-Jones, anyway? As if my typical mode would be comparison to her specifically.
- Obligatorily, I must mention The Mugshot, which is interesting to me exclusively in its overwhelming, totalizing power at becoming an insufferable meme almost instantly. It almost presents a new category of memeing, a new meme-time, a joke-rate which even the submarine implosion couldn't match. And it continues my thread of wondering about "conservative" versus "liberal" humor, what all of that even means; also raises questions for me about the validity or credulity of Twitter (X?) accounts like PopBase, which release celebrity information in a similar way to TMZ or ET, but online and truly facelessly. The whole thing is weird, and indicative of what this is for people my age: not political fare, but fodder for jokes. It's, as they say, deeply unserious. (And for what it's worth, this is the singular response-joke to the mugshot that my brain can recall.)
aug 24 2023 ∞
aug 25 2023 +