Moving week: eaten as well as eater. Installment 6.

In text:

• By way of AIR CONDITIONING, the fourth (yes, fourth) Object Lesson I'm editing this summer, I learned about an essay called "Being Prey" written by philosopher and scholar Val Plumwood, which tells the story of her attack by crocodile and subsequent feelings towards life. It's a strange essay in part because it turns, by the end, to a vaguely vegan, pacifist view, which comes only after a lengthy description of the truly gruesome attack this woman faced while completely alone in the wild. If nothing else it is an interesting read, and short enough to be worthwhile, though perhaps too short to be truly persuasive in a particular way; perhaps in 1996, when it was first published, that wasn't the case, but we are so firmly entrenched in a factory-farmed-climate-apocalyptic state that one singular essay tends not to sway me one way or the other on issues of ecology anymore.
• I read "Friendship" in THE PARIS REVIEW. I realize this column both makes me more well read and makes me seem more well read than I really am; I am not, and do not in truth read that much, and have no plan except to know that I will encounter writing on the internet, usually hawked by the writer or editor who shaped the published piece. I like this short thing; I like that it was quietly about New Orleans, and about friendship, of course, but how friendship changes and develops and is and is not certain things. This is pertinent on my way out of Flagstaff, where, I now realize, I've made at least a few meaningful friends whom I must now leave behind. That is what adult life is, as it turns out. Onward.

In video format:

• Dylan and I rewatched the entirety of UNDER THE SILVER LAKE after I fell asleep in the middle and Dylan got too creeped out to continue alone the first time, David Robert Mitchell's fourth but second-to-me movie following IT FOLLOWS. I was never the biggest fan of IT FOLLOWS, though I watched it twice to double check, and I can't remember why now. SILVER LAKE is measurably stranger and more eccentric than IT FOLLOWS and than I expected; Andrew Garfield plays a weird loser who lives in LA despite not holding down any sort of job or income, and who meets and falls in lust with a girl who goes missing for seemingly cult-related reasons after their first hang out. It's mostly about conspiracy: about believing that the media is sending us at all times vague signals which clue us into a shared understanding among the wealthy about their power over us. But it's really about dating in LA in the 2010s; about chasing after someone who doesn't want to be found, interfacing mostly through friends-of-friends, hitting dead ends before hitting a truly bizarre wall and then fucking your neighbor instead of bothering with the thing you wanted in the first place. It also certainly becomes a critique of new spiritualism; which is to say, it's way too many things at once, in a way that isn't ultimately successful.
• I absolutely loved Ro Ramdin's video entitled "Colleen Ballinger and Commentary Culture," which aims its sights less on Colleen's dumpster-fire-ukulele apology (which I wrote about in Installment 3) and more on the ensuing flood of commentary surrounding the video. More generally, the video critiques commentary YouTubers, that kind who take for granted that what's interesting about commentary is actually everything but: the personality of the commentator, the way the commentary is delivered, the thing that's being commented on. "Why so often are the takes identical, and the comments filled with audience members agreeing, or saying 'you expressed what I thought but was unable to put into words'?" Ro asks. She goes on to say that one might expect precisely the opposite of a genre based in personality: subversive, controversial, or otherwise unique takes, takes that aren't frequently agreed upon by thousands of comments. "Commentary as a genre," Ro writes/narrates by way of one conclusion, "might not be inherently subversive. ... The function of commentary is no longer to critique what is worthy of critique or to commentate on what is explicitly bizarre or funny, but to roll with a certain Zeitgeist." This is a truly brilliant take, in my opinion, because anyone--audience or creator--is party to this cycle. I sit firmly in both camps as a watcher of YouTube commentary (see previous posts), and as a self-proclaimed "good consumer" and writer about the things I consume, even if informally. I know I use the term "meta" too much, but this meta-analysis, in which Ro's aim is certainly pointed, at least in part, at herself, is totally and completely my jam; it makes me feel a little better about finding most YouTube commentators not only annoying but completely unwatchable, and also marks Ro as one of the best to do it. By commenting on the state of the place she situates herself in, she's inadvertently (or, really, deliberately) positioning herself ahead of the curve.
• I made a big fuss of seeing OPPENHEIMER "how it was meant to be seen"--in an IMAX theater--which meant a 1.5 hour drive to the Grand Canyon, or, really, Tusayan, which houses the closes IMAX theater to Flagstaff. Of course, I want to write a review of the movie (with particular attention to the union/organizing B-plot that seems to thread through to the end). But I can't, because on our drive back to Flagstaff in the true dead of night, with a car full of five people, myself included, a small herd of elk crossed our path. I was driving 71 miles per hour; three to four elk crossed past me towards the passenger's side, and a baby elk trailed just barely behind. Without that trailing--the few feet of space the baby left between her and her pack--it is highly likely that at least one of us would have died from the accident, and it is almost certain that my car would have been totaled. Instead, I braked, swerved into the space, and killed or maimed or at the very least struck the baby elk, who in turn smashed the driver's side mirror into pieces. There was no blood, and I'm squarely convinced that mirror was never meant to make it out of Arizona (this is the second incident with that specific mirror, which doesn't escape me, as it's the closest to and most frequently interacted-with thing by the driver, me). All of this happened in the midst of a conversation not about OPPENHEIMER (we'd exhausted much of that by that point, already having driven 45 plus minutes), but about THE TALKING HEADS, specifically whether "Psycho Killer" or "Once in a Lifetime" holds more cache in the pop imagination. Of course afterwards we all sat stunned--the elk running into the road, the small collision were both so fast none of us had time to scream or even verbalize that something was happening. After the thud (the "pum" sound, as Arina later called it), the only person to speak was Arina, who said "What happened?" She had been texting, and missed the whole thing. Meanwhile, mine and my dad's lives flashed before our eyes, silently and independently yet concurrently. Ronnie and Dylan were almost certainly having the same experience, though I haven't really confirmed this. Anything I thought of OPPENHEIMER is near-totally lost now. I will rewatch and review it properly in the coming weeks provided I don't develop some insane paranoia about near-near-death experiences related to it.

Other bytes:

• Though I am not a Mitski fan, I am privy to all manner of Mitski news online, including the imminent release of her new album THE LAND IS INHOSPITABLE AND SO ARE WE. I bring this up only to comment on the cover art, or at least what I assume to be that. I texted a tattooist friend about it when I first saw the cover--it rings of the style of DIY tattoo that's been floating around my corner of Instagram since ~2017 or so, in a way that almost feels behind on the times. This may be a niche experience. The back cover/tracklist has a whole other thing going on, something akin to a French movie poster or an ethical hair clip brand ad campaign. That it's all vaguely ecological--but also extremely human--strikes me, too. All of it feels dated, or belated; but I'll wait to comment further until I hear literally any of the songs, of which I still haven't despite a single released Wednesday.
• This week is, you may notice, much briefer than previous ones, because I spent most evenings saying goodbye to various folks, and feeling kind of sick about it all. The elk seem the final blow in something though I haven't deciphered what. Next week I'll be back after moving, reviewing (hopefully) the many books and recommendations I've received in the midst of all the goodbyes. Thanks for sticking with it.