Welcome back. This is installment 2 of good consumer::

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If you want to give me free practice reviewing or thinking critically about something you've written or read and enjoyed, shoot me a message with a link on Twitter and it'll appear in one of these. In general I love to know what everyone's reading/listening to/watching <3 Thanks 4 reading~

I am actively:

• finishing McKenzie Wark's LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH. (More on this later.)
• editing Ed Simon's RELIC, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. It connects nicely with something else I watched this week, Broey Deschanel's "Immersive Van Gogh: Why Art is in Crisis," which I write more about below.
• in the midst of a couple books I forgot to mention last week, on account of my not consistently reading them: Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE and Kathy Acker's BLOOD & GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL. I don't necessarily love to admit this, but they are challenging enough for me to need breaks, or to choose something more digestible when I only have a moment.

In video format:

• I happened upon the enchanting OBREE, a short documentary on YouTube about Graeme Obree, a brilliant and bizarre cyclist and bicycle mechanic. The story is one of an outcast/underdog, Obree, who rides a bike he built to accommodate his truly unique riding style. The underdog narrative gets particularly juicy when, early in the movie, we find out that his opponent comes from a "family of cyclists" (?!). Of course it's meant to be taken as a heartwarming or inspiring tale; I found it all kind of sad, though, especially since Obree and his eccentricities were ultimately stripped of their "official" merits, when the governing body of international cycling banned not one but two of his riding styles, and his custom-built bike. Still, it's exciting. I was riveted when the doc showed footage of a TV interview with Obree and his then-rival, Chris Boardman, sitting next to one another. "I think it's essential to have a rival," Obree says, never turning to his, looking only at the interviewer. "Sport'd be boring if you came out and won, won races without any competition."
• I saw ASTEROID CITY, which—perhaps because of my incredibly low expectations (due to my last Wes Anderson in theaters being ISLE OF DOGS, which I pronouncedly disliked)—I found truly wonderful. When I see something once I can't help but see it everywhere, which explains my obsession in particular with the metanarrative (perhaps even metacognitive?) layer of the story. In the same vein, I couldn't help but watch it as a quarantine movie. It helps my case (or doesn't) that it's a movie about isolation set in a place that looks a lot like the place I live now, where I spent the past two years feeling on and off isolated. Like the play-characters, I, too, happened upon this strange part of the country, and am now being re-released into regular life after a foreign event, a series of blossomed and half-realized relationships, and a forced stay. Metacognition: in for 2023.
• Thanks to my neuroses I've decided that I'd like to swim laps, but only after watching multiple videos on how exactly to do it successfully, as if this is rocket science and not a simple exercise which I've done before. This Howcast video on "how to swim laps" struck a chord with me, perhaps because the speaker seems to capture my anxieties about doing wrong in his delivery of how to do right. No one will tell me how to do the flip at the end without humiliating myself in the process of learning. This might just be adulthood.
• I saw INTERSTELLAR in theaters, not five days after seeing ASTEROID CITY there, too. The movies has been my one major Covid sacrifice, as it was one of the first and only things I deeply missed for the two and a half years I wasn't going. After this one, I feel confident in my feeling that space movies are meant to be seen only in theaters. Maybe all movies are?
• Broey Deschanel, YouTube cultural critic, released a new video, "Immersive Van Gogh: Why Art is in Crisis" on Wednesday, which parses the question of what's happening to art when a multitude of for-profit, hyper-capitalists are turning famous pieces of art into interactive, VR, expansive exhibits. Simon's RELIC also takes up questions of the function of art, too, specifically as a secularized version of religious relics. Simon and Maia alike take up Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which I suppose is a natural reaction to things like NFTs (perhaps already bygone), and AI "outpainting" a work of art, expanding the original breadth of the piece into a speculative, larger frame. Maia's video essays are always smart, considered, and unpretentious; I've written extensively (also privately, for now) about her piece on LOVE ISLAND, expanding her argument about the Panopticon. I think what makes her work great is that lack of pretension, which isn't offset by dumbing anything down. She works with complex texts, and writes genuinely novel considerations about culture and media. She also makes me think about my choices, namely, whether I'll ever step foot in an "Interactive" art exhibit (highly unlikely).
• This proto-deepfake ad from 2005 for a then-new Volkswagen Golf, mentioned in RELIC, haunts me, as it should, for its specter-like quality of the future. The original, updated, runs the tagline. How long until they remake this to look less like shit? I give it two years.

In writing:

• Rayne Fisher-Quann posted a new, short essay to INTERNET PRINCESS, a column which I so admire, and which I'm sitting on an entirely separate essay about. My other essay re: Fisher-Quann is about journaling, parasociality, and what it means to curate (or not), and dissects her famous post "standing on the shoulders of complex female characters." But this week's post, entitled "suffering mix," is interesting for the precise reasons I wrote my original essay about her work, too; here, she's negotiating how to talk to a huge audience about being in pain without giving away all the details. As someone with virtually no following, it's hard to imagine what kind of additional stress this is—not only to experience difficult things, but also to be expected to write or talk about them in your personal column.
• I arbitrarily happened upon "Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice," a column written by a psychiatrist who posits Swift as "the poet-laureate of this generation." O.K. I don't often admit this, but I have my soft spots for Swift (early albums, and her pop culmination, 1989, feel fine to me). I matured out of her pretty quickly, though; I am generally disinterested in heterosexuality, self victimization, and (to be blunt) white feminism. I'm hyper-averse to "eras" or purporting that one can be in "an era," particularly when touted by someone who has essentially had the same public persona for the duration of her career (rich, white, victimized by circumstances almost entirely in her control, but always taking back power from "the man"—always a man, specifically). The author of the column does little to address this, and actually kind of encourages her teenaged patients to embrace the idea of eras of ones life. (As if being an age—ten, fifteen, twenty-six—doesn't exist to give us an express sense of time, of movement of the self, without retroactive pronouncements about meaning. Does titling a period of difficulty, growth, strife, give it meaning? Or can I argue that it's a form of gratuitous self-obsession... That might be too harsh either way.) I've never had a therapist, but I would hope if I did they'd stop me from metaphorizing and outright projecting onto anyone (including but not limited to Taylor Swift), as these are, I suspect, some of my deepest internal delusions. The columnist, on the other hand, seems to encourage this parasocial internal play. I digress—I'd like not to make this little project an exercise in hating, and if I'm allowed my delusions (not named here), so is everyone else.
• My (internet) pal Sam Bodrojan published a short story, "Pica," in Peach Mag this week. I think I'm partial to its uber-contemporary quality, how the realism is so tangible it moves the scene forward by virtue only of being, well, real. When I write fiction (as stated: rarely and privately), it always comes out somewhere in this realm, too; I have a preference for the stuff of life, and in particular the complexities of work, how it bleeds into everything. In general this is just a quick and good piece of writing; the fact that it's set in Denver, among the climbers and campers and New American fare did not escape me, either, living in some version of that myself in Flagstaff.

I also:

• have been listening to THE IDIOT in audio format, read by the author, Elif Batuman. It's been at least a month now, but I often forget I'm listening to it, even as I'm listening to it. I don't know if it's appropriate to categorize this as "reading"; because I can't underline or feel pretensions about looking how one does when reading a paperback in public, it's kind of in one ear out the other. I'm left with impressions, mostly. And I'd be lying if I didn't mention that now every time I try to write fiction, which is, in fairness, rarely (it happened once last week), it comes out sounding like Selin, the book's overthinking, detail-obsessed narrator. The book—or, the impression I retain of it—is great fun, especially as a summer "read". Mostly it's about a tortured crush, which is either extremely or not at all reciprocated. It really does capture the feeling of a serious crush, of the confusion which inevitably surrounds it; it's also a campus novel in some capacity, which I'm partial to.
• was a guest on RADIO FOR JUST ABOUT ANYTHING, my friend Ronnie's radio show, early on Tuesday morning. I haven't gotten up quite that early in a long time; I was up and out of the house (with coffee and banana in hand) at 5:35AM. It was fun being on the radio, and recalled the old days when I would go into WRBH 89.3FM in New Orleans and read excerpts from novels, magazine clips, or other news articles. That was always recorded, never live, and it strikes me how scared I used to be of live radio. It's a twofold change—one, realizing that there's not likely to be many people listening to the stations I'm on, and two, not caring about slip-ups like I used to. Ronnie has an unmatched joie de vivre, laughs at everything, and makes a great friend and radio host.
• watched my roommate's cat, Milo, which mostly consisted of feeding and cleaning, but also of fighting, turmoil. Milo, who was "rescued" from being an outdoor cat as a little guy, spends most summer days in misery looking out the window, meowing and wishing he could be free. The trouble is that we live near the highway (near being within listening and looking distance, though a massive cinder block wall and several tens of feet separate us from the action), which is no place for a cat. Fortunately for us all, Milo doesn't go far, and mostly wants to roll in the dirt. Unfortunately for us all, I never feel great about taking him out, which resulted in him breaking through not one but two second-floor window screens in our house, jumping off the roof, and into his desired dirt pit. Hence, our fighting and apprehensions towards one another. We reached a stalemate until his rightful owner returned, at which point he went back to a more normal self (one that gets taken out regularly by someone far less anxious and far more responsible for his well-being).