Content Nausea No. 13: Steady On My Mind
A late sentiment a bit misplaced, but that comes as no surprise...
Welcome to the 13th edition of Content Nausea. Two weeks or so ago (more than that), I wrote about the first time I heard Japandroids and Oso Oso. I think it’s one of the better of these I’ve done, so please go back and read it again. I guess I will keep linking to the welcome blog.
Damn, I wrote the majority of this at an Airbnb in Atlanta almost two weeks ago. Currently, I’m sitting in a Super 8 in Milwaukee, Wis., and I am about to drive to Green Bay. Time, man! It moves. The Super 8 coffee is not good. I need to get my travel coffee gear together soon. Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through these stilted stops and starts. As I write every week, it will get better, and not all of them will be this long. I really needed to dump my notebook, so to speak. And as a little tease for next week: You might be in for some pure, earnest, wholesome Content Nausea. Exciting times!
It can get tiring when people say, “Wow, only in 2019!” or things like that because things have always been bad, more or less, and plenty of bad things have happened in years other than 2019. We just have more access to them and can experience them in more poignant and visceral ways. A lot of it is a good thing, and hopefully, it can lead to some change. But yeah, it can get exhausting. The internet sucks sometimes.
But every once in a while there are some things that are a little too on the nose for even 2019. On Sunday morning, the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers announced that their new stadium in Inglewood, Calif. — the whole complex will cost $5 billion and be twice the size of Vatican City, though it is being privately funded, per The Washington Post — will be called SoFi Stadium.
SoFi is “an online personal finance company that provides student loan refinancing, mortgages and personal loans.” An NFL stadium named after company that traffics in student loan debit, of which the U.S. population owes $1.5 trillion, seems pretty perfect for 2019, right?
It immediately made me think of this piece in The Baffler that I read earlier this year (or maybe last year?) and stuck with me. In “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt To Me,” M.H. Miller, an editor for The New York Times Style Magazine, details his own experience with student debt. It’s a tragedy. And, of course, SoFi is in there.
SoFi, which bills itself as a “modern finance company” (its name is shorthand for Social Finance, Inc.), is a Silicon Valley start-up that offers, in addition to loans, membership outreach in the form of financial literacy workshops and free dinners. Their aim is to “empower our members,” a mission that was called into question by the resignation, in September 2017, of its CEO, Mike Cagney, who employees allege had engaged in serial workplace sexual harassment and who ran the office, according to a New York Times headline, like “a frat house.”
Miller talks about going to meetups with other people who write checks to SoFi to pay off their student debt, including an anecdote where the attendees fill to-go boxes with leftover food to take home. “For now, though,” Miller writes, “we knew where our next meal was coming from.”
It’s a bleak existence. I’m in the lucky part of the population without any student debt (thank you to Mom, Dad and in-state tuition). But the specter of accumulating any sort of debt, whether it’s from a loan later in life, credit cards or some other source, constantly looms over everything I do. I know how ruinous it can be. Miller shows exactly that, and SoFi’s presence makes things almost darker.
Miller’s conclusion is unsettling:
This thing, this twenty-first-century blight that had been the source of great ruin and sadness for my family was now so normal—so basic—that it had been co-opted by the wellness industry of Silicon Valley.
It feels like almost too perfect of a match for the NFL.
(The Baffler also has a good piece about the NFL this week).
For someone who is in his 27th year of watching the NFL — assuming Dad propped me up in front of the TV for the 1992 season, when Brett Favre became the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers — I’m spending my Sunday afternoon watching NFL RedZone for the first time. RedZone has been around since 2009, but as a child of basic cable who never had a TV in college, hasn’t had cable in his adult life and is content to just watch whatever game is on, I was never exposed to it.
But I’m waiting for the Eagles to play the Falcons in Atlanta tonight, so I’m killing time at my Airbnb, and it’s on option through Sling on the Roku in my room. The only other option is the Cowboys-Redskins game, and that’s probably not a good idea for anyone.
RedZone is disorienting. I’ve long been a proponent of watching any sporting event on mute, but RedZone puts that to the test. The action whips around so fast that sometimes it’s the only way to know what’s going on. Cardinals-Ravens was on when I looked down to right that sentence. When I looked up, it was Jaguars-Texans. I don’t really know what’s happening. It’s fine, though, because when the sound is on, the switch of the commentary is so seamless between host Scott Hanson (I thought his name was Hanson Scott for a long time) and the local broadcast crews that it just kind of melts together.
Football is football, though, and I guess it’s a little more smooth than just following along through Twitter.
Some content I wrote mostly a while ago
The Eagles played the Falcons in Atlanta. Mercedes-Benz Stadium was nice.
In which I tried to use as many quotes of a grown man saying “rip it” as possible.
Former Terps, Ravens and Eagles wide receiver Torrey Smith retired last week. There was a football player in my COMM107 class during my freshman year at Maryland, and we were leaving class and walking across the mall together one morning when he saw Torrey Smith walking the other way. He said, “Do you know Torrey Smith?” I said, “No.” So he yelled, “Yo Torrey, come here! Come meet a fan!” Torrey laughed and kept walking. That was my only Torrey Smith interaction, aside from interviewing him a couple times where he was always thoughtful (especially when talking about the president).
“The speed is real,” Doug Pederson said about DeSean Jackson. Real never sleeps. Jackson’s Eagles debut looked like “back in the day,” too.
There has been more stuff since then, but it’s all here, you can scroll through the injury updates to find the really good stuff, but I guess I would recommend this, this, this, this and this.
Some content I listened to mostly earlier this month
It’s been a big couple weeks for new albums, so I decided to break it out.
The vibes [fall] playlist is out in full force. It is probably the most successful thing I have ever done on the internet. Subscribe to it. It might get an update.
The 082k19 playlist ended up being one of the best of the year. The 092k19 playlist needs some work, but it’s coming along.
House of Sugar by (Sandy) Alex G: Someone whose opinion I respect a ton told me he thought there was a little too much going on at times during this album, and I agree with that. But songs like “Southern Sky,” “Cow” and “In My Arms” are too good.
Charli by Charli XCX: There was definitely an ‘expectations vs. reality’ thing going on here, where most of the hype — including from Charli herself — seemed to come from the collabs and the features on this album (which are still pretty killer). But the solo songs really shine through. I made a separate playlist that is mostly collab-free, and it’s been great to listen to. “Next Level Charli” is a pure banger anthem, but “Silver Cross” and “Official” are two songs that cut at a different emotional level I never expected Charli XCX to hit. I love parts of this album.
Forever Turned Around by Whitney: Light Upon The Lake became one of my favorite albums of 2016 during a trip to the south that summer, so it felt appropriate to reprise the new Whitney album during a swampy visit to Atlanta. I walked around Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta’s oldest public park, with my headphones in. The vibes were good with this.
I’ve started thinking about various decade-end lists that are going to start dropping at the end of this year, and I’ve started to think about mine (and how I probably won’t get around to finishing it). Wild Nothing’s Gemini (2010) is in a good place to be my album of the decade. There are other albums I listen to more and like a little more, but there aren’t many that feel as perfect. I listened to it in the car at 4 a.m. while driving to the airport Saturday. It was good vibes.
Some other content I read or thought about this week
I went to the second MLS game of my life Saturday night in Atlanta. Atlanta United FC lost to Columbus Crew SC. I have a pair of Crew socks at home that say, “Columbus Til I Die.” It was a good game. United fans are pretty wild, and it was impressive to see a large football stadium that filled for a soccer game. I guess soccer might have a chance in America after all!
OK, this is going to be an unwieldy list of links and quotes:
We’re Turning Stranger by Kate Wagner in The Baffler
Strike With The Band by Kate Wagner in The Baffler
Rap music’s unspoken leak crisis in The Fader
An interview with 100 gecs in The Outline
Using the word “recharge” as a bad metaphor in Real Life
Art Briles is trying to restart his career in Texas in the LA Times
Jenny Odell on slowing down time in The New York Times
The attention economy demands not just consumption but also the production and upkeep of a marketable self. The work of self-promotion fills every spare moment. In the age of the personal brand, when you might be posting not just for friends but potential employers, there’s no such thing as free time.
Paul Clarke Wants To Live by Rebecca Tan for Longreads
What’s next for Alex Honnold after Free Solo for ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue
Cherry Starr watches football without Bart Starr in ESPN
The Many Requirements Of Hold Music, A Genre For No One by Sophie Haigney for NPR
An Afternoon Eating Ice Cream With Hanif Abdurraqib by Rob Harvilla in The Ringer
“Part of the project of this book was like, how can I very plainly find a way to articulate this immense heartbreak cleanly and plainly?” he says. “And saying, like, ‘I’m not gonna lean on the grandiose nature of the easy thing.’ I’m not gonna say,[serious poet voice] ‘My heartbreak felt like a bomb.’ But how can I very plainly say, ‘I was very sad’?”
Luke O’Neill in Welcome To Hell World:
I don't really know what hell is but I don't think it's a place where bad things happen to people randomly such as natural disasters and death because that's just what the regular world is. I think it's probably more accurate to say it's a place where bad things happen because someone wanted them to happen to you or just let them happen out of negligence and indifference. Where bad things happen and they didn't have to but your life was less important to someone else than what they thought they had to gain.
More Hell World:
What an absolute luxury it is to be able to have anyone pay attention to your pain I guess is what I want to say. If you’re lucky you get to smuggle your sadness into something that tricks other people into paying attention to it like a book or a song and then they go and tell you how good you are for making it and some- times even pay you money for it. It’s the perfect crime. It doesn’t make the pain go away but it’s still better than nothing. Most people don’t have that option. Most people suffer in anonymity unless they happen to be suffering in a sufficiently newsworthy fashion in which case we all glance at them briefly and say holy shit but mostly we’re just glad it’s not us that it’s happening to until some day it is.
I promise I’m not going to turn this newsletter into Hell World Jr. [the top of this newsletter is DEFINITELY Hell World Jr. though] even though I have noticed some tics seeping into how I think about things and my writing. Also, I don’t think I could handle writing about that many depressing topics. Shit sucks, man.
On hotel bars (maybe some day I will stay in more hotels with bars?)
An obsessive tries to solve the D.B. Cooper case
The volcanoes are coming for us, too, which kind of rules
Just watching baseball games is fine in Deadspin
Oh shit, I completely forgot about the Caroline Calloway story (it’s been a long couple weeks) [this and this]
Cord Jefferson in The Awl at the end of 2012
A 9/11 retrospective for a football player
The big Amanda Hess package in The New York Times about fan culture & politics [Elizabeth Warren, Marianne, Trump]
And this is questionable work that we are doing. The point of translating politics into pop culture may be to make it more accessible, but it can also make politics feel oddly remote — as if it is all just a television show to watch, or a fantasy novel to read, or a game to play. And while presidential candidates need to pitch a wide tent, swaying other people — people who are not like them — to their cause, stans are intrinsically agents of exclusion, posturing above those who don’t already agree with them or just don’t get the jokes. Though political stans ostensibly exist to promote their favorite candidates, you get the sense that they are also looking to build micro-fandoms around their own online personalities. This is a time when social activity — talking with friends, creating media and offering commentary — can be styled as political in and of itself. Activism slips easily into discourse; our idea of what it means to “do something” has become almost indistinguishable from talking about it.
What DeSean Jackson’s homecoming meant to Philly
Confidence is no virtue in The Outline
Baseball players and donuts and a very funny Adam Jones in Sports Illustrated
How to have an OK relationship with money in The Outline
The death of paper tickets in Sports Illustrated
Competitive oyster shucking in China in Deadspin
How does the internet smell?
Everything I Know I Learned From Vanishing by Meredyth Cole for Hazlitt
And today, we are all hunted, or, at the very least, we are searched for. I realize that disappearing is impossible as long as I insist on posting pictures or tweets, but that is the beauty of my situation. I can’t disappear; but I can exist in as many places as possible. I show up on the screens of people I once conversed with, or haunt the geo-tags I used to occupy in real life. I have a complicated relationship with social media; the success-mongering of my peers makes me feel sluggish, but I love the digital ooze that I can leave behind. I want to be traceable. And isn’t it amazing how the ugliest creatures leave such a beautiful, glistening wake?
Rap lyrics as evidence
Sports fans are crazy, and that’s OK (for the most part)
Learned much more than I ever thought I would about TikTok from Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker and it didn’t necessarily make me feel great?
A newsletter about getting addicted to Juuling
A good newsletter about music and some other stuff:
Beyonce wastes no time on any of this peasant bullshit because when you’re rich, people come to you and do things for you. … This world sucks so bad for regular people like us and if you can chase the pain away by eating the occasional donut over the sink I say go for it.
Thanks for bearing with me! That was a lot! That’s not supposed to happen!
Thank you for reading the 13th edition of Content Nausea. Please tell me if there are any typos or what you liked about this. It will get better. I am trying to make it better.
Wherever you may stay
That's where I'll return
I've never felt committed to much
But that don't mean that I can't learn
To dedicate and reciprocate
What you send my way
And I promise that I'll say "hello"
As often as "goodbye"
Steady on my mind
—D.G.