[I started writing this edition of the newsletter at, like, the beginning of February? Maybe? It sat in a minimized window on my desktop for too long. Obviously, much has happened since then, and this is disjointed, and it is too long, but I am trying, and I am trying to work out some ideas for the future because I want to keep doing this, and I hope you want to keep reading it. shoutout to Joe for texting me a couple weeks ago to check in on it.]
Welcome to the 18th edition of Content Nausea. This newsletter is a New Year’s Resolution that has fallen by the wayside (and off a cliff) and left me with the nagging feeling that there is something I need to be doing at all times (but I thought the decade in review turned out pretty well). I do not think that is too healthy. So this is the new year. Here is the welcome blog. Please click the heart at the top of the page and maybe forward this to someone you know.
In hindsight, maybe I should have realized that an album called We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed would have some bleak, apocalyptic sentiments bundled inside of it. But it was 2008, and our house was the only one in the neighborhood with an Obama sign, so words like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ were at the front of my vocabulary. I got what was going on, but I didn’t get it.
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed from Los Campesinos! arrived as a leak on a burned CD in a legendary late September care package from Anna that contained a murderer’s row that is probably worth a second newsletter. But one of the other CDs was Hold On Now, Youngster, the Los Campesinos! debut from earlier in the year. And in terms of openers, “Death to Los Campesinos!” packs much more of a punch than “Ways To Make It Through The Wall.” Plus, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed had skips on it. So Hold On Now, Youngster won out, both in terms of impact and practicality.
But to a 16-year-old boy who was a couple months removed from reading The Fountainhead and thought he was finally becoming deep and ‘figuring things out,’ the concept of the words We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was lasting, and anyway, Los Campesinos! was a band I was so supposed to like. I gave one of the albums to a girl for her birthday in Summer 2009 (another girl got Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix), and I reviewed the next album Romance Is Boring for the February 2010 issue of The Patriot.
The review is not on the now-dormant Patriot website (we learned in 2009-10 that operating separate web/print staff was inefficient), but the print headline on the PDF (which I will not link to) said the album ‘exceeds expectations,’ and I wrote the band was hitting its stride. I’m not sure how I knew that. Also, the song titles were a menace for a print word count, though maybe I would be wise to draw on that concision. I reviewed Teen Dream by Beach House at the top of the page.
For, uh, obvious reasons, the idea of ‘doom’ was back in my head Wednesday as I took a work from home happy hour with a DIY paloma (tequila + grapefruit Spindrift + some lime & salt) and landed here with the simple beautiful/doomed juxtaposition.
“Ways To Make It Through The Wall” lays all of it out right away:
I think it's fair to say that I chose hopelessness
And inflicted it on the rest of us
But at least I've come to terms with my own mortality
We search for different ways
To make it through the wall
Resign our parents' interests
Will one day be our own
We wait at ease, we wait to see
We are waiting here for catastrophe
We wait at ease, we wait to see
We are waiting here for catastrophe
Good shit. Also, the end of the second verse has the line, ‘I identify my star sign by asking / Which is least compatible with yours.’ More good shit. “It’s Never That Easy Though, Is It? (Song For Other Kurt)” opens with, ‘This one time I kissed a girl for class war,’ which I would have had little-to-no comprehension of in 2008.
There was also many more enjoyable things to these albums than I remember. The lasting memories for me had more to do with the gang vocals, lyrical references that would have more sense if I had gone to a private liberal arts college and the sometimes superfluous instrumentation. I liked a lot more than thought I did.
Anyway, the title track takes things there, too:
You feel terrified at the thought of being left behind
Of losing everybody, the necessity of dying
Oh, we kid ourselves there's future in the fucking
But there is no fucking future
I'm just practicing my accents, picking at old sutures
Heavy shit!
But it’s kind of a reminder, too. This was the cultural moment a dozen years ago. Desperation and hopelessness are not new, and it’s easy to argue that those feelings never really went away. I’m not blind to them this time, and the past days, weeks and months of reflection have been an interesting exercise into the that previous time for being beautiful and doomed. This time, though, hope and change don’t seem poised to win out. I loaded up on face wash and lotion at Target on Tuesday night at least I can be beautiful in the end.
Some content I read or listened to or thought about since mid-January
The 012k20 monthly playlist was pretty good, if I may so myself:
Ah, crap, I started writing this earlier in February, so it’s worth pointing out that the 022k20 monthly playlist was also pretty good:
Oh no, it’s now mid-March and there are 76 songs on the 032k20 playlist, which is not fit for consumption yet.
s/o to Adam for bringing back his music newsletter, too!
I still haven’t done my songs/albums/shows of the year/decade because I’m a slacker and maybe I don’t want the 2010s to end (yeah, exactly), but the delay has given me more time appreciate Remember the Silver by Emily Yacina, which dropped in December and will probably end up on my year-end list:
Pang by Caroline Polachek is another one that’s worked up some lists.
All right, the rest:
A podcast on the Super Bowl XXXV halftime show, which I didn’t know I needed.
The audience is less important than the gestures, and the gestures long ago supplanted and replaced the message they sought to convey. It can only get bigger, and only ever becomes more uncanny as it grows. The same could be said of the NFL in many ways, but all of this delusion and desperation together produces something wildly abstract and stilted; there’s an uneasy but undeniable comedy to the way it all expands without ever quite growing. All this trouble, for all these years, all because some powerful people were frightened that doing less would look like admitting defeat.
Instagram felt innocent by comparison. No one I knew cared about it or made a living on it. The people who confessed a troubled relationship with the platform were visual artists, which I was not; prone to FOMO, which was not my flavor of social anxiety; or influencers concerned with a standard of perfection that was not my standard, and so I felt immune. For the most part Instagram people preached positivity and contentment, and reminded themselves and their followers that the aesthetic harmony attainable in images was fleeting, not sustainable as a way of life. Instagram people did not seem mean or clever. They were earnest and sincere. They drank green smoothies and went on hikes, sought personal bests, good health, peace of mind, and oneness with the universe. They believed every day was a beautiful day to be alive. Leaving Twitter for Instagram was like moving to Los Angeles, only cheaper. I knew people who’d gone west to convalesce and to retire from public life. Maybe Instagram would be like that for me.
“Diplo!” a woman in a skintight white halter yells out, her curls bouncing as she jumps up and down to get his attention. “You are! The muthafuckin' man!”
He strolls over and adjusts her top.
“Your boob's hanging out,” he says. Then, his work done for now, he fixes his cowboy hat and walks off into the Florida sunrise.
I don’t recall the scenes at all, just the feelings. I remembered feeling joy and regret, but I couldn’t pull out any specific image. It mattered enough to me that I flew to Missouri to eat pizza, yet in the manic circus of life, the details slipped away, like so many things. After running a thousand miles a minute for going on 20 years now, today takes up so much of my energy that it can be a struggle to remember. Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with it — and why I love just spending a day at Booches and Shakespeare’s. And yes, I often hit both in the same day. I’m not trying to make new memories as much as I am visiting old friends who grew up and disappeared a long time ago. I want back some of what I’ve forgotten or misplaced.
I began thinking of this universal feeling as the longing for less. It is an abstract, almost nostalgic desire – a pull toward a different, simpler world. Not past or future, neither utopian nor dystopian, this more authentic world is always just beyond our current existence, in a place we can never quite reach. Perhaps the longing for less is the constant shadow of humanity’s self-doubt: what if we were better off without everything we have gained in modern society? If the trappings of civilisation leave us so dissatisfied, then maybe their absence is preferable and we should abandon them in order to seek some deeper truth. The longing for less is neither an illness nor a cure. Minimalism is just one way of thinking about what makes a good life.
// All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD // How Your Laptop Ruined Your Life // ‘ClassPass Is Squeezing Studios to the Point of Death’ // The Wrong Goodbye // Kobe Always Showed His Work. So We Have to in Remembering Him, Too. // The People of Las Vegas // I hope Mr. Peanut is honey-roasting in hell // Raising a person in a culture full of types [h/t Matt] // Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms // The Incredibly Happy Life of Larry David, TV’s Favorite Grouch // Live from New York, it’s Michael Che’s weird fixation with me // Who’s Watching Your Porch? // How the ‘Bachelor’ Franchise Became an Influencer Launchpad // BIG CAT EYES // How Marfa Went From Donald Judd’s Anti-Commercial Escape to a Mecca of Luxury Minimalism // Inside Russell Wilson’s Seahawks, where positivity — and corniness — reign // Four hours is all we need // Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall // The 2000s Never Ended // No Filter // The Year in Pivoting to Video // The Seductiveness of Insta-Nostalgia // The Twenty-Teens: The Most Sort-of Decade of All Time //
I hope this wasn’t too long! [It is too long. Here are the rest of the links that I added after I typed up the part above it. You don’t need to scroll down any further, really. This is more for me than you, though The Campaign at the End of the World conveys a sentiment about billionaires I had been struggling with for a while.]
The NBA halftime show is a living example of art thriving incongruously, impossibly, inside a system where almost everything else is optimized for maximum profit. It is a demonstration of a life’s work whose significance exists apart from the size of its audience, or their response to it. It makes a different kind of meaning, both inside and outside the rules. You don’t have to be a poet to love this. It is, like your life and mine, a flash of something small and strange and real inside the big, shiny machine. Something worth staying in your seat to see.
The Tyranny of Terrazzo (pairs nicely with Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding):
The millennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.
The relentless and obliterating inequality that warps every facet of American life is easy to see and increasingly difficult to ignore, but it can also be vexingly difficult to comprehend. The very idea of a billion dollars, for instance, is effectively a science fiction concept, not only for people who actually live off what they get paid every two weeks but also for your basic everyday rich person. It is one thing to know that a billion dollars is one thousand million dollars, but what a number that size actually represents does not just beggar belief; it defies understanding. The idiotic hierarchy that our deliriously wealth-besotted media imposes where this sort of thing is concerned—a millionaire is a successful person, whereas a billionaire is a very successful person—is something worse than unhelpful. It conflates things that have no right being conflated, but the outsize scale of both the broader cultural problem and the more specific comprehension-related one renders the compounded mistake somehow too big to see.
// ‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York // Welcome to Neo New York, Where Everything Feels Old School but Isn’t // New York City’s First Skateboarding Superstar // Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music // Garbage Language // Bernie Sanders Is No Donald Trump // Kanye, Out West // Kobe Bryant’s merch helped remake his image. After his death, collectors are cashing in. // The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse // What the Story of the Vermont Reds Tells Us About Bernie Sanders // The Astros’ Trash-Can Cheating Scheme Is a Window Onto Human Nature // What’s a Quibi? A Way to Amuse Yourself Until You’re Dead // Shell Is Looking Forward // The infinite scroll // On hobbies, habits, and creative work // Tim Anderson Is Here to Save Baseball From Itself //
Thank you for reading the 18th 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. Actually, I’m just trying to do it.
This is why we cannot afford to close an open casket
You protect no one by obscuring the mirror that reflects our own problematic reality
Allow me to ponder the role I play
In this pornographic spectacle of black death
At once a solution and a problem
—D.G.