Content Nausea No. 47: Freebird II
Content Nausea No. 47: Freebird II
When I pass my reflection there isn’t any question of where the person in it came from / When I catch myself thinking and hear the voice that speaks inside, I know where I got my brain from
Welcome to the 47th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 46 right here. Will we make it to No. 50 by the end of the year? Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog. It looks like Substack changed the color scheme so there’s white print on a pink background instead of black print. I’m not sure I’m a fan.
I do not have much to start this newsletter with, other than I was given the prompt of “night drives, ‘Emily in Paris,’ and empty stadiums” for a newsletter last weekend and I will be making good on at least one of those in the coming days/week.
Anyway, I made a Google Form for an end-of-year survey I want to write about in a couple weeks. Please do it.
I am “emptying the notebook” today.
Some content I wrote this week
The Eagles are playing the Packers on Sunday in Green Bay. I will not be traveling this year, which is unfortunate. The game last year marked some sort of bucket list/lifetime achievement. Aaron Rodgers turned 37 this week, which is one of the few things that will make me feel “older.”
Darius Slay had some refreshing candor about his performance against DK Metcalf, who is so much fun to watch in person. Also, the Jim Schwartz-DK Metcalf proto-beef is …good? I hope I get to cover a couple more their matchups.
For the first time in my three years on the Eagles beat, Doug Pederson was asked about job security. He also acknowledged that he would consider giving up calling players, and then he acknowledged that he had delegated in some situations.
An Eagles player who once complimented my hair got released this week.
Some content I listened to this week
The 112k20 playlist is finished, and in the process of finalizing it earlier this week, I realized that I didn’t really update it after the halfway point of the month, which is inexcusable.
I started on the 122k20 playlist:
I’m trying to get some 2020 year-end songs and albums list in order, and I’m trying to plan the roll-out. I just want to make a list that I’m satisfied with for the first time in a couple years.
Otherwise, not much is new on the listening front. I would recommend the 130103 mix was it continues to get colder outside and to also read all the stuff I wrote about it because not many of you read it.
I liked this Mary Lattimore song:
Also spent some time with the 2010 legends Big Surr, who eventually released a very good album in 2017:
Yes, in case you were wondering, I distinctly remember tweeting, “ever since I met you I’ve been alright!” at some point in fall 2010 when walking out of the Cambridge Community on North Campus at the University of Maryland.
Also listened to this mix that me and Anna made in January 2012 (fine, Jan. 22, to be exact), when she drove me back to school for second semester sophomore year and we went to see Real Estate and The Babies at Black Cat with Kyle after going to Jason’s Deli in College Park (Bleeker was wearing a Giants sweatshirt even though he was sweating because the Giants were playing the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game while the show was happening) ((“The Drag” still goes!)):
Some content I read this week
We’ve got a lot of links to drop this week.
I spent my Friday night catching up on some newsletters from the week, which means that I read Larry Fitzmaurice’s Last Donut of the Night about “Like a G6” by Far East Movement, which means I listened to “Like a G6” by Far East Movement, which means I thought about a high school dance in October 2010. Truly wild.
Delia Cai’s interview with Cord Jefferson was good (he’s one of, like, 13 people I still follow on Tumblr); Tyler Dunne’s new Substack has been interesting, and his latest on the present and future of the Green Bay Packers is incredibly relevant to me; Will Leitch wrote about fandom (specifically of college sports); Emily Atkin’s issue of HEATED about climate change and John Kerry was good; also this one on the Sunrise Movement; and Fitzmaurice also wrote about “the End of Chillwave” back in August, which has some interesting points.
Man, it is brutal to link to a bunch of Subtacks while writing a Substack.
Anyway, Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter has been one of my favorite recent subscriptions in the past few months (ty, group DM), and the two issues “On Storytelling” and “On Prestige” were particularly good.
Prestige is so complex and plays so dirty because we attach it not to our bodies or good looks, but to our brains. Perhaps it’s just another issue that we’re failing to solve because we’re not working collectively to do so, just shaming ourselves for our attachments to what seems prestigious because we can’t afford, financially, not to do so. Prestige won’t take its boot off our collective neck until we no longer have to worry about our basic needs. When will that time come?
There was one morning last weekend(?) where I read a couple articles about books and literature that probably went over my head, but I appreciated this interview with Lauren Oyler. It felt pretty real?
I listen to mostly terrible music but I see that it’s terrible and I just don’t brag about it. There’s this drive to make any aspect of your personality and life a part of your public presence and therefore marketable. If you’re a writer, there’s a lot of pressure to do that. If you like the shitty things that everybody is talking about all the time, you feel you have to write about those things. You write about them, but the fact is that stuff is just not that interesting. So then you have to do this elaborate justification, and as you’re writing you start to feel embarrassed because you know it’s wrong. But you can’t stop, you have to keep going, because otherwise it’s super embarrassing. Then you have to drive home the fact that it’s not embarrassing even though you know it’s embarrassing.
The whole let people enjoy things thing is really weird. The people who enjoy things are the majority. They have the power. They have tons of fucking shit to read and watch. Marvel movies get and make all the money. Those are the things that get made and those are the things that will continue to get made. The argument ends up being very patronizing, because if you’re “letting people enjoy things” then you’re assuming they need some kind of allowance.
A couple sports links on college basketball during the pandemic, college football during the pandemic, (quoted from The New Yorker below), the NFL during the pandemic, the NFL during the pandemic and college basketball during the pandemic.
Football, particularly college football, is an occasion, a communal event. The ecosystem around the sport is vast. It starts with the players, but it extends to their classmates and to their coaches. It branches out to athletic trainers and their partners and kids. It extends to journalists, and camera operators, and photographers, and stadium workers, and bus drivers, and their families. It includes alumni scattered all over the world, and their children, and other children in other places who root for the teams with the uniforms they like. It brings together grandfathers and granddaughters, and aunts and cousins, and their spouses, and their friends. This is the majesty of college football: it connects people in a great web of affection. These are the filaments along which the virus can spread.
I will say that college basketball has been the toughest sports to actually pay attention to during all of this. It seems more naked than all of the other sports. It’s the one where the external factors are the most obvious. But I will still set my tablet next to my computer and boot up the Terps…
Kyle Chayka wrote about the concept of “ambient TV” and “Emily in Paris” — stay tuned for an upcoming Content Nausea… — in The New Yorker:
In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic. Nothing bad ever happens to our heroine for long. The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching. Here, there is nothing to figure out; as prestige passes its peak, we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.
Sophie Haigney has become of my favorite writers over the past two years or so (mulled wine! Gansett!), and I thought this piece from earlier this year about about the photos our empty cities was poignant:
But I know now, too, that these photos, taken together, were part of an exercise in myth-making. In fact, the world never really stopped or emptied out. In fact, we were never all in this together. In fact, the virus was not the great equaliser that put everything on pause. Many people continued to commute to their jobs, either because they were suddenly deemed “essential” or simply because they had to. Life for many people didn’t come to a full stop; it simply became more dangerous. The world only ever looked unpeopled from certain vantage points.
Why “Harness Your Hopes” is a top Pavement song on Spotify.
“Children of Quarantine” from The Cut.
I wrote a couple hundred words about what “Yoga with Adriene” has meant for me during the pandemic for a zine, and this profile made me realize I have probably heard Adriene’s voice more than anyone else’s (maybe Doug Pederson’s?) over the past eight months:
Mishler doesn’t fit neatly into either the booming category of YouTube influencers, who are mostly young and annoying, nor the booming category of wellness influencers, who are also mostly young and annoying. She is 36 and not annoying. Most of her content is free and requires nothing more than a mat. Unlike some of her mainstream YouTube influencer peers, she has not mocked suicide victims or appeared in blackface or consumed a Tide pod or faked a kidnapping for attention. Her Wikipedia page does not have a “Controversies” section in it. She has recused herself from the kind of behavior — inflammatory, mercenary, exploitative, self-exploitative — that social media platforms are designed to generate. In an online world where everyone else seems turned up to 11, Mishler hovers at a room-temperature two or three.
A New Yorker piece about venture capitalism.
Machine Gun Kelly gets the Naomi Fry treatment in Nylon.
I had not been reading Real Life in a while, so this piece on subscriptions kind of hit me a little hard.
It’s been about a month since Four Seasons Total Landscaping became a thing, and so The Philadelphia Inquirer checks in on Northeast Philly’s newest most notable landmark.
Some other content I saw or thought about this week
Places I have eaten pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving in the past decade: A South Jersey Wawa parking lot (2011); a Delaware rest stop parking lot (2020). In between? Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania (I think?) and New Jersey.
On the cider front, I believe I am more of a Jack’s guy than a Shacksbury guy, though the Shacksbury Arlo is still quite good.
My corner store has started carrying wine, and I am not sure if that is good or bad.
I posted a link to Pitchfork’s 10.0 review of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to Tumblr, and it got flagged as an inappropriate post because of the album art (lol). The post is in appeal.
Thank you for reading the 47th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
When I think about you I see a person who
Hasn’t existed for a long time
Before you started using, before I starting choosing
To do the same thing for the same reasons
The first name I called you is not a name at all
More of a duty than a function
Often an execution, often with deep confusion of
‘Who was I when that name was just mine?’
—D.G.