Saturday, November 7 is going to be a day they write about in history books, and I want you to be there to witness it <3 Tickets are live now, so get them while they’re hot!

Grab your tickets here: https://nycomedyfestival.com/lineup/charlie-flynn-live-at-union-hall/

And if you can’t wait until November…

…here are some of my other upcoming shows!

• INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE, my long running standup and video comedy show, is BACK this fall at Union Hall, the third Wednesday of every month. The first show of the fall is Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30. A ticket link and the full lineup will be available soon, but in the meantime follow our instagram at @invisiblearchitecturecomedy

• CRACKIN’ UP COMEDY - Washington, DC - Thursday, September 24
  I’ll be back in my hometown to headline a fabulous night of queer comedy with Crackin’ Up! I’m laughing already just thinking about it… Tix available HERE

• THE DUCHESS AND SPECIAL GUESTS - Brooklyn Comedy Collective - First Wednesday of the month
  Gay guy improv will never die! Come see us perform with a new special guest each month. Past guests have included John Early, Pat Regan, Chloe Troast, Jeff Hiller, Grace Reiter, and so many more. Come find out who’s next on September 2! Tix available HERE

• NANCY - Mr. Nancy’s - Second and Third Wednesdays of the Month
  Yet another fabulous show with my friends on a Wednesday, this time in the People’s Republic of Ridgewood. Great vibes, great comedians, great burgers, and totally free…I mean come on now… RSVP HERE!

So many more shows to come…follow my Instagram to stay totally up to date!! Well anyways I love and would die for all of you…keep fighting <3

Hiii friends! It’s been quite a month! Summer is in full swing in the greatest city on earth, and I’ve been swinging right along with it! Here are some highlights.

Mamdani Media Circus

I started off the month very strong, getting an insane last-minute guest for my new web show, Data Leak: Mayor Zohran Mamdani. I found out just a few days before that we had gotten the green light to go through his phone on camera, all for the very savvy purpose of getting the word out about his administration’s digital initiatives around the World Cup. I like to think that I am the first hard-hitting journalist to ask a sitting Mayor of NYC if he has games on his phone.

We met him at the delicious Tacos Don Jose in Corona, Queens, where he was doing a few other media hits. We had about five minutes carved out of his well-oiled machine of a schedule, and we squeezed a lot out of it. He was just as quick, warm, and sharp in person, and his kindness and genuine enthusiasm was apparent. Especially in the wake of last week’s midterm primaries, it’s hard not to feel like New York and the Mamdani administration are at the heart of an earthquake that’s spreading to reshape the national political order. It was really exciting to see that beacon of hope up close and personal, and to feel like I had some small part in amplifying it. Still haven’t washed my hand :P

Opening for Gay Guys

Speaking of our nation’s fabulous current political landscape, I also spent some time this month in my fabulous, sociopathic hometown of Washington, DC, just on the eve of our fabulous national Semiquincentennial. My time there was brief, but don’t worry, my parents managed to squeeze in a joy ride past the Kennedy Center after Trump was forced to take his name off of it.

I was down in the swamp to open for dear friend and fellow gay guy Jake Cornell, who is on the road with his new hour. I think Jake is a true genius and master of the spoken word, and loved hearing all about his recent herculean journey doing standup on a gay cruise. Our show happened to intersect perfectly with the UFC fight at the White House, so, again, it was nice to feel like I was part of such a multicultural weekend in our nation’s capital :D

Back in Brooklyn, I had the opportunity to open for yet another genius gay guy that I hold in similar esteem, Pat Regan, at the Bell House. The show was a ball, and I’m truly obsessed with the way Pat sees, thinks about, and talks about the world…there is no one quite like him. Pat also plays a part in Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s new film which I got to see for a second time this week at BAM, now that it has been released in New York and captured the city’s hearts and minds. As someone who has been a fan of John for basically my whole adult life, it’s incredible to see the summation of his singular point of view and interests as an artist, fully realized without compromise, and filled with so much joy and irreverence. I loved it!

Aside from being gay guys and geniuses, Jake, Pat, and John also share the distinct honor of having performed as special guests with my improv troupe The Duchess, at one of our monthly shows at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective. As luck would have it,

our run has been extended through the end of the year, with our next show THIS WEDNESDAY at 8:30 pm, featuring special guests Courtney O’Donnell and Zach Schiffman, plus openers Esther Fallick and Nikki Denton. You won’t want to miss it!

THE DUCHESS LIVE IN PROVINCETOWN 7/21-24

If, for some weird reason, you do miss it, you can also catch us next month in PROVINCETOWN, where we’ll be doing three nights of live comedy shows at Gifford House on July 21, 22, and 24…and getting into all sorts of trouble in our free time between shows. See you there!

The Bandwagon

Back to the Big Apple, I had the distinct honor of hopping on the Knicks bandwagon as they marched toward their historic NBA Championship this month. I do love basketball, but I’d be lying if I said I actively kept up with the league. But give me a reason to believe, and honey I’ll believe. It reminded me of being a student at the University of Virginia during their epic March Madness run in 2019, but I did not drunkenly smash my face into a brick pathway this time. Little victories! I guess I just have good luck with underdog orange-and-blue teams who play thoughtful, smart basketball! Go figure. The most cinematic part of the whole championship for me was the Citibike ride home from watching game five, as the whole city erupted into a spontaneous party. As I biked under fireworks that being launched from the median, I felt so lucky to have set down roots in this city in time to bear witness to and be a part of this moment of pure hope, joy, and rowdiness.

Unfortunately, the rash decision to steal a themed trash can did result in me losing my DEI job at JP Morgan Chase :/ you win some you lose some.

I spent the series decked out in some fabulous bootleg Knicks merch made by my friend, and yet another genius, Chloe Troast. I watched game four and its amazing comeback with Chloe and friends after performing on her UCB improv show, Chloe Troast Solves Your Problems, and let’s just say we solved them :)

Speaking of Chloe, I’m still hard at work writing for her web series, Spilling Your Seed, which just launched its third season! We shot some very special episodes with very special guests in LA in May, and even more this month–I can’t wait for you all to see them! Here’s one of our most recent releases.

Here’s some BTS from a recent shoot…

That’s pretty much all I got for pride month, is that okay?

I also had a really good Turkey Club from a place near work (yes, Turkey Club is a proper noun for me.)

Looking Ahead…

Now for the good stuff…I’ve got a lot of fun shows coming up and I would love to see you there! The biggest is in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 16, where I’ll be headlining Goodnights Comedy Club! This is my first headlining show on the road, and I can’t wait! If you’re in the area or know anyone there, I’d love for you to spread the word! I’ll give every single person a kiss after the show so make sure you’re up to date on your shots.

Raleigh Tickets

Other upcoming shows:

• Go Dummy’s Dummy Draft (Improv) - Monday, June 29, UCB New York

• Night of Your Life - Monday, June 29, Caveat

• Camp Virgo - Tuesday, June 30, Caveat

• The Duchess and Special Guests (improv) - Wednesday, July 1, Brooklyn Comedy Collective

You’ve made it this far, here’s a standup clip as a treat:

kk byeeeee <3

IN THE MEANTIME, I’ve been working hard on the sacred, ancient art of standup comedy, and I wanted to invite you to the incredible summation of all this work…my HOUR!!

One week from today, on Sunday, March 29 at 5pm, I’ll tell an hour of jokes and stories at Brooklyn’s beloved Union Hall, with my fabulous openers Freddie Shanel and Megan Striff-Cave! I’ve been working on this material for a long time, and I’m so excited to see it all on its feet.

Tickets available HERE !

If you’re in NYC, I’d love to see you there, and if you’re not, send it to a friend who you think would love it!

This show is the first step to taking my hour on the road, so if you’re not in NYC, please keep the faith. You can also sign up for my mailing list so I can let you know when I’m going to be performing near you! I promise not to bombard you with emails unless I’m going to be in your town.

If you can’t make it to this show, here are some other chances to see me perform in the city this week:

• Monday, 3/23: Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

• Tuesday, 3/24: Tuesdays at the Red Room at KGB Bar (Manhattan)

• Thursday, 3/26: An Evening with Olivia Von Blue at KGB Bar (Manhattan)

Looking wayyyy, ahead, I’ll be in WASHINGTON, DC opening for THE Jake Cornell at Union Stage on June 12…c’mon hometown hero…Tickets HERE.

I’ve also been working on…

Spilling Your Seed with Chloe Troast!

I’m a writer for Chloe’s new webseries, which I must humbly say is fabulous. It has been so much fun to work on it with such an incredible team. I think my favorite episode so far is with the hilarious Richard Perez.

I think that’s all I have for you right now…shout out to the Social Network soundtrack for making me focus enough to get this done…I also used the opportunity to finally order my new Hokas, so…watch THAT space, honey!

Alright love you see you soon byeeee!!!

Am I missing something? I earnestly asked my empty bedroom the first time I came across a new commercial for Capital One. The 30-second ad mimics the iconic “there’s no crying in baseball” scene from Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own, in which Tom Hanks’ Jimmy Dugan, the drunk, begrudging coach of the Rockford Peaches, berates a player to the point of tears, and then humiliates her even further for crying. The scene, while humorous and quotable, captures the tensions at the heart of the WWII era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, later resolved when Dugan finds “a better way” to coach.

The commercial recreates the scene almost uncannily. It opens with a woman in a Rockford Peaches uniform weeping while holding up a credit card, because her “travel rewards card didn't earn enough miles for her vacation”. Then, Jennifer Garner emerges from the dugout, dressed like Jimmy Dugan, and tweaks his famous line: “are you crying? Are you crying because of that other card? There’s no crying in baseball, or with the Capital One Venture Card, because…” she goes on with a few more gibberish details about the card and its rewards and closes with. “There’s no crying with the Venture Card…what’s in your wallet?” End of ad.

I racked my brain, and eventually Google, for connective tissue between A League of Their Own, actress Jennifer Garner, and a travel rewards-focused credit card. I could find none. Garner wasn’t in the 1992 film, nor even the 2022 Abbi Jacobson-helmed series of the same name. Credit cards were not invented until 1946, three years after the bulk of the film, and the referenced scene, take place. It seemed like they just spun a wheel to combine things people recognize (à la the Phoebe Bridgers tweet generator meme), and trusted that it would be enough. “I know that scene, I know that lady, and I haaaaate crying. Let’s check this card out.” 

I’m not saying commercials need to be auteurist masterpieces. I’m not sure they should even exist at all. But is this nostalgia-milking collage of familiar but unrelated references really the best way to capture attention these days? 

There’s an urge to say the ad feels AI-generated, but it’s not even true. It lacks the nonsensical whimsy that often emerges from “artificial intelligence,” as we’re calling it. No, this feels very human in its shameless pandering and focus group precision. 

I’d also be remiss not to point out that despite the racial segregation of the All American League, a small plot point in the film which is explored much further in the series, a majority of the non speaking women in the dugout behind Garner are Black. It’s almost as if the ad is saying “we know we’re hearkening to America’s shameful racial history to get more people to go into credit card debt, but look, we’re doing it the right way!” 

It’s sludge. The whole thing is sludge. Penny Marshall deserves better than this. 

Am I crazy? Will you please let me know if you’re seeing something that I’m not?

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

“Charm” by Clairo

As someone who has listened to Sling approximately 10,000 in this calendar year, Clairo’s third album has been one of my most anticipated for a while, especially following gorgeous lead singles ‘Sexy to Someone” and “Nomad” (which instantly enters the canon). I’m loving it booooots…other favorites right now are “Pier 4” and “Juna.” So boom. 

Coreys

Conner O’Malley put out this short film as I was writing this newsletter, and I of course dropped everything. I’ve been excited to see what the comedian would do next following The Mask, which he released last December, and this is just as chaotic and poignant. It’s basically Persona or May December for the angry, bored, unfamiliar American everyman, as O’Malley’s Corey discovers a YouTube video of a man, also named Corey, who looks just like him, partying in Vegas, driving them both to madness as they seek each other out. 

Game of Thrones Season 1

Rewatched it this week and let me be the first to say this show was really good at the beginning…I don’t care if it’s an unpopular opinion…I’m uncancellable..

Political Violence

JK I’m not actually into this but it feels like it has to be acknowledged this week…I was on stage hosting an improv show when it happened and halted it to announce the news…Much like when I took the mic at a frat party to announce the death of George H.W. Bush…which didn’t go over quite as well…

As Chappell Roan, the Midwestern Princess behind pop delights such as Pink Pony Club, HOT TO GO!, and Casual, has skyrocketed to mega stardom and near ubiquity in the past few months, one central question has emerged in the cultural conversation: “is this what it felt like to see Gaga in 2010?” I can appreciate the question; Roan, who performs as a drag persona and embraces queer identity and aesthetics has had an incredible moment lately, highlighted by a monstrous crowd at last weekend’s Gov Ball performance (prompting a major stage upgrade at the following weekend’s Bonaroo, again drawing a huge sea of Pink Pony Princesses.) Although I am very protective of my icon Lady Gaga, a lot of the artistic comparisons are valid; both are shaking up the pop landscape with explosive and anthemic music that seem to infect everyone they reach; both are gifted artists who have put in their dues, taking years of hard work in order to suddenly blow up overnight.

Where I think the comparison falls short has more to do with the cultural moment that surrounds the performers rather than the performers themselves.

Lady Gaga emerged before stan culture was ubiquitous, before the slang of the queer internet was a lingua franca, before people were thinking quite so much about their online presentation of self. It was “Just Dance,” there didn’t need to be a viral challenge with choreography surrounding it. It was a time when mainstream public voices felt more comfortable being mean, snarky, exclusive. Reality TV was Simon Cowell trying each week to top himself by dashing another American Idol hopeful’s dream with an even cruder and more cutting insult. Stardom was cutthroat, celebrities didn’t have to be as nice or relatable as they are today, and our access to their every move and thought was so much less ubiquitous. Glee was just getting started.

I fell hard for Lady Gaga as a little gay fourth grader–I still remember training my older sister to properly do the little monster claw convulsion with religious fervor–the Bad Romance music video shifted the aesthetic and emotional core of my young impressionable mind. One of my strongest memories of pure joy as a child was when my best friend Michael’s mom showed up to pick him up from my house and handed me a copy of the “Born This Way” CD, freshly released and procured from Borders (rest in peace.) 

Like Chappell, Lady Gaga was also compared to an experimental, drag-informed, landscape-shifting pop icon that came before her, but it wasn’t so warm and fuzzy. Aside from insane inquiries about whether or not she had a penis, one of the main narratives of Gaga’s early career was that she was ripping off Madonna. We loved her music, but the culture was skeptical of her authenticity, and pitting her against a titan of the genre she was reshaping was a perfect way to test her mettle, put her through the wringer of public scorn and ridicule as soon as possible. As ridiculous as it all was, it forced Gaga to prove herself as an artist, a fire under her belly to become a legend and icon in her own right. What we got was “Born This Way”, a personally and culturally seismic album that unabashedly championed and centered queerness in ways that were revolutionary, and certainly opened doors for artists like Chappell Roan to perform and express the way they do.

In the years (almost decades😵‍💫) since, the culture has become a lot nicer on its surface. It is no longer acceptable to pit strong women against each other, which, of course, I think is a good thing. I wonder, however, if this attitude conversely forces our pop stars into a new thunderdome of niceness: fawning over peers, celebrating all comparisons, behaving as avatars of our own expectations more than as human individuals and artists. 

Charli xcx discusses this exact catch-22 in her new masterpiece album “brat.” On tracks like “Girl, so confusing” and “Sympathy is a knife,” she bemoans the awkward expectations placed on her interactions with other women in the industry by the recent cultural emphasis on feminism and women uplifting women (you know, like Taylor Swift!) Charli sings “I don’t know if you like me/ sometimes I think you might hate me/ sometimes I think I might hate you/ maybe you just wanna be me/ you always say “let’s go out”/ so we go eat at a restaurant/ sometimes it feels a bit awkward/ cause we don’t have much in common.” Girl, I get it. Thank god you’re marrying a 1975 so you don’t have to go on Hinge dates.

I’m glad that our instinct is no longer to set pop stars at each other’s throats, but I think that our culture is still just as bloodthirsty. Making a culture thats totally frictionless means people don’t have anything to rub up against, to embrace or resist. Ideas don’t interact. Sometimes a little healthy competition gets the blood moving. Good luck, Babe!

four more quick things

here’s what I’m into rn…

Apple by Charli xcx

As mentioned earlier, I’m really obsessed with Charli’s new album (the gay guy who lives in brooklyn?? No way!!) While nearly every song could be considered my favorite at any given moment, Apple is really standing out to me. At this point I’m so obsessed, you might as well call me Eve. I love the weird lyrics about wondering, pondering, dissecting, and rebelling, life as an apple, or a ride to the airport, or wait, both? Is the apple rotten right to the core?

Hundreds of Beavers 

I finally got to watch Mike Cheslik’s underground film sensation just as I was getting sick earlier this week, which was perfect circumstances because the whole thing felt like a fever dream. It’s essentially a live-action slapstick cartoon, almost entirely free of dialogue, following a buffoonish frontiersman as he tries to get revenge on the beavers that ruined his livelihood and end up with the girl of his dreams. The internal logic is fascinating and it’s thrilling once you really get the hang of how to watch the movie. I highly recommend (but don’t start a fiasco by renting a film called “Hundreds of Beavers” on the family Amazon account at 9 am on a wednesday and accidentally charging it to your dad’s work card.)

House of the Dragon

I’m back in y’all. I still haven’t listened to enough podcasts to actually tell you what happened on last night’s Season 2 premiere, but I can tell you that I’m ready for whatever is coming next. I wanna ride the dragon just for a second come awnnnn y’awllll.

Late Night Variety Tonight Live

Geniuses Matt Albino and Caroline Dunn are putting on the CORPORATE PRIDE edition of their perfect variety comedy show tomorrow night at Littlefield. Word on the street is that yours truly may even show up to lay down the law for a few minutes. Stay tuned…

Last month, I largely avoided coverage of the Met Gala. I didn’t feel like I was taking a profound political stance by doing this, and I wasn’t driven by a huge sense of justice or anything like that. I’m just…bored. As coverage of the annual gala, which raises money for the Met’s Costume Institute (named after Anna Wintour, of course) has ballooned in the social media age, its facade of exclusivity and cultural significance has waned. What once felt like a bastion of progressive American cultural institutions, has, in the past decade or so, morphed into something different, more convinced of its own benevolence and essential goodness, yet less willing to display it meaningfully.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hypocrite. I won’t act like I haven’t dreamed of attending the Met Gala, and if I somehow ever got the call I probably wouldn’t turn it down. Do you know how much I’d love, for one enchanted evening, to truly believe that my queer existence was resistance? To believe that I was empowering America’s marginalized youth by wearing a brightly-colored tuxedo with a nontraditional cut on a red carpet into a $75,000 per person dinner held inside an Egyptian temple that happens to be housed on the Upper East Side? Don’t worry, its all for a good cause: Anna Wintour. 

I first became meaningfully aware of the Met Gala in the summer of 2017, as I waited to start my freshman year of college and figure out what I was going to do with my life. I watched Andrew Rossi’s documentary The First Monday in May, which chronicles the planning and execution of the 2015 Met Gala, centered on the exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass.” I was obsessed. A lifelong love of art and museums seemed to crystalize for me in this moment; I felt like I was seeing behind the curtain into these institutions of immense significance and moments of cultural meaning-making, and the idea of being a part of it was tantalizing. I largely credit the film for my eventual decision to study Art History in college, with a focus on museum work.

I hate to do this, but that year was also the second-to-last Met Gala before Donald Trump took office in 2017, a seismic event which amongst numerous other profound ripple effects, fundamentally changed America’s view of and relationship to its political and cultural institutions. Trump’s ascent exposed something about our systems of power and influence,  stripping bare facades of prestige and immutability and transparently using them as tools for personal gain and protection.

There were three Met Galas during the Trump administration (2020’s was canceled due to the pandemic): 2017 celebrated Comme des Garçons's Rei Kawakubo (I made the trip up from Virginia to see this one); 2018 decided my culture was a costume with “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”; and 2019 unleashed the Pandora’s Box of Susan Sontag onto the monoculture with “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” 

To my mind, these are the high watermark of the Met Gala in the modern age, in terms of effective, interesting fashion, cultural relevance, and meaningful discourse. People paid attention to these red carpets, with themes both specific and broad enough to prompt social media discussion and fanfare. A general focus on queer aesthetics, plus the attendance of the “Liberal Elite,” plus the perceived progressive cultural power of the largest and most significant museum in the country was a perfect recipe for resistance porn in an age of representation politics. In the moment, it felt like these people were standing up against the rise of fascism, protecting our culture from the monsters on the other side. 

One pandemic and a Biden presidency later, this attitude largely persists, but it now feels so much emptier; the posturing of resistance without a specific target, the belief that hierarchy and celebrity should exist as long as the people at the top have read some bell hooks. 

Rather than truly countering fascism, we’re just yassifying it. We are still amplifying institutions and systems of power (Hollywood, Media, Celebrity, the Art World) because we think they’re progressive. They’re still saying “we matter,” “you should look at us,” “we’re doing this the right way.” 

Where do we go from here? Didn’t this stuff used to be fun? Why is E! News there?

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Three Women (1977)

I’ve been a Robert Altman head for a while now–I consider Nashville (1975) one of my favorite films–but I had still never seen this 1977 feature starring Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek until last night…and let's just say a boom occurred. In the lineage of Bergman’s Persona and Todd Haynes’ recent masterpiece May December, the women in this film are fascinated by and weary of one another, and slowly begin to blend together. It’s abstract and difficult, but beautiful and experimental, and totally engaging. Maybe next I’ll watch Brewster McCloud.

Hacks Season 3 Finale

I still love this show. Near the end of this season I began to worry a bit that the show was getting a little preachy and losing its edge…just when I was starting to like Ava!!! But then the finale really nailed everything and landed the tone of the entire season. I won’t spoil anything, but I’ll echo a tweet (which I unfortunately can’t find) that suggested that this moment, in which the tides suddenly turn in an incredibly satisfying way, was really the beginning of Hacks.

PRIDE

It’s a protest, what can I say??? Everyone settled in for four incredibly powerful Gay Guy Fridays.

Invisible Architecture

I’m never going to stop doing this. The next edition of my standup and video comedy show Invisible Architecture is next Saturday, June 15, at Nighthorse in Greenpoint. I really hope to see you there!

Belief

I don’t believe in right angles,
I think they’re too right to be real.
And if rightness and realness were one in the same
the left side would lose its appeal

And I’m still not sold on the solstice,
the sun never really goes down.
The moon is still spinning; just stretching its legs
talking a lap around town

The archetypes add up to everything,
but split them apart and they’re sunk.
When you look for the pieces, you don’t see the parts,
the peasant turns into the punk

To sift through the science is simple;
It’s tricky to talk to the trees.
They greet without curtsey, feel no need to bow,
to wave, simply wait for the breeze

Do city birds think that buildings grow from seeds?

Twigs fill slits in the air conditioner
humm nuzzling morning routine
still for a season
a home of debris, like always

Was it ever different?
Survival without symbols?
Dignity without design?
Courage without consciousness?

Art Deco cliffs
Mass transit caverns
Are they used to it by now?
Would the forest feel more foreign?

Ambition

Crossword corners fill my view,
A sentence alone starts to sing
How do you write when you don’t know the words?
When Ifs, Ands, or Buts are just things?

When, oh when, will my moment come?
And what will the headlines be?
Fresh air; fresh shave; fresh perspectives.
Somebody; anyone; me.

History hangs like a handbag,
pinching a nerve in my back.
How much of Charlie is Charlemagne?
How much of Heaven is hack?

I know there’s sense to the silence,
but can literature not be loud?
Fig trees are growing; I planted the seeds.
Is the goal to be happy or proud?

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Ram by Paul and Linda McCartney

“Ram”, Paul and Linda McCartney’s sole album-length collaboration and Paul’s second post-Beatles venture has entered my life recently thanks to dear friend and genius musician Caroline Strickland, and I feel like nothing will ever be the same. The 1971 album feels like a blueprint for so much that came after it; experimental but grounded, confident in the questions it asks, and chock-full of McCartney’s effortless, quirky coolness. I’m particularly fond of the opening track, “Too Many People,” plus “Heart of the Country” and “Long Haired Lady.” So basically this just in…Paul McCartney is a talented musician…

The Searchers (1956)

That’s right you guys, not only is Paul McCartney a great musician, but John Ford is also a great filmmaker…stay tuned for more hard-hitting journalism. After falling in love with Stagecoach, Ford’s 1939 ur-Western and his first collaboration with John Wayne, in his breakout role, I’ve been captivated by the filmmakers visual storytelling and complex depictions of American archetypes. In The Searchers the two reunite, in what feels like a capstone of their partnership, and a bookend on a certain era of American westerns. Ford, a grizzled Civil War veteran who still claims allegiance to the Confederacy despite taking place more than four years after their surrender to the Union. He’s a wanderer, almost a ghost, poisoned by hatred and bigotry and violence, who returns to his family’s homestead out west just in time for a tribe of Comanche Indians (portrayed problematically by mostly white people) to attack his family and take his niece captive. This spurs a four year journey across the west (stunningly shot in Monument Valley, likely place for John Ford to be.) His motivations become increasingly questionable, his methods increasingly violent, and his hateful bigotry increasingly apparent. It’s a fascinating film, an American kaleidoscope that turns archetypes on their head and searches for the truth behind our country’s history, its mythos, it heroes, its fantasies, and its realities. I think I’ll watch this movie for the rest of my life, and anticipate that it will be a different movie for me each time…how exciting to think that this classic still has so much of itself to reveal!

The Four Seasons Orlando Baby

I can’t imagine you haven’t seen this instant classic video of a seemingly-fully conscious baby politely raising their hand to affirm that they would like to go to be included on a trip to the Four Seasons Orlando (real Charlie-heads know that I was born in Orlando…Arnold Palmer Hospital hiiiiive.) The video itself is a bit of an American kaleidoscope, and you can get as much meaning out of it as you’re willing to invest. I have personally bemoaned on TikTok my frustrations at the timing of this meme, because as someone with a freshly buzzed head, I currently look exactly like this baby…however Halloween is just far enough away that the costume won’t be current or even really legible by then…we used to be a country…

The French Fries That the People Sitting at the Table Next to Me at the Park are Eating Right Now

They smell really good…what can I say…gimme dat XD omg I just realized they’re even waffle friessssss…looks like there’s a light beer batter…hey y’all do you hear my stomach growling 🥺

When I was a tour guide at my college’s art museum, I took the task of showing around our visitors (mainly elementary and middle school students) very seriously. I especially liked giving tours to students who were still young enough that they had yet to start thinking ‘fine art’ was difficult to grasp, yet to internalize that this was all convoluted and over their heads. Instead, they could see paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures for exactly what they were, without the clouds of faux-academia or the fear of peer judgment blocking their way. I sometimes found myself jealous that they could have these pure aesthetic and emotional experiences, without hand wringing about the artists’ intentions or the work’s place in the larger canon. As an Art History major who had spent the last few years wringing my hands over these exact concerns, I worried that I was beginning to miss the forest for the trees. 

In the Student Docent program, our guiding teaching practice for art education was “See, Think, Wonder.” This was a general outline for how to look at art and figure out what you were noticing, how you were responding, why you were feeling the way you did. It is an incredibly helpful way to slow down and get your arms around the piece. The questions are simple, and straightforward: What do you notice? What do you think about those details? What do they make you think of? What more do you want to know? What would you ask the artist if they were here right now?

I liked this framework for its broad applicability; these questions could be asked of any work of art, across mediums, and generally provide helpful insight. More importantly, they privileged the personal experience of engaging with art and discerning meaning over any prescribed, absolute doctrine on the true meaning or correct interpretation. You could sprinkle in helpful facts and details, notes about the artist’s life, but you never wanted to feel like you were giving a lecture or shutting down an idea. Young kids had the upper hand at this naturally. With older kids, tours always started like pulling teeth. I remember myself saying things like “you guys have phones and computers full of pictures, you’re sending memes, you have constant access to cameras, you know how to read an image.” I didn’t care how lame I sounded. 

By the end of tours, they usually loosened up, more comfortable with taking chances, and less concerned with having the right answer or being laughed at. “See, Think, Wonder” always worked like a charm. The museum started to feel less like an oppressive, intimidating institution, and more like a laboratory to experiment with ideas, or a playground to imagine and consider new ways of seeing and being. 

I was always frustrated with how much work I had to do to see things the way kids do naturally. Our instinctive ability to look, ponder, imagine, and interpret was lost somewhere in our socialization, and we had to retrain ourselves to see, think, and wonder. We’re born looking closely, but somewhere along the way we’re taught to zoom out, we unconsciously build a barrier of filters, prejudices, ideologies, and conventions between ourselves and the world, but still believe we are seeing clearly. 

I’m currently spending a few days out of the city, “trying” “to” “write,” (how am I doing?), and one of my goals for my self-prescribed solitude in a chilly cabin by the water was to spend minimal time on my phone while I’m here (so far I’ve only made one tiktok about Carly Simon!!!!!!)

The first thing I did after settling in and turning on the heat, was pull out a jigsaw puzzle (one that I’ve done before, of course.) I love a jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t do them that often, much like my relationship to cooking. This was a perfect re-entry: 500 pieces, a simple color palette, a painting of an idyllic village of saltbox houses, and, most helpful, a note in the box in my mother’s handwriting to let me know that one of the edge pieces is missing. 

I locked in, and got the puzzle done in a few hours, helped in large part by Robyn’s Honey on repeat. As I got the big chunks out of the way, I was thrilled watching the pile of pieces shrink. As the number of unplaced pieces became fewer and fewer, it was crazy to notice new details in them, to see new details, crucial to the finishing touch of the bigger picture, that I would never have noticed when they were separated into big piles of vaguely similar colors and textures. They revealed themselves, making me aware of these small flourishes and differences that had been in front of me the whole time, but I hadn’t been able to see. 

Later on, I went over to the beach, to look for what I’ve always called Toenail Shells (but I guess are generally called Jingle Shells? okay…) I got a vision last summer of making a lampshade out of them, but sadly learned that being held up to light just makes them look dirty and unappealing. This trip, I decided I still wanted to do something with the shells, so I am leaning into their government name and trying to make some sort of windchime. Stay tuned…

Anyways, on that walk along the beach, I tried to look closely, to follow my interests, and to listen to myself. Something instinctual woke up in me, and I became almost a machine. I instantly knew which shells I wanted, making quick decisions as to what rocks were worth a spot in my cargo pant pockets, letting the universe tell me whether I should comb the beach right at the water or if I’d have better luck on the dry shore. 

I’m not really sure how to end this…I left with quite a cache of beautiful shells, and once I get my hands on a needle and thread I am going to make crafts the likes of which you’ve ever seen. I feel lucky to get to be creative and to spend so much time thinking about and talking about and writing about and making art. Gotta look closely I guess…Don’t get too big for your britches…

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

La Chimera (2023)

Yes, I saw Challengers, and yes, I enjoyed it. I went in knowing I’d root for Josh O’Connor’s character, mainly because I had just seen star him Alice Rohrwacher’s new feature, La Chimera, which floored me. O’Connor plays a British expat in the costal Italy of the 1980’s, recently released from prison, who makes his money finding and robbing ancient Etruscan crypts. What’s more? He spends much of the film in a fantastic linen suit. It’s a mesmerizing, sensitive, lively, and thrilling look at life, death, greed, and beauty. I really recommend seeing it while it’s in theaters. And if you still haven’t had your fill of Joshie, go check him out in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017). That’s where I first met him, and let’s just say I’ve never been the same…

The Plot Against Harry (1969)

Two movies this week, go cry to your mother. I was thrilled when I saw that this film was coming to the Criterion Channel in May, mainly because I felt like a fool for missing it’s recent run at the Film Forum. Starring the fantastic Martin Priest as the titular aging Jewish gangster (also recently released from prison,) it’s a fantastic gem that feels like a mix between Goodfellas and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Directed by Michael Rohmer in 1969 and produced outside of the studio system, the film never received a true theatrical run until two decades later in 1989. It’s so modern and remains so engaging, and feels incredibly ahead of its time. I have to imagine it would be remembered as a true classic if more people could just see it, so do your part and give it a whirl.

Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt

I’m loving this brief, beautiful new album from the singer-songwriter with one of the most enchanting and haunting voices out there. It’s been on a lot in the background, so I’m still not totally sure which track is which, but “World on a String” stands out as an early favorite. Listen once and you’ll want to listen again. Still can’t get enough? Listen to “Moon Dude” from her 2015 album On Your Own Love Again. That was where I fell in love.

Hacks Season 3

HACKS IS BACKKKKK thank God. I have still only watched the first episode of the new season, but I am so thrilled that this show is back. It is funny and heartfelt and actually good, which is so rare on television these days. Any Meg Stalter vehicle is one I want a ride on. And you’ll have to credit my sister for this observation, but the next time you’re watching a recent season of Drag Race, take a good look at RuPaul’s mug…it’s givvvvving Deborah Vance…and I mean that as a compliment.

I’ve mostly tried to avoid thinking, talking, writing about artificial intelligence as it has loomed larger and larger in the cultural dialogue over the past few years. The few times I’ve played with ChatGPT and AI image generators, mainly out of sheer curiosity, I’ve been left feeling empty and confused at the sheer mediocrity of everything it spits out. It’s all so eerily functional; blocks of text without a spark of wit or insight, images that match their prompt and go no further, passable sludge for a culture overrun with “content.” 

I became frustrated with people hailing this technology as the path of the future, but also found myself a bit skeptical of the alarmists on the other side of the issue, foretelling the end of art itself. It was such a pessimistic view of humanity, to think that everyone other than the learned elite would be pleased and pacified with soulless cultural output for the rest of time. People like good stuff, thoughtful media, art that responds to its time, even if they aren’t acutely aware of it. Eventually, we grow tired of the sludge. It’s like junk food, or Marvel movies; enjoyable for a while until consumption just becomes a habit and makes us feel bad. Eventually we all crave something fresh–an apple or an indie. As Jean Smart’s early Hollywood tabloid writer Elinor St. John gets at in a memorable monologue from 2022’s Babylon, there’s always going to be that thing. That spark, that cultural flow that surrounds us and connects us.

AI can imitate, but it can’t innovate, I would remind myself, perhaps naively optimistic. But as corporations and decision-makers increasingly adopt and experiment with generative technology, I realized that those in power don’t privilege aesthetic innovation to quite the degree that others might. This left me with a sinking feeling and a lingering question: Are we stuck here forever?

I started to worry that the culture of our current moment would be technologically enshrined as the culture for all time, the truth, exclusively plundering the past rather than looking towards the future; post-reality, a snake eating its tail. Algorithms scan and imitate the words and images that humans have made up to this moment, reproducing our present over and over again like a funhouse Xerox machine, until everything is recognizable but nothing feels real. AI seems to be accelerating the ideas in philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, in which ‘simulacra’ serve as symbols of themselves, copies without an original. 

Will we become so caught up with copying and imitating the old world that we forget we have agency to shape the future? It has felt like this for a while, perhaps more acutely since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, whose campaign was notably focused on returning America to a mythic, idealized, and false greatness of some nonspecific past. It still feels like we’re in a bit of suspended animation, perhaps because we are all holding our breath, only able to imagine a future where things get worse, the oceans rise along with the fascists, and the world we’ve worked so hard to build crumbles before us. It’s comforting to mine the past, sanding down its edges along the way; nostalgia is tempting.

I worry that the tantalizing nature of a false past, and the already waning novelty of generative technology and artificial intelligence might convince us to sleepwalk into a future that is scared to innovate, to err from the norm, to explore and wonder for the sake of it. Sure, a self-driving car can get you to a pre-decided destination, but can it take you for a drive? Algorithms attempt to rob us of our ability to wander, to stumble upon new ideas and inspirations and conclusions and decide for ourselves what to make of them. What’s the point of efficiency without an end goal?

I thought about this a lot as I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which clocks in at just over 2 hours, comprised of 31 songs. It’s a perfectly passable album, and there are a few songs I really enjoy. However, as a longtime Taylor fan who has experienced quite a bit of disillusionment over the last few years, perhaps from her sheer overexposure, I was left with a real feeling of emptiness after my first listen. I’ve always appreciated Taylor’s ability to jump nimbly from genre to genre, to approach each album from a totally new sonic and symbolic perspective, while always maintaining a core of essential Swift-ness. “The Tortured Poets Department,” just felt stale, run-of-the-mill, comfortable, and not especially interested in saying anything new. As Tom Breihan writes in his brilliant review of the album for Stereogum, “the lore has come to swallow the music..the songs...are simply not strong enough to support the weight of all that fucking storyline. It’s starting to feel like the lore is all we have. It’s not enough.” Joe Coscarelli at the New York Times posited that the album essentially functions as a new season of The Kardashians.

I’m not saying that Taylor Swift has to keep making albums that sound radically different from one another, or that she isn’t allowed to settle into a sonic aesthetic and keep making the kind of music that her fans like. However, Taylor insists on holding a position at the very center of the critical and cultural conversation, and she is arguably the biggest pop star in the world, and will be for the foreseeable future. At that level, I do think there is an imperative to say something new, to try to shape that conversation; if you’re going to steer the ship, you have to choose a direction. She is more than welcome to go make a million more same-sounding albums with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, but I’m just a bit tired of being told that they are among the most important or crucial albums of our cultural moment, especially when Taylor has been able to reach that benchmark time and again in the past. I guess I liked her when she was a little hungrier.

Slate pop critic (and former professor of mine) Jack Hamilton often writes about how the streaming model of music has confused the relationship between artists and consumers; where music used to be a product that we bought directly from an artist, it is now increasingly seen as a gift that our benevolent cultural overlords bestow upon us. Taylor extracts so much money and attention from her fans (Swifties always have something to buy, whether its five different versions of an album vinyl, a cheugy cardigan, or a Travis Kelce jersey), but it increasingly feels like a tithe, a religious donation, a subscription box. There doesn’t seem to be any expectation of quality, or really any expectation of anything in these exchanges. The buying itself is paying homage, the art is secondary.

I’m not accusing Taylor of using AI or of algorithmically generating her album, but as I trudge through the album again, I can’t help but hear the same kind of schlocky sludge: passable, familiar, unremarkable songs. They’re certainly listenable, but don’t we deserve more than listenable? She knows what her fans like, she knows what they respond to, she knows they’ll buy what she tells them to and show up in droves to her tours. Just like AI-generated content, however, it doesn’t push the conversation forward, it doesn’t say anything new, and it doesn’t respect that people are worthy of complex, intentional, engaging, and forward-thinking cultural output. Don’t we deserve better?

That said, she made “Delicate,” so what do I know?

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

I watched Assault on Precinct 13, John Carpenter’s second feature film, made right before his landmark Halloween (1978), without knowing anything about it. It popped up on the Criterion Channel, and looked like the exact type of gritty 70’s movie that I like, so I figured it would fill in a cultural gap. It is insane and exciting, as a youth gang in LA that behaves more like zombies than humans, remorselessly killing anyone in their path. Their most shocking victim is an 11-year old Kyle Richards (best-known as a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills,) killed while holding an ice cream cone. A group of strangers running from the gang post up in a nearly abandoned police precinct and do as much as they can to protect themselves from the seemingly endless hoard of armed invaders. It’s so eerie and stylish, I highly recommend!

Sling, by Clairo

Clairo’s sophomore album, released in 2021, has reentered my life in a crazy way over the past week. It’s so thoughtful and moody and vulnerable, and is really speaking to me. I liked it upon its initial release, but never spent much time with it. However, the fourth track “Zinnias,” in which she imagines settling down in the south, a few houses down from her sister, waking up with a baby in the album’s titular sling, has especially grabbed me. There’s something beautifully melancholy about the vision, things move slow, flowers bloom, things are simple. She doesn’t really want this life, but she wants to want it 😭.

Top Chef: Wisconsin

This season is gooooood yawllll, tap innnn. I like Kristen Kish as the new host (apparently Padma Lakshmi left to focus her efforts on improv comedy? twin), Tom Colicchio is awesome and reminds me one of my uncles just like always, and Gail Simmons remains mindful of why she was invited to the section. Plus this season is set in Wisconsin so they’re always talking about cheese, and they did a challenge about Frank Lloyd Wright (so I got to listen to my favorite Simon & Garfunkel song.) I’m personally rooting for Michelle, and encourage you to do the same.

Herbal Supplements

My brilliant friend Jules Riviera, who writes the lovely Groovy Ruminations newsletter, hosts a monthly reading series for poets, authors, and essayists at Cherry on Top in Bushwick. Jules has been kind enough to ask me to read one of my essays at the next installment, which just so happens to be this evening at 8 pm. See you there, dear reader?

At times in my life, I’ve been accused of being pretentious, which I honestly think is a total misapprehension of my character.

In truth, I like a lot of mass culture and “stupid” stuff, but my fragile ego forces me to do mental gymnastics to convince myself that my reasons for enjoyment are more artistic and therefore noble than the average Joe. Essentially, I try to “horseshoe theory” my way into appreciating the mainstream. I can like basic stuff, but please God let me like it in a complex way. (P.S. did you know that the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” come directly from eugenics and phrenological pseudoscience?)

For example, I spend a lot of time watching, talking about, posting about, and, of course, thinking about…Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane’s animated sitcom that just turned 25 (so did I, dear reader. We’re both 1999 babies😜). The show was not on much in my house growing up (except for the odd late night when my dad decided to live a little for once and stop acting like he was above it.) Instead, I relished sleepovers at friends’ houses, inhaling the Griffins’ insanity and irreverence. Once I went on vacation with my best friend’s family, and our room had its own TV. We spent each day in anticipation of Cartoon Network turning into Adult Swim at 10pm, always kicking off their programming block with two episodes of Family Guy followed by two episodes of its sister American Dad. It was heaven. 

I think I could always pick up on Family Guy’s subtle winking; I could tell the people writing the show were a little smarter than they were letting on; the jokes were jokes, but they were also tests, mirrors, dangling carrots. Are you really gonna laugh at that? Are you that easy? Is that all it takes for you?

It was exciting to think that there was a whole new angle to approach all of this; engaging with culture could be active. If you weren’t thinking all that much about what you were watching, you could still have a pretty enjoyable time, but you’d be missing something. You’d be out on the real joke, only getting half the story. 

Though I may not have been able to put it into words at the time, there was an aesthete in me that felt I was somehow betraying The Simpsons, which, even as a sixth grader, I knew was seen as a bit nobler and more intellectual. I loved how those jokes were smart, subtle, clever, constant, and woven in seamlessly. By that time, however, The Simpsons had been around for decades, and was widely for its greatness. It had lost its edge; watching The Simpsons didn’t feel like I was getting away with anything, but sneaking episodes of Family Guy felt like I was accomplice to the coolest crime. 

As it passes a quarter century, Family Guy has become less of a conventional sitcom and more of a sandbox of symbols, and the Griffins less of a family and more of a theater troupe, ready to pick up and act out just about any story, joke, or idea. They are aware of this, often directly referencing the family as being aware that they are on set, on TV, and playing characters. They started in 1999 as a more typical sitcom family, embodying familiar archetypes of the American nuclear unit. In the years since, however, the show has become so well-known and culturally ubiquitous that the Griffins themselves have come to occupy those archetypes; the satire is no longer far enough from the truth for the two to be distinguished.

In their ubiquity, the characters have been so universalized and removed from the show’s base reality that they can essentially do whatever they want. By season 22, the Griffins are all essentially sociopaths, acting on pure id, largely devoid of complicated emotions or personal details. They are not characters, they are the idea of characters. They are puppets, and in turn their idiotic and petty stories often feel somehow mythic. They are vessels to be filled with criticisms, jokes, anxieties, aspirations; they are platonic ideals; this is Commedia Dell’Arte. I think this is also why the show has seen a resurgence, especially among The Youth, in the last few years; the Griffins have been around long enough that they can essentially be whatever we want them to be. 

A similar sentiment bolsters my enthusiasm for the James Bond movies, which have gotten me through a lot of aimless nights of scrolling and searching for something to watch. I loved seeing the Daniel Craig movies as they came out growing up, and those in my inner circle know that Skyfall (2012) is my go to comfort movie. I’ve jumped around in the last few years and watched most, but not all, of the 27 Bond films (and, as Context Clues readers know, become obsessed with several of the theme songs.) 

People hear this and think I love misogyny and violence, and the Br*t*sh, and explosions, and that’s not the case at all. I do love explosions, but the joy I derive from this series has a lot to do with its imperfections, its flaws, and how the franchise has aged as a cultural object. Since the premiere of Dr. No in 1962, Agent 007 has served as an archetype of a certain type of western masculinity–suave, womanizing, charming, violent. There is a familiar cast of characters, filling familiar roles in each film: bosses, inventors, damsels, femme fatales, friends, foes, high stakes. In the 60+ years that they have been making these movies, cultural attitudes and values and concerns have ebbed, flowed, and shifted wildly and constantly. The familiarity of the mold that has become unconscious to us allows those who fill it–actors, writers, directors, consumers–in each successive installation to therefore reflect their personal ideas and the dominant attitudes of the time in more complex and subtle ways; you can paint more abstractly when the audience has a rough idea of what it is you’re painting. 

It’s like leaving a camera in the exact same spot and taking a new picture every month. Keeping a few things constant makes you so much more perceptive to change. When looked at like this, each film is also a time capsule of sorts, containing that cultural moment’s priorities and attitudes, towards gender, empire, violence, politics, art, beauty, power. When watched in succession, the franchise almost becomes a cultural time lapse. Focus in on a few main themes, ideas, and identities, and capture how they change with the rest of the world. 

I would be remiss not to note that, while I’ve been thinking about the ideas in this essay for a while, Family Guy did air a James Bond parody about a month ago. It’s not very good, ultimately, but the culture gods were listening to me. STREAM NOW ON HULU OR DISNEY PLUSSSS)

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

STRESS POSITIONS (2024)

I got to see the knew film written and directed by Theda Hammel and starring John Early at the IFC Center last week, with a brief introduction from the duo. Most of the few minutes were spent trying to nail down a definition of “gooning.” No comment. I really enjoyed the film, and the enthusiasm and hype around it made me even more excited. I have loved John Early for like a decade now, and all I ever wanted as a high schooler watching “Paris” and “Family Dinner” endlessly in my friends’s basement on Friday nights, was to see him in doing his thing on the silver screen, in a packed audience cackling at his singular presence and attitude. It was heaven, you must go see this film, and if you do can we pleeeeease get coffee and talk about it or somethinggggg….one more stone cold classic below for good measure

Nymphia Wind Winning RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16

I have never witnessed such an avalanche of emotion from a group of gay guys. I thought the Greenpoint apartment I was in to watch the finale was going to explode. When Ru called Nymphia’s name as the winner, we all became “When You Wife Thinks She’s The Coach” for a brief moment. I’ve loved Nymphia from the moment she walked in the werkroom, and seeing her live a few times since has only made me more mesmerized and in awe. Going into the finale I would have been happy with just about any winner, but there is no denying that she ate the lipsync up and served excellence throughout the whole season. We voted yellow mawmaaaa.

The Culture Turning on The Tortured Poet’s Department

I don’t even think the album is bad, but I think something other than ubiquitous praise could be good for all of us. As I’ve said since the beginning of the re-recording era, Taylor is at her best musically and culturally when she’s hungry, mad, scorned, playing the underdog. I’m really glad that she seems happy, but I no longer feel like she has anything to prove. The Swiftie State Media has not been quite as much of a echo chamber this time around, and Pitchfork only gave the album a 6.6. Our culture will only let a woman be on top for so long, and if Taylor loses her footing on universal acclaim again, I wish she would focus on making the next Reputation, rather than just making Reputation Taylor’s Version.

INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE

YUP I’m promo-ing again. My perfect comedy show is this Friday, April 26, at Nighthorse in Brooklyn. It’s going to be great and I would looooove to see you there.

Sometimes I think I can be hopeful to a fault. I can be blinded from reality by the sheer desire for things to be good, to go right, to end up how I imagined. Some might call it magical thinking, some might call it delusion, most would probably just call it narcissism; I can be lulled into a sense that the universe is talking to me, slipping me signs, whispering directions in my ears. What I’m really trying to say is that I put a lot of faith in lucky pennies. 

If you look around my bedroom, packed with too many tchotchkes and knickknacks, you’ll notice a few shallow dishes equally packed with one cent coins. Thousands of Abe Lincolns give you subtle side-eye all at once. When I see a penny on the ground, it’s hard for me not to stop and look closer, even if I’m in the middle of a crosswalk, even if I’m a nuisance to the people behind me. If it’s heads up, I almost always feel the urge to grab it, like a breadcrumb, a puzzle piece, a sign that I’m headed in the right direction. Once in a while I’ll feel lucky enough, and leave the penny for someone who needs it more–double it and give it to the next person. 

Recently there was a penny on the front stoop of my building, and three days in a row I noticed it, bent down to look closer, saw the facade of the Lincoln Memorial, sighed, and went inside, penniless. Finally, on the fourth day, I couldn't stand it any longer; I bent down and flipped the penny over to reveal the profile of our 16th President. I left the penny there, hoping someone would find it and feel lucky. We can make luck for each other, we can create hope, sometimes all we have to do is flip a piece of copper. 

About a year ago, I was hung up on a boy who I liked much more than he seemed to like me. My chronic hope made it hard for me to see the situation for what it was, and I went nearly crazy over a few day period, waiting for a single text back, either a declaration of devotion or one of devastation. I tried to play cool, which has never been my strong suit, but spent a good 72 hours in a haze–it was the only thing on my mind.

I wandered around the city in a bit of a stupor. Deep down I knew the truth, I could see the cards for what they were, the feelings weren’t reciprocated, and I was going to be disappointed. But in the time it took for that truth to arrive, I indulged my hope, and let myself believe the inevitable wasn’t so inevitable. As I wandered, I started to notice lucky pennies everywhere. Almost as soon as I picked one up, there was the next, and the next, and oh look, another. I once found three in a single subway station. 

These lucky pennies tricked me; they made me believe that the universe was going to make my dreams come true, going to give me the ending I imagined. I confided over text to my lifelong bestie Morgan, someone equally prone to magical thinking and acutely aware of signs from the universe. Even she could see that things had gone too far, that I was getting lost in a pseudo-schizophrenic spiral, that I had lost the plot on actual reality and was careening towards a non reality of my own creation. She tried to hint at this, advising that “maybe it’s time to cool it on the penny math.”

“But the pennies don’t lie.” I replied, annoyed that even my reliable partner in delusion thought I had taken things too far.

“Well at least stop looking for them,” she told me, “let them find you.” This moment woke me up. I was keeping my head down, blocking out the truth, trying to squeeze a miracle out of a world that was lucky enough. I cooled it on the pennies, and tried to keep my eyes ahead of me. 

Eventually the truth I knew was coming was confirmed, and there was a relief in the certainty. I was devastated, but at least I was done living in limbo. I woke up, and started trying to see with fresh eyes. A few days later, I was crossing the street near my apartment when I noticed a glimmer in the crosswalk; there was good old Honest Abe looking up at me, almost winking, almost challenging me.

What the hell, I thought, it’s not like I was looking for it. 

I bent down to pick the penny up, and my fingernail struggled to find a ridge. As a red hand flashed above me and my allotted time in the middle of the street waned, I realized that the coin was embedded in the asphalt. I wouldn't be adding this one to my collection unless I had a spare jackhammer lying around. 

As I walked home, the image of the penny stuck with me. Maybe, I thought, the luck is already baked into the world. 

I was left thinking of Rita Dove’s marvelous poem “Testimonial,” which I used to pass painted on a mural nearly every day in college:

Testimonial

By Rita Dove

Back when the earth was new
and heaven just a whisper,
back when the names of things
hadn't had time to stick;

back when the smallest breezes
melted summer into autumn,
when all the poplars quivered
sweetly in rank and file . . .

the world called, and I answered.
Each glance ignited to a gaze.
I caught my breath and called that life,
swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet.

I was pirouette and flourish,
I was filigree and flame.
How could I count my blessings
when I didn't know their names?

Back when everything was still to come,
luck leaked out everywhere.
I gave my promise to the world,
and the world followed me here.

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Civil War (2024)

Alex Garland’s latest film, starring Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaney as photojournalists and Persona-esque parallels of each other, on a mission to capture the fall of Washington DC, the climax of a fictitious Civil War in America’s near future. It wasn’t perfect, but something about it really worked for me. I think a lot of people are looking for the film to have a more clear-cut politic, to precisely predict how and when our country’s resentments will finally boil over and we’ll create our own downfall. Garland resists providing too many details, and presents his world how it is on a personal level, rather than walking us through how it got there structurally and institutionally. It becomes a story about America’s penchant for violence and spectacle, and the fragile, fracturing line between the two, a line on which even those who are supposed to be the arbiters of truth and objectivity struggle to balance. My American Studies degree is begging me to draw a parallel between Civil War and Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville (1975), another great film about America and Americans navigating, and often crossing this line. Maybe I’ll save that for another essay.

ToonPaul’s Drag Race

This tiktok series brings to life an entire season of Drag Race through the lens of popular cartoon characters, perfectly capturing the essence of the series and it’s cliches and trademarks. I struggle with what I imagine are AI-generated images and voices, but it’s clear that there is a very savvvy and smart human being behind all of it. It has also blown up my gay group chat, as you’ll see below. One recent highlight is the lipsync between Donald Duck and Kirby. I think that Phineas might be my winner…

Criterion 24/7

The Criterion Channel, aka the most annoying person you know’s favorite streaming service, launched their new “24/7” stream this week. It is a constant stream of curated films, some classics, some obscure, almost always quality. As someone who struggles with choosing what to watch, this is my heaven. As an unemployed person with too much free time on my hands, this is a slippery slope. I love having the option to just have great movies playing, and the nostalgic feeling of flipping through cable and just watching what’s on. As one twitter user wrote, “the children, they yearn for Turner Classic Movies.”

Limeade

LOL YUP I’M WRITING ABOUT LIMEADE. This week I noticed I had a bunch of limes in my fridge that were about to go bad, and thought to myself…something must be done about this…I found a recipe and squeezed those babes and made some delicious limeade…it was so easy and refreshing…would make a great cocktail mixer too…did I mention I’m unemployed?

A few weeks ago, on the third or fourth First Nice Day of the Year in Brooklyn, I was laying on a blanket in McCarren Park with a group of friends, desperate to soak in some much-needed Vitamin D. The patch of grass was crowded with similar groups of sun-seekers, but there was just enough room for a man on a bike to weave his way through the sea of blankets. He rode effortlessly, despite having a car tire balanced on his head, trailed by a gaggle of screaming toddlers, enthralled by the spectacle and apparent miracle of physics. The whole park took notice, and the rider took the attention as a challenge. He got off the bike, took the tire off of his head, and walked over to one of the park’s numerous metal trash cans, filled nearly to the brim with the refuse of picnics and Park Hang Beers. He lifted the trashcan up, put it on top of his head, and mounted his bike, and the crowd erupted. He once again rode around, leading a now even more enthusiastic cadre of children. It was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen.

He eventually ended the show with a bow and rode off into the sunset, and we got back to basking, thinking the afternoon’s excitement was now behind us. A few minutes later I heard a new group of children screaming, and this time they had something to sell. It was Girl Scout Cookie season, and those little girlbosses were not going to miss out on a huge gathering of people delirious from the simple joy of wearing shorts and a tee shirt outside for the first time in months. Every year it feels like spring is never going to come; I’m still not sure that it ever really will. Anyways, I wanted Samoas.

It was a three-person operation, consisting of the almost stoic, business minded Girl Scout, and her mother, holding a tote bag cartoonish in size and truly bursting with boxes of Tagalongs and Thin Mints (notably unavailable were the oft-overlooked Trefoil…always a bridesmaid.) Rounding out the trio was a six year old boy with a wireless microphone who was screaming loud enough not to need one. His amount of sheer energy and enthusiasm suggested to me that he had already had a good sampling of the confections they had on offer. I recognized him instantly, the Girl Scout’s little brother. A tentpole of child society. A crucial piece of the operation, often overlooked. It was like looking in a time machine mirror. He was me two decades ago.

I never made it to the rank of Boy Scout, I couldn’t even get through Cub Scouts without hating it and not wanting to be around the rest of my “pack”. Luckily, my older brother felt the same way. I think we were all just as happy to not spend our Monday nights at the local Presbyterian Church. 

I was, however, much more enthusiastic about attending my older sister’s Girl Scout meetings, led in part by my Mom after school. (I’m pretty sure my sister was only ever a Brownie, in classic Flynn style.) I remember one day in first grade my teacher gave us some free time to read or color; I opted to hand make a sign reading “GIRL SCOUT MEETING THIS WAY” with a huge red arrow. I had spent the whole day anxious that the troop wouldn’t be able to find the black box theater. 

I just loved the energy, I loved being there with everyone. I loved crafting, I loved gabbing, I loved feeling like I was somehow helping to run the show because my mom was in charge. I was a part of the executive committee. I always loved showing off for my sister’s friends and making them laugh, and this was my prime time. Unlike at Boy Scouts where my different interests and attitude made me feel wrong and uncomfortable, at Girl Scouts my differences made me special, unique. It was a heavenly environment, and perfect training ground for a little gay guy who would one day become a stand up comedian. 

I surmised that the little brother in the park was named Patrick from his Mom’s continued pleas to “calm down, honey,” and “turn the microphone down when you get that close to people.” From the huge smile on his face and the speed with which he ran from blanket to blanket (and the enthusiasm with which he recited his mother’s Venmo handle) I could tell he was in a similar kind of heaven to the one I remembered experiencing. He was a salesman, showing off, being funny, shouting out cookie orders at his sister and then rushing to fulfill them himself. He was also helping, he was being a good brother, spending his Sunday helping his sister earn a patch. 

I remember a similar feeling at my first ever Girl Scout International Bazaar. “Our” troop’s assigned country was Norway, and I had toiled away coloring their flag on so many pieces of Shrinky Dink paper that I could do it in my sleep. Almost two decades later I probably still could. In my young mind, this task was as important as curing cancer. I was right. We were not going to be upstaged by Finland. 

This quick moment in the park brought back so many memories, the safety and comfort of being in a room full of girls, the attention of being the funny kid with too much energy and an eternal smudge on my face and stain on my shirt, the self-importance of feeling like a crucial part of the operation. I’m so thankful for so many groups and spaces like that throughout my life, and for my sister for putting up with me always wanting to hang out with her friends and show off for their attention. I’m glad that the tradition of Girl Scout Little Brothers is still going strong, and that there are still little Patricks in the world. I was so taken by the moment that I wished I could get up and join them; I wouldn’t even ask for a cut of the profits, it was all for the thrill of the game. I hope Patrick gets an honorary patch.

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

New York Earthquake

The last time I experienced an earthquake was in Virginia in 2011, when my family’s minivan just happened to be driving over the bumpiest road in town. We had no idea anything had happened until we got home and all of the art on our walls was hanging slightly askew. The gallery wall over the TV was never quite the same after that. When we turned on the news and they confirmed there had been a small earthquake, I was fuming that I had missed it. I couldn’t let that happen again. I mostly forgot about that until Friday morning. I was in the shower, and I felt the ground shake a bit below me, heard a big rumbling, and saw the curtain shaking back and forth. I was surprisingly calm about it, and assumed street construction was just shaking my building, until I heard my roommate call my name and asked if I felt that. I had done it. I felt an earthquake. I’ll never forget this moment. I’m glad everything was safe, I loved the memes and tweets for the ten minutes that they were funny. We will rebuild <3 

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

I’ve been reading Michael Schulman’s fantastic book Oscar Wars, which chronicles the history of the awards from the founding of the Academy almost a century ago, all the way up to the present. I’m loving it, hearing the complex, thrilling, confusing, and funny stories behind so many movies I love. It’s also made me realize just how many movies I haven’t seen, and my Letterboxd watchlist has never been longer…I decided to start working through it, and watched Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson in an incredible and iconic performance as Norma Desmond. I really don’t have any critiques. It’s perfect filmmaking, pristine dialogue, incredible sets, and a timeless, metatextual story. I remember trying to watch this in middle school, when I was trying to secretly culture myself (around the same time I first listened to Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” and wrote “second hand news” in my notes app, and nothing else.) I didn’t get through it back then (maybe I was too distracted by having missed the earthquake,) but I am so glad to have now officially seen it. Criterion Channel babey!!!!

“B2b”, Charli XCX

An instant classic from my namesake pop girl, who’s ready for “brat”????? That’s all I have to say go listen YAWLLLL.

INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE

MY PERFECT COMEDY SHOW IS BACK!!!!! If you can’t promote yourself how the hell you gonna promote somebody else. Basically it’s at Nighthorse in Greenpoint on April 26 and you really don’t want to miss it…Like really really don’t want to miss it…If you miss it you’ll tell your grandchildren you knew about it and didn’t go and they’ll respect you less…that’s how historic this is going to be. Get your tickets here XD.

Yesterday, despite the freezing downpour, I gallery-hopped through Tribeca with two artistically-inclined friends. There were a few shows we wanted to see, but really we were wandering, ready to discover something exciting and different and new. By now I’ve gotten pretty good at looking at a painting or installation and making a gut judgment: I love it or I don’t care…sometimes I hate it. My gut judgment tends to last upon closer inspection, though I’m pretty willing to admit when I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes I’ll warm to a painting I thought was garish or self-important at first glance, and occasionally a few extra seconds of inspection will force me to betray something I initially found bold, smart, or engaging. 

I turned 25 last week (brag), and as my prefrontal cortex solidifies, it’s nice to feel like I have a handle on my own personal taste, my ‘eye.’ I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, and I can generally figure out why. Even more, those closest to me have started to pick up on it as well. Yesterday, as I looked at Nina Silverberg’s small, precise paintings of gloves, books, and empty archways on view at 1969 Gallert, I was entranced by their warm colors, crisp lines, and repetition of symbolic motifs. My friend Eve turned to me and whispered, “these are so you.” How did she know???

(((Before I say anymore about personal taste, I want to acknowledge a passage from Henry Jenkins’ book Textual Poachers which blew my mind when I first encountered it in college. Jenkins concisely considers the relationship between popular “taste” and social power in a way that is as damning as it is riveting.In his own words: 

“Concepts of ‘good taste,’ appropriate conduct, or aesthetic merit are not natural or universal; rather they are rooted in social experience and reflect particular class interests…these tastes often seem ‘natural’ to those who share them precisely because they are shaped by our earliest experiences as members of a particular cultural group, reinforced by social exchanges, and rationalized through encounters with higher education and other basic institutions that reward appropriate conduct and proper tastes. Taste becomes one of the most important means by which social distinctions are maintained and class identities are forged. Those who ‘naturally’ possess appropriate tastes ‘deserve’ a privileged position within the institutional hierarchy and reap the greatest benefits from the educational system, while the tastes of others are seen as ‘uncouth’ and underdeveloped.”

Excuse the long quotation, but I find this argument fascinating, and probably worth its own newsletter, but I think it enriches any conversation about taste and culture.)))

ANYWAYS, Eve was right. Those paintings were ‘so me.’ Somehow, she had looked at them and seen my interests synthesized. It helps that she and I are often museum buddies, and have spent a lot of time looking at art together. In that moment, I realized I had done the exact same thing to her at the last gallery. As we entered Nicelle Beauchene gallery and took in their show of Silas Borsos’ delightfully cheeky still lifes, I said “oh these have Eve written all over them.” I was right. 

Our third gallery hopper, Charlie (other Charlie🙄) was not immune either. At Bortolami Gallery, he was entranced by Philip Pearlstein’s massive nude paintings made in the 70’s and 80’s. Eve and I confided in each other that the paintings were a little bit lost on us, but as Charlie talked more about them, we could appreciate why he liked them, and see what he was drawn to. All we had to do was look through his eyes.

There’s an amazing intimacy to knowing someone well enough to see the world through their eyes, and have their taste and ‘lens’ in your own toolkit. How lucky am I to have people in my life who can look at the world and see not just for themselves, but see for me as well? To have their perspectives in my back pocket? When you start to look for other people, the world opens up. You’re forced to decenter your own point of view, and realize that just because you don’t personally like something doesn’t mean it’s not likable or good. More than that, you get to see those you care about in everything; when a painting reminds you of someone you love, that colors your experience and understanding of it—the art literally changes, grows, expands, in that personal moment of meaning making.

Perhaps most thrilling of all is when you realize you’ve gotten it wrong. When you say “I know you’re gonna love this,” and then in fact they don’t. It can be shocking, jarring, humiliating, devastating, but ultimately it’s an opportunity to learn even more about them, to further explore their complexity, and know them even better; it’s a chance to deepen your relationship even further. (As I like to say, every time you feel stupid, it means you just got smarter.) These moments equally serve as reminders of the mysteries of art and humanity. We are not aesthetic machines who can see three things we generally like put together on a canvas and churn out instant appreciation. Sometimes we don’t know why we like things, or why we don’t. Yet again it becomes an opportunity to see, to think, to wonder, a little bit deeper.

I love that I can see the bright pinks and vibrant energy of a Matisse painting or a blooming rhododendron bush and instantly think of my sister and her love for bold color and delicate beauty. Anytime a painting depicts a mother holding her child, I have no choice but to send a photo to my bestie Morgan, a labor and delivery nurse, who loves babies almost as much as she loves the motif of the Madonna and Child. Impressionistic paintings of cloudy beaches and lush greenery remind me instantly of my parents, and their cherished collection of art that filled my home growing (see my mea culpa about taste and privilege above🙄.) When a pristine architectural interior comes across my Instagram explore page, you know that is going to be messaged directly to my brother for his vision board. A Tiktok clip of Liza Minelli on stage in her prime? That’s for bestie Caroline.

That little moment with Eve, a moment of being seen outside of myself in such a special and intimate way, really stuck with me as I processed the hundreds of paintings I saw yesterday. I just really love art ultimately and continue to be floored by all of the new avenues through which it can impact my life, my thoughts, my relationships, and my ways of seeing and being. NOW IT’S TIME FOR YAWLL TO GO LOOK AT SOME PAINTINGS OKAYYYY.

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Joni Mitchell back on Spotify

Tbh I haven’t totally looked into why Joni Mitchell and Neill Young dropped their weapons against Spotify and the insanity of the streaming model’s approach to compensating artists for their work. I have a feeling the details will be devastating. That being said, perhaps the only thing more devastating than corporate takeover is the lyric “you’re in my blood like holy wine/ you taste so bitter and so sweet/ I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet.” from “A Case of You” on Joni’s 1971 masterpiece album “Blue.” Earlier today while out on a walk I thought to myself, why have I been on the verge of tears all weekend?, and then I looked down at my phone and remembered.

Clockwatchers (1997)

I finally watched this film, directed by Jill Sprecher,  after years of John Early begging me to, and I really wish I had listened to him sooner. This perfect little film stars Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach as four young women brought together as nearly anonymous temps at an equally anonymous corporate office, brought together by their yearning for lives more exciting, more meaningful than office work. As they become close, they also start to realize they don’t know each other at all, and a small office scandal starts to tear them apart. Almost three decades later, it feels eerily relevant to our current age of corporate streamlining, outsourcing, and dehumanization of workers. Not to mention all of the performances are perfect and the fashion is great and Toni Collette I would die for you as usual. Parker Posey is a standout (shocker,) and if this whets your appetite for her 90’s Indie It Girl-dom, I recommend checking out Party Girl (1995) and The Daytrippers (1996) next. What a three year run!

Silas Boros’ “Fruit Theater” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

I mentioned this show in the manifesto above, but wanted to reinforce just how charmed I was by this whimsical still lifes, painted on linen, in which the subjects depicted (mainly fruit) almost seem to be playing with each other, or posing for the camera. Among my favorites of the bunch were Marmalade Muses (above) and Green Orchestra (at the top of the newsletter). They’re on view through April 6. Go go go!

Dawn going home on Drag Race

Sorry to play into my worst hater tendencies but I have honestly been waiting for this since the premiere…Morphine wanted that twink obliterated.

Thanks for reading Context Clues! If you like what I have to say, subscribe and forward to a friend! And if you hate what I have to say also please subscribe and forward to a friend…a healthy society needs criticism…

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Every time I find myself typing “facepalm” into the emoji search bar, I get a little thrill. It’s one of my most-used emojis, one that always manages to add a flourish of self-deprecation to even the most innocuous messages. Plus, it’s more evocative than any words I could have written in its place. I love that this little collection of pictographs, ostensibly designed to streamline communication, have developed into their own unique and universal language, a language of emphasis and association and connotation.

Emojis can live on their own, telling stories, delivering quick indications of emotion, excitement, frustration, shame, fear, joy, devotion. They more often serve as a sort of neo-punctuation, coming in at the end of a message to indicate how it should be read and received. Like an exclamation point or a question mark, their meanings are imprecise; an exclamation point can indicate excitement as easily as it indicates anger (which is why we need our CONTEXT CLUES, baby.) As anyone who regularly texts with someone over the age of 50 can tell you, a period to the Boomers is just the proper way to complete any sentence, whereas to us young folk it means this is serious and I am pissed. Don’t get me started on my Dad’s frequent use of the ellipses…

Emojis also carry their fair share of ambiguity. Sending a 🫣at the end of a late night message to a paramour means something considerably different than sending a 🫣to a friend with whom you’re trying to reconcile after a big fight. However, in both cases, it still works. 

I like that we have these little sources of flair. Little ways to add warmth and complexity and subtext and subtlety to even the briefest messages exchanged otherwise impersonally and coldly. It all feels very human; oh, I’m worried they’ll think this very straightforward message is rude? Let me add a little yellow smiling face at the end; a friend sent through a plan in a group chat and I want to let them know I’m fully on board in a way that’s quick and cheeky? Thank God for the salute emoji; oh I’m going to be late for no good reason and I’m fully aware that it’s my fault, but it’s not high-stakes enough for me to type out a real, earnest apology? Good thing I can just type out “be there in five🤦‍♂️” and they’ll get the idea. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a pictograph must be worth at least double that. They’re streamlined and efficient in a way that makes them archetypal, allowing us to pull from a collective understanding of signs and symbols to bend them to apply to whatever situation in which we find ourselves. Emojis are hieroglyphics, of course, but you didn’t need me to tell you that. 

Moreso, they are ways to embellish, deepen, complicate, and simplify the meanings of our messages. They indicate care and intention as well as whimsy and complexity. They stand in for words we’re not brave enough to type, as well as those we’re just too lazy to. 

At the moment I’m very pro-🥸. It’s cheeky, even lampooning, but let’s people know that I’m in on the joke. At least in on the joke that I’m trying to tell…who knows how it will be read on the other end?

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

Showgirls (1995)

I’ve been aware of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls for a while, but only in very broad strokes as a campy cult classic about an aspiring dancer in Las Vegas, and something about sabotaging with pearls. If I’m being honest, my main point of reference was this John Early video in which he dons full Nomi Malone drag to recreate what I now understand to be the iconic scene of her first rehearsal. I’d been curious, but never curious enough to find where to watch it, until this week, when it was added to the Criterion Channel as part of their “And The Razzie Goes To…” collection, of films that were not well-received on release, but have been reevaluated to have more merit than they were once given credit for. (I also watched Freddy Got Fingered (2001) as part of this series, and maybe I’m just a sheep but I see it for the dada masterpiece it was presented as.) I really enjoyed Showgirls, and was blown away by its scale and ambition (and lack of narrative coherence, which kind of added to the dizzying effect.) It’s full of sex yet deeply unsexy, an American Dream tale that reveals the American Nightmare of patriarchy, abuse, and reverence for spectacle above all else. Just don’t ask Nomi where she’s from…#differentPLACES

Yoga

Bravely going to be the first person to say that yoga is enjoyable and makes me feel good? I’m kind of just laying there but also I’m suddenly sore after? I found a studio near me that does entirely donation-based drop-in classes, and honey that was all I needed to hear. I still don’t know what most of the words mean or the poses are, but I’m trying my best and you know I’m finishing up with a big old Namaste. I am also a creature of habit and get very easily fixated, so check in in a few months and I will either be well past my yoga phase or be doing crow pose like it’s nobody’s business (I just had to google what it’s called.”

“I Got Heaven” by Mannequin Pussy

To be honest I haven’t yet spent enough time with the latest album from one of our best current indie punk bands to give a full review, but I am absolutely loving it. I’ve been a fan since their last album “Patience,” released in 2019, which features “Drunk II,” one of the best songs in recent memory. I saw them live in Richmond that year when they kicked off their first headlining tour, and it remains one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, thanks in no small part to lead singer Marisa Debice’s incredible vocals and stage presence. I remember standing at the merch table, pondering buying a tie dye shirt I loved and asking my friend “can I really wear a shirt with the word pussy on it?” I didn’t realize Dabice herself was sitting on the other side of the table until she paused her conversation, turned to me, and said “of course you can.” To this day it’s still one of my favorite shirts, and an incredible conversation starter. I can’t wait to see them live again in May. So far, standout tracks from the new record are “Split Me Open,” “Nothing Like,” and the title track, “I Got Heaven.”

Me Seeing Dune Part II Tonight

I’m seeing Dune Part II tonight!!! I think I would be good as a Bene Geserit but not sure I could survive the pain box. If anyone has thoughts lmk!!! See you at the movies <3 It will probably be in this section next week hehehe no substack spoiliessss

Thanks for reading Context Clues! If you like what I have to say, subscribe and forward to a friend! And if you hate what I have to say also please subscribe and forward to a friend…a healthy society needs criticism…

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Last night I was in a packed Bed-Stuy bar for a friend’s birthday. The DJ was spinning old records through a blasting sound system, which was nice but would have been even better had there been a bit more room for dancing. Instead, I was stuck—all six-plus feet of me—with my head much closer to the blaring speakers hung from the ceiling than to the conversations of my friends I was trying my best to engage in. I’ve been suspicious that my hearing is going for a while, and when I found myself essentially putting my ear directly up to everyone’s mouths as they spoke, (hauntingly reminiscent of several conversations with my grandparents, just now on the other side) my suspicions were only further bolstered. 

After a while, I gave up. I stopped trying to listen intently, or even to engage, and thought I’d try to dance or maybe just to zone out entirely. As the warm sounds of vinyl mixed with the buzz of chaotic chatter throughout the bar and then collided with the audible but indiscernible conversations happening right in front of me, I started to hear a symphony. 

Rather than trying to make out words, to listen closely, to focus my ears’ attention in any one direction, I just let myself treat them as sounds, notes, parts of a whole auditory experience. There was something exciting about it—a certain thrill in separating sounds from their symbols, in focusing on the blurry, in tuning in by tuning out. I tried to listen with fresh ears, as if I was an alien, and have a purely sonic experience.

This lasted maybe a minute or two before enough people had nudged and bumped and run into me on their way to the bathroom that I had to snap back into reality. I thought of Francois J. Bonnet’s 2020 manifesto “The Music to Come”, which asserts “a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as “music” is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth.” 

I bought this pamphlet at a bookstore when I first moved to Brooklyn a few years ago, and although I’m still not sure I fully grasp what Bonnet is getting at, I’ve continued to roll the ideas around in my head ever since. I love to think that there is something inherent and natural about music, and that our sensory experiences are just mediated, filtered representations of a more universal “truth” that as of yet eludes humanity. (I gifted the 56-page volume to a musically-inclined friend that December, and he accused me of “giving him homework for Christmas.” Yes, and what about it?)

This exercise also called to mind the notion of “abstraction in nature,” in which one similarly tries to decouple sensation and symbolism, this time visually. Rather than looking at, say, a bright sky over a field of grass and interpreting beautiful clouds and rolling hills, you take your brain ever so slightly out of focus, and instead see a pure composition: a broad plane of cool blue, speckled with blotches of white, grounded by an undulating strip of gradated green. A patch of gravel becomes a study in shape, texture, and value. A row of barren trees in the dead of winter reveals fractals, webs of lines jutting towards and away from one another and creating shapes as they intersect. It’s easy to forget how rare experiences of pure, bright color might have been in a world before pigments could be easily synthesized. 

It’s easy to forget that we have at least some margin of control over our perception, and that making an effort to shift, or at least pay attention to this perspective can be subtly revolutionary. The names we’ve given things are just names. The words we use are just words (although we can talk about language as a natural phenomenon another time.) The categories we create help us make sense of the world, but they’re nevertheless manmade. I once bought a sticker at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that said “shift perspectives, change the world.” I can no longer even remember what exhibit it was tied to, but that phrase has stuck with me. Perspectives are not locked, and “the world” is just a shared set of interpretations, most of which we have some semblance of control over.

Letting yourself look for abstraction can provide clarity in interpreting figuration. Understanding rules not only allows you to break them, but to investigate them. By actively interrogating our shared reality, even if it’s just a brief, zoned-out moment on a dive bar dance floor after a few too many gin and tonics, we can better understand how this reality shapes us, and, of course, how we have the power to shape it right back.

four more quick things…

here’s what I’m into rn…

“Albatross” by Fleetwood Mac

Yes, this song came out in 1969, and no there are no lyrics, but it really resonates (if you’re here it means you already read the nonsense above.) This song has been a favorite for a long time, but every once in a while it takes over for a little while. The slow, mournful guitars seem to be in conversation with one another as the fuzzy but relentless drum plods in the background, as if leading them towards an inescapable fate. Or perhaps, as the name suggests, it just captures a big, lonely bird, soaring over the ocean, heading nowhere in particular. The album that surrounds it, “The Pious Bird of Good Omen,” was released six years before Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band, and shows another side of Fleetwood Mac, more rooted in the emerging rock scene in the UK. I recommend it all!

This tweet from @cardamomkiss

There’s not much more to say…it’s just the truth. If you’re ever in London, go to the Victoria and Albert. Fiber arts are perfect. I wish I was at a museum with my mom right now. 

The Hospital (1971)

See, my whole thing is that I love random movies from the 70’s…and unfortunately *mz*n Prime does have an incredible selection of exactly that. I stumbled upon The Hospital the other night, looking for anything, really. As a huge lover of Dr. Strangelove (1964), I was surprised to realize that I had never seen another movie starring George C. Scott, and decided to amend that. He plays a spiraling chief of medicine at a New York hospital, going through a midlife crisis as a string of mysterious deaths occur just under his nose. It’s pretty bizarre and tonally all over the place, but there was something incredibly charming and engaging about it. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore! For better or for worse! And btw it’s for worse!

The Traitors

I promise I pay attention to current media too!!!! I am of course loving this show…Phaedra makes me laugh laugh laugh. Sheree I would die for you. Pilot Pete go lay an egg. CT see me after class. Trishelle yeah yeah whatever. John I’m just like what the…I do think I would love to spend some time at that castle, but I hate how they all eat dinner at little stools in sitting chairs…maybe if the dining room table wasn’t covered in a floral typhoon there would be some more room for eating…#NotASermonJustAThought. And of course I’m still mourning Peppermint. We love you girl.

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Among the Little Golden Books on my childhood bookshelf, one stands out as especially formative for, like, my whole thing. “The Monster at the End of This Book,” written in 1971 by Jon Stone and illustrated by Michael Smollin, stars Sesame Street’s Grover, addressing the reader directly. He is aware that he is in a book, and the first page opens with the muppet already on edge, having himself read the title. He’s scared of whatever beast is waiting for us at the end of the story, and pleads with the reader not to turn the page.

As you go against his wishes, Grover grows increasingly frantic, going to drastic measures to prevent you from turning the page. He ties a web of knots, nails pages together, and even builds a brick wall, desperate to keep himself safe from the monster. He gets angrier and angrier at the reader, which always thrilled me, his panic palpable. Smollin’s illustrations make this chaos visual, blending warm colors and giving the text personality, emphasizing and stylizing words and text bubbles to capture Grover’s hysteria. It’s kind of an aesthetic revelation, hand-drawn yet crisp, frantic yet legible, over-the-top yet perfectly spare. 

You reach the last few pages, and Grover has exhausted himself. He makes one final plea for his safety, but seems resigned to his fate. Fatefully turning to the last page, there is a sigh of relief. There’s nobody on the page but Grover, who remarks “well look at that! This is the end of the book and the only one here is…me! I, loveable, furry old Grover, am the monster at the end of this book. And you were so scared!”

He got my ass! What a plot twist. I remember being so excited the first few times this was read aloud to me, on the edge of my seat for the big reveal. Then, once I became familiar with the plot twist…somehow it kept getting better? The spoiler didn’t spoil, it sweetened. It enriched. Being aware of the stakes, or lack thereof, made all of Grover’s terror even funnier; he was stressed out for nothing, a perpetual victim of a panic that would never pay off. He could find relief at the end of every read-through, but only if you, the reader, were first willing to put him through sheer hell (I wish I could teach him about the 5-4-3-2-1 Coping Technique.)

Would you kill me if I said this was one of the first times I became aware of metatextuality? Grover was aware of his status as a character in a book, with the stark white void of the pages becoming a real place; his home, his fortress, his prison. He was trapped in this narrative, one he was doomed over and over again Groundhog Day style. I was an active perpetrator of this doom, forcing Grover through an obstacle course of anxiety. The guilt of this complicity was only assuaged by the knowledge that everything would be alright. 

There was something revolutionary for my young brain about the idea that a text could not only be aware of itself, but be aware of me—not just an anonymous recipient of the story, but an integral part of its existence. Without me, the pages don’t get turned. Without me, Grover doesn’t have to have a panic attack, but then again, without me he also never gets the relief of discovering that there is nothing to be afraid of. There is only a monster at the end of the book if I get him there. Without me, the narrative can never be completed. 

Of course, I wasn’t aware of these complex dynamics of media analysis as a five year old, but I can’t help but think it flipped some kind of switch: Things I loved, like “Spongebob Squarepants” don’t just emerge from thin air, but people have to conceptualize and bring them to life. Even then, they’re not truly alive until they’ve reached the viewer. It’s a certain notion of activation that I’ve carried with me since, and that continues to excite me as I engage with art across mediums. If a blue muppet has a panic attack in the white void of narrative fiction, and no one is there to witness it, did it ever even happen?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Barbie (2023), is a direct rip off of this masterpiece.

While we’re on the subject of this picture book’s influence on my taste, I think one could draw a direct line between my enthusiasm for this book as a child and my love for the paranoid political thrillers of the 70’s. After all, this book is a paranoid political thriller from the 70’s. 

This is baby’s first The Parallax View (1974). Grover’s panic and paranoia are not all that dissimilar from Robert Redford’s in Three Days of the Condor (1975). His desire for truth and safety against a powerful, abstract foe (me) directly mirrors that of Woodward and Bernstein’s against Nixon’s Republican party in All the President’s Men (1976). The only color palette as perfect as Smollin’s is that of The French Connection (1971). I’d be remiss not to point out that all of these were released after “The Monster at the End of this Book.” 

Would I still love Klute (1971) had I not first been made aware of the complicity and voyeurism of media consumption and the power dynamics between art and commerce through this cardboard book? Is this the type of children’s education The Sesame Workshop was going for? What’s your bag, Grover?

There’s also the thread of uncontrollable anxiety, launched by a kernel of truth and blown way out of proportion through sheer panic and awfulizing. I know that panic, and even as a little kid I was getting pretty good at awfulizing. There was comfort in knowing that you could laugh it all off at the end, when everything’s fine, when you realize there was never anything to worry about in the first place. But there’s also shame that lingers, a humiliation that something so inconsequential could have evoked such a reaction, and that you made it everyone’s problem, even the potential voyeur who could be pulling all of the strings.

On the true last page of the book, a coda to the grand finale, Grover has returned to the white void, no longer in need of his construction material, and covers his face with his hands. A thought bubble reveals how he truly feels: “Oh, I am so embarrassed.” Me too, sweet angel!! It’s okay!!!

four more quick things…

Here’s what I’m into rn…

The Spaghetti Variable

Last night, I saw God in a microwave. At the debut of my dear friend Mitchell Ashe’s one man show, “The Spaghetti Variable,” he transformed The Tank into a laboratory, eating increasingly scalding plates of nuked spaghetti as a means to access his memories, 95% of which have been mysteriously lost. Mitchell is amazing at holding an audience in suspense, in disbelief. He revels in making you squirm and in testing your patience (the show starts with the room completely dark, lit only by the light of the microwave, which cooks a plate of spaghetti for five minutes, setting your expectations for a night of awkward endurance.) Mitchell’s performance was athletic, pushing his body to the absolute limit (after shotgunning his third Diet Coke in a row I became truly worried for my friend’s safety,) but it’s all rooted in an earnestness and a yearning for community, safety, peace. Mitchell plays mournfully on the musical saw, but only after he has used it to saw off one leg of his stool to make it less wobbly; in a faux-karaoke scene, he croons Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain” so beautifully and effectively that you almost forget that his mouth is overflowing with fake blood; the show’s emotional climax comes as Mitchell dances nude with a body pillow. It works! I’m excited to see how this show develops and urge you to check it out next time it’s on. (Mitchell is also making a video with fellow genius Pearl Emerson for my mixed-media comedy show this Friday, just FYI :P)

The Devils (1971)

Watched this crazy telling of a true story of religious hysteria and political persecution in 17th-century France as part of the Criterion Channel’s Ken Russell spotlight. I knew nothing about it, but was sold from the opening moment, in which King Louis XIII performs in drag as Botticelli’s Venus for his royal court of genderfluid revelers. The film becomes The Crucible meets Suspiria, with monumental, pristine set designs, and amazingly unsettling performances from Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave. It’s a nightmare visual fantasia, somehow released by Warner Brothers in 1971? Highly recommend.

“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM”

I’m personally loving Beyonce’s latest foray into country. Paris, Texas references abound as she starts the rollout of Act II. I prefer TEXAS HOLD ‘EM to 16 CARRIAGES if I’m being honest. But I’ve also been waiting for this since Daddy Lessons. There’s a real warmth to this song, it’s a southern summertime dance, with a whistle melody flowing through like the perfect breeze to cool everything off. And the cherry on top? Tressie McMillan Cottom is going to have a ball with this era.

This One Mitski x Bones and All Edit

This fancam from Luca Guadagnino’s undersung 2022 masterpiece starring Taylor Russell as a vagabond cannibal perfectly combines its haunting, lonely aesthetic with relevant lyrics from Mitski’s “Abbey”: “I am hungry/ I have been hungry/ I was born hungry/ what do I need?” It’s so good. It was posted in May of 2023 (of course by user @ soccermommyfan) but I watch it regularly. The song and the movie have so much to say about each other! How exciting and inspired to put hem together. I am personally an advocate for the Fancam Oscars and would love to be put on that jury. I also just want to make sure we have one more moment for this beautiful film before we go full Challengers-mode in the next few months. I see you Luca!

Thanks for reading! See you whenever <3

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Every time I watch a season of a reality competition show, by the time the finale rolls around the cast has become my family. I prefer a show with a product rather than just a game for games sake. I prefer Project Runway to Survivor; Top Chef to Big Brother; Top Model to The Challenge. 

These shows bring me comfort like nothing else. They were foundational to me and my family growing up (television as the modern hearth etc. etc.) We measured time in air dates: Mondays were for American Idol, Tuesdays Dancing with the Stars, and by Thursday it was already time for Project Runway. 

My family loves to observe, to judge, to talk over the TV, and to engage in the drama.  What my siblings and I especially loved growing up was to vote for our favorites (I say this like it was in the past when in reality I have voted via text for American Idol several times in the past calendar year.) 

The evening after my Grandfather’s funeral in 2006, my Grandmother’s house was flooded with somber guests chatting, consoling, and picking at the spread. The three of us, however, were in my Grandmother’s bedroom, crowded around a small TV, watching the Season 3 finale of Dancing with the Stars. Emmett Smith, former Dallas Cowboys running back, and Cheryl Burke had just all but locked up the golden mirrorball with their freestyle to “Can’t Touch This,” performed as always by the house band (this still ranks among my favorite finale freestyles, including Drew Lachey’s and Charli D’amelio’s.) I think this was the moment I developed my lifelong habit of biting my fingernails. I couldn’t stand the thought of Mario Lopez beating this dream team. 

In this panicked moment, we burst from the bedroom into the funeral reception, and found every adult with a cell phone. We interrupted conversations, badgered aunts, uncles, and cousins, and collected every flip phone on the premises, all of which we used to vote for our pick as many times as possible (ten per phone of course). Our efforts weren’t in vain: Emmett and Cheryl took the mirrorball, and the Flynn family continued to believe in the power of the vote. I blame this episode for my enthusiasm for Hillary in 2016. (Does anyone remember when Cheryl Burke was on the Suite Life of Zach and Cody as a travel nurse? My dad still references it regularly. )

There was a real comfort to these shows: the ritual, the drama, the high stakes bolstered by a consistent formula. It gave us something to talk about, an outlet for our opinions, fertile ground for playful arguments that end in slammed bedroom doors. With each critique, I built my own sense of taste, and started to discern all of my family members’ eyes. It was how we got to know each other, see everyone’s wheels turn.

These shows also, of course, taught me to grow the hell up and realize that life’s not fair. Every time Tim Gunn loved something in the workroom and Heidi and Nina tore it to shreds on the runway, I lost a bit of my innocence. A gay boy became a gay man. 

Despite the upbringing I’ve just outlined, I for some reason felt the need to keep it a secret when I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. I didn’t want unwelcome questions about my obvious-yet-undisclosed sexuality, but I also liked having something that was all mine. I got to discover a whole new world, a new structure, a new language. I fell in love with the queens in the same way I had fallen in love with every single person to ever compete on The Next Food Network Star (except Dom from Season 11 I still can’t stand you Dom.) Eventually the secret got out, and my sister joined in the fun. I’m not sure she could go toe-to-toe with Michelle Visage, but she could do some serious psychic damage to The Hilarious Ross Matthews. These shows kept us all in touch even as we grew up and left home; we had to watch these shows, we were obviously going to have strong opinions, and the family group chat was a safe place to express them.

My most recent obsession has been Ink Master, a tattoo competition show which is as insane as it sounds. I’ve binged season after season, unable to stop myself. The people who compete have the most bizarre yet on-the-nose ideas about gender and masculinity, serious anger issues, and fascinating names (Creepy Jason, Sausage, Tatu Baby, and Cleen Rock One are amongst my favorites,) but damn if those creeps can’t tattoo! Don’t forget that they call the tattoo-ees “human canvases.” And yes I have the human canvas application bookmarked on my laptop okay…

I love that this show lets me be a critic. After one episode I was already comfortable calling a bad tattoo “jacked,”’ “chewed up,” and “tonal as hell.” And I was right. Now that I’ve seen more seasons than I haven’t, I have a sixth sense for Ink Master. I know what the judges will like, I know when someone is in over their heads with an American Traditional panther or a New School hot rod, and I can always sniff out when a Flash Challenge is actually going to be an Elimination Challenge. There’s something nice about knowing something so instinctively and intimately. Especially when that something is a Spike TV show hosted by a former guitarist for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Dave Navarro you will always be famous and creepy. 

As prestige TV starts to eat its own tail, there’s something nice about knowing that people who want to make art also want just as badly to be famous. Reality competition makes that very apparent. And that’s America baby. You think I don’t love this awful country? Grow up.

four more quick things…

Here’s what I’m into rn…

“Nobody Does it Better” by Carly Simon

I handled this year’s seasonal depression the way I always do: by watching as many James Bond movies as possible (fascinating half-century chronicle of changing ideals of masculinity in the shadow of waning global empire btw.) I warmed to Roger Moore this year, and watched what’s probably his best Bond flick, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Better than the movie, however, is the Bond song, performed by my auntie Carly Simon and arranged by my boo and Kennedy Center Honors mainstay Marvin Hamlisch. It’s the perfect song: dramatic, cheeky, cinematic, a little sexy, and a smidgen mournful. It’s the best Bond song, closely followed by “Skyfall” and “Live and Let Die.” There’s just something so awesome about it. I listen to it on repeat. I listen everywhere I go. I can’t go to sleep at night without watching the legendary live performance on Martha’s Vineyard. Admittedly, every 6-9 months I become deeply obsessed with a new Carly Simon song (we can talk about You’re So Vain later, but let’s just say it’s every English teacher’s favorite song for a reason.) I also want to point out that it’s very chic that the song has a different name than the movie, but includes the lyric “like heaven above me/ the spy who loved me/ is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.” She slipped it in! I love her.

Design for Living (1933)

YEAHHH I got a Criterion Channel membership. Pain changes people. One of the first things I watched was this three way sex comedy from the 30’s, released just ahead of the Hays-Code era of Hollywood censorship. It’s jarring but so exciting to hear transatlantic accents speak so frankly about sex, especially in a way that keeps power in the hands of the brassy broad at the center of a love triangle. Also, I had always heard about Gary Cooper, but oh my god. Like oh my god…

Cycladic Art at the Met

The Met’s Cycladic sculptures, some of the earliest surviving examples of the Ancient Greek sculptural tradition, have always been among my favorite items in their entire collection. Simple, smooth, human forms that could depict anyone, yet each one feels so specific. Something about archetypes, the human urge to represent, the act of making, the collective unconscious, what can I say? It all gets to me! The new expanded Cycladic display at the Met is stunning, and to be able to see and compare and consider so many examples of such a foundational tradition of western art history is just cool I mean let’s not mince words. I also like that they all stand like they’re telling their parents they just threw up. While you’re at the Met check out their Africa & Byzantium exhibition, kind of a revelation. They knew what they were doing with those darn mosaics back in the day.

Invisible Architecture

Your ass is not getting out of this without a plug. My mixed-media comedy show Invisible Architecture is NEXT FRIDAY, February 23, at Nighthorse in Greenpoint (and yes I live in Greenpoint I’m a hometown hero). Beautiful comedy by Michelladonna, Mera Cualfield, Charlie Bardey, and Annabel & Sabina Meschke…plus videos by Tim Myer, Lukas Battle, and Pearl Emerson & Mitchell Ashe. Plus my brother and sister are coming if you want to fact check the Dancing with the Stars story from before. See you there pookie!

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