I was a little bitter that I felt like I couldn’t partake in the collective nostalgia, for a number of reasons. I was also annoyed that people were prematurely marking the decade’s passing when the most important 10-year anniversary hadn’t even happened yet, which was of course my own move to New York in August of 2016.

That first year in the city I did nothing in particular. I smoked other people’s weed in Stuy Park and filled in my eyebrows with too much enthusiasm and saw every other movie screened at Village East Cinemas. I read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and paid too much money for crappy chardonnay at the one liquor store near my dorm that never asked for ID. I was too candid in class and too standoffish at parties and generally made a fool of myself in most contexts. All of this set the tone for the remainder of my college career, which ended up being three more years of unremarkable routine and begrudging, belated self-discovery.

I was spectacularly unhappy through most of it, more so than I realized at the time, depressed almost to the point of delirium. But at least I was spectacularly unhappy in New York and not the Massachusetts suburb where I’d lived my whole life up until that point.

No one is compelled by writers waxing poetic about New York except for those of us who are already in thrall to the city, and even I find that pretty tedious to read much of the time, so I’ll try to refrain from it here. Anyway, I suspect that what I like about New York is not in fact unique to the place: the proximity of other people’s lives, the convenience, the anonymity, the history. The sun on the bricks and the brownstones, the feeling of being in perpetual motion. The relief, on a hot day, of walking down a street where a fire hydrant has been opened and the rushing water lowers the temperature of the whole block. The sense that when I’m here, I’m in the world.

As I slipped out of my 28th year last month, I was thinking a lot about Joan Didion because that was the age at which she famously left New York, writing in her essay “Goodbye to All That:”

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms.

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

It’s the latter part of this excerpt that tends to get quoted again and again, but the first part is what I return to most often. For years I didn’t even realize that Didion was describing an unpleasant experience because I was so enchanted by the imagery of soaked silk spilling from the windows of some beautiful old walkup on 75th Street. When I first read that essay, freshly spat out of the suburbs, everything in New York—every weather-related inconvenience, every shaft of light and ruined piece of fabric—was magical to me, and I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave.

Those early years in New York I experienced no great romances. I suffered no extraordinary disasters. My achievements, small and inconsequential, revolved almost exclusively around the themes of passing my classes and not killing myself. My heartbreaks were glancing blows; the hurts I caused others were invariably more severe. I can count on one hand the number of people I met during those first years with whom I’m still in any sort of regular contact, even though, at the time, I was convinced that they would be my friends forever. I continued to believe this for the majority of the past decade.

It seems absurd now to claim that all of it counted. In fact I’m sort of amazed by how little it all mattered on the whole.

The series of circumstances that partially imploded my life came many years after I first moved to the city. In its wake most of the earlier memories have congealed and gone sour, reduced to a stubborn residue that clings to old photographs and anecdotes I would have probably been happy to reminisce about otherwise. My cat, who came into my company through a series of misadventures when I was a sophomore, was the last living, breathing link to that chapter of my life. When she died last year, I thought, well—goodbye to all that.

I would do a lot of the past ten years differently if given the chance, not least of which is my eyebrow situation circa 2016-2019. But I would still come to New York.

I suppose by saying that I’m making the same mistake I made when I first came here, which is that I’m giving the city more credit than it deserves in order to evade the real throughline in all of these experiences: myself.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, 2016 was the north star toward which I was always oriented. In the darkest depths of my teenage mental illness, that year retained its faint glow, still visible from what often felt like an insurmountable distance. It was the number automatically appended to my school logins since kindergarden because it was the year I was to be released from the clammy grip of the public school system. I liked to look at it, steadfast in the corner of my computer screen, as I did my English homework, imagining the life I might make for myself when that was the current calendar year.

My high school graduation ceremony took place in the gymnasium rather than out on the football field because it was pouring down rain that afternoon. It was a poorly-ventilated, anticlimactic affair. I thought I would feel different but mostly I just felt sweaty under my graduation robes.

When I arrived in New York a few months later, laden with dorm decorations that included a Deaf West Spring Awakening poster and a very trendy twin XL duvet from Urban Outfitters, I had the same expectation that I would be instantly remade once I crossed the threshold into my residence hall on East 15th Street. I would sense it somehow, a crackling emission of energy from beyond the veil, like a benevolent lightning strike. When it didn’t come, I maintained my conviction that it would still happen one day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it never did. And even without that singular moment of revelation, even in the long shadow of bad memories, I’ve managed to stumble into a life that I’m glad to call my own, in the city I still love beyond reason.

I love riding the bus through Brooklyn on a sunny day where I don’t have to get to my destination by any particular time, all the glimpses of other people’s lives running parallel to and occasionally intersecting with my own. I love the elderly woman at the farmers’ market outside Tompkins Square Park who tells me which stall sells the sweetest peaches. I love the museums and the libraries and the subways and the parks. I love New York for every stupid clichéd reason I would have given you at the age of thirteen, eating dinner at the Times Square Olive Garden and thinking it was the height of glamour.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to love the memories that broke my heart, simply because they happened in this place which I find so easy to forgive despite everything, and because they happened to the person who brought me here. I take comfort in the fact that, ultimately, even Joan couldn’t stay away.

Ten more years, fifty more yards of yellow silk, none of it counting and all of it mine. It’s still everything I ever wanted.

— ECT

The writer and musician Eliza McLamb recently published a great essay looking into the practices of a digital marketing agency called Chaotic Good. She specifically focuses on the agency’s connection to the band Geese and its frontman Cameron Winter, who’s lately been hailed as the savior of indie rock by a perhaps suspiciously high number of both critics and TikTok commenters. I think that McLamb’s essay about what this all means for the music industry and current working musicians basically says everything that needs to be said. But someone sent me another Substack article on the same subject by a Tony Price, which I frankly found insufferable, and it got me thinking about something that I’ve often wondered aloud to friends about but never really tried to articulate in writing.

Is it possible to make music (or any type of art), especially in the current moment, without referencing and/or imitating your antecedents? It possible to write about music (or any type of art) without comparing it to its antecedents? If indeed impossible, is either inherently bad?

Personally, I go back and forth on this, because I love a reference and I love history and I don't think "originality" is a moral imperative for art. In my art history classes at Parsons nearly a decade ago, I saw firsthand how young aspiring artists deliberately resisted learning about the history of their preferred medium because they were too focused on their own output and attendant branding. But I also don't think that everything needs to be a reference in the first place, or explicitly acknowledged as one. And then at the same time, I generally only like old(er) media, and find myself underwhelmed if not outright irritated by so much of what comprises contemporary media. And then I’m also frustrated by the current culture of endless remakes and rehashings, the pervasive retromania that has gone far beyond beating a dead horse and is now kind of just parading the horse’s corpse around.

Last week, my coworkers were discussing Hilton Als' review of the 2026 Whitney Biennial for the New Yorker.1 He specifically calls out Precious Okoyomon's contribution to the show, a sculpture series of baby dolls (some in blackface) and stuffed animals stitched together, many of which are hanging from nooses. Als seems to think that Okoyomon is obliged to somehow reference Mike Kelley, who also very famously used stuffed animals in his work, and that their failure to do so is representative of the whole Biennial’s failure to acknowledge art history more broadly. I admit that I do always think of Kelley when I see stuffed animals in a fine arts setting, but I also don't think Okoyomon's work has to be in direct dialogue with his. In a way it already is anyway, given the context of its exhibition, because many, many visitors to the museum will make that connection on their own whether or not it’s stated aloud.

Or they won't, and maybe that's OK?

This issue of antecedent acknowledgment becomes a double-edged sword for creators, listeners/viewers, and critics alike, because the response to this acknowledgment ultimately hinges on whether you personally agree with the comparison. Their tasteless pastiches vs. our informed homages…

Tony Price writes:

Geese™ is not a rock and roll band.

They don’t sound like Television…They don’t sound like the Rolling Stones. They don’t sound like the Velvet Underground…They don’t sound like Deerhunter…They don’t sound like the Strokes. They definitely don’t sound like the Fall…If anything, they sound like every single one of these bands discographies being streamed in HD at the same time through AirPods™. And that, my friend, sounds like a FUCKING RACKET.

I agree these comparisons, which are frequent in the reviews lauding their 2025 album Getting Killed, range from silly to asinine, because Geese’s music doesn’t really sound like them, but also because I think this is lazy writing. As much as I appreciate historical context, I am also sick of cultural criticism—or more broadly, reviews of Anything—that only compare the subject to other people in the field.2

If you look past his truly galling writing style, you can see that this guy Tony has a somewhat salient point about how these references ring hollow, in the case of Geese and so many others today, because almost nobody who’s created a viable career for themselves off their own creative work in 2026 can authentically share their referents’ lifestyles. In other words, they’re not slumming it the way real punks did. But who in the music industry is, nowadays, except for the same musicians who are embarking on grueling tours without major label support and eating ramen while very much not being lauded by the masses?3

And in either case, does that affect the quality of the music itself? I ultimately like Geese’s music, even if I do find Cameron Winter himself a little cringe-inducing. But Emily Green is an excellent guitarist, and I’ve been known to listen to both Getting Killed and their 2021 album, Projector, with some frequency. I like their arrangements, how the violin interacts with the guitar, the emphatic use of trombone, and the manic structures their songs are often built around. I like the sputtering bass lines. I like their melodies, especially when they’re straightforwardedly pretty and in direct contrast to Winter’s less than conventional vocal style. Sometimes Winter’s lyrics are brutally corny, and sometimes they hit me right where I’m tenderest.

I think the other reason why people are having such a strong reaction to the uncovering of Chaotic Good’s marketing practices is that nobody likes to admit that they got got. We know how commercials work: even if the exact product isn’t immediately clear, we know that by the end of the ad there’s going to be a call to action that involves spending money on something. The “algorithm” is much more opaque.

It's scary to realize the extent to which our entire digital landscape is orchestrated by highly sophisticated corporate machinery. As much as we may try to cling to the old view of the internet as a democratic platform for community-building and organic “discovery,” it’s much more likely that any given piece of content you’re seeing on your feed is the result of decisions made by stakeholders who actually don't care much—if at all—about the culture they're controlling. And it’s lowkey embarrassing to admit that you found yourself agreeing with the positive comments underneath a Tiny Desk concert video (or in this case, a From the Basement session), only to learn later on that those were probably all just bots echoing each other as part of a carefully curated “digital narrative”.

I do think that's worth being critical of, and I wish people were more vigilant about their own susceptibility to marketing in all its forms but especially online, whether from a major music label or a government agency dedicated to “apolitical” space exploration.4

The thing that saved me from total despair at the close of McLamb’s essay was her affirmation that she does actually like Cameron Winter’s song “Love Takes Miles,” and that her enjoyment of the song, the emotions and memories she associates with it, are real and hers to keep, long after Geese have disappeared from social media feeds. I found it lovely and moving the way she describes her discovery of the song, because it chimes so well with many of my own experiences: “How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it.”

Even more succinctly, a comment on McLamb’s essay reads:

That’s the thing I didn’t get from Price’s essay, which was sent to me in part because it opens with a discussion of the Velvet Underground and the disputed authenticity of the obscurity that’s been ascribed to them in retrospect. Even when praising them, there’s no real acknowledgment of his own emotional connection to their music:

The Velvet Underground were, and still are, the greatest rock and roll band to ever exist. That’s not because some prick in a denim jacket at Rolling Stone™ made a living off of signalling that he was tuned into the counterculture, not because of what Brian Eno said, not because of that fucking Banana™.

So why are they so great, according to this guy? We’ll never know, because he immediately launches into like 3000 words of very unclever, millennial Lester Bangs cosplay. Oh, well.

I also didn’t get from Hilton Als’ essay what exactly it is about Mike Kelley’s work that he finds so moving compared to Precious Okoyomon’s. Even if you accept the premise that Kelley must be understood as ground zero for artistic plushie usage, why are his works successful in “engag[ing] with the passage of time, the commodification of emotion” while Okoyomon fails at their own stated goal of “thinking through a noncoercive rearrangement of desire”? Again, I guess we’ll never know, because Als’ review ends shortly after this conclusion with no further analysis.

What makes Television so good, or Deerhunter, or the Fall? Is making a reference to a canonical example of a medium worthwhile if you don’t identify what made it effective in the first place? Is that not equally as hollow as some chump citing the greats for inspiration even when their own work sounds like crap? Is liking something because a bunch of critics in the 1980s (or bloggers in the 2000s) decided it was cool any more or less authentic than liking something because you got it served to you by a social media algorithm? None of that matters anyway if we can’t articulate our own relationships to the work, what particular ways in which we’re moved and inspired and infuriated and frustrated by them, and why we return to them after that initial click.5

For the past 15 years, my primary source of music discovery has been cool girls I follow on Tumblr, which remains one of the last bastions of algorithmless internet. That and recommendations from friends (frequently the same people), non-friend radio shows (via KEXP, NTS, and WFMU), references made elsewhere, film soundtracks, and now the 1001 albums project which is frankly almost entirely mid but very occasionally leads me to an excellent record that I know for sure I would never have found otherwise.

At the very bottom of the list is current ambient conversation, the stuff that Chaotic Good is apparently working so hard to create. But that’s because I LIKE going out of my way to find new music. I’m aware that the vast majority of the world does not engage with music like this. Although it makes me sad and I can’t imagine living like that, I recognize that it is no great crime in theory. But I also think that kind of complacency in terms of what media you consume and how you consume it is worth resisting.

And yeah, maybe I fell for it anyway. But at the end of the day Getting Killed is a pretty good album, and at least I know why I think so.

The thing that bugged me the most about my classmates’ disinterest in the syllabi of our art history courses was the disinterest itself. There is no greater sin than incuriosity, especially for those who aim to develop their own creative practices, or at the very least comment on others’.

Bad taste can, however begrudgingly, be forgiven. But an unwillingness to interrogate what informs your taste is irredeemable.

— ECT

If you aren’t in the habit of trawling the internet for primary sources on dead rockstars, let me be the first to break the wonderful news to you: Tom Verlaine’s archives were recently acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The New York Times article about the acquisition includes a photograph of Verlaine’s signature checkered leather jacket, languishing on a wooden clotheshanger against the blank wall of his former apartment in Chelsea. I didn’t actually recognize the jacket at first despite having seen it in dozens of photographs. It was unfamiliar to me here because, for the first time, it was in color.

Most of the photographs from this era—if they exist at all—are in black and white. They are by turns stark, the result of a camera flash in a dimly-lit room, or taken without any real light source at all and therefore composed almost entirely of shadows and indistinct shapes. Either way they’re difficult to decipher, flattened by the lack of variation in tone, and often badly reproduced: copies of copies.

Even in the well-preserved photographs, the entire spectrum of light is reduced to a binary: pale or dark. Colors (of hair, eyes, clothes, furniture, guitars, walls, art) can only be guessed at. This lends them an impression of unreality, with the awareness that the missing pigmentation is such a drastic departure from how we perceive the world through our own eyes on a daily basis. It makes the images hard to believe.

So I had no idea that the jacket was so flashy. Even dulled by years of wear, the colors are immediately eye-catching: toffee, brick red, fuchsia, several shades of green from meadow to moss. What looks white in the 1970s-era photographs is actually gold and glittery. It surprised me because the jacket seems at odds with the type of person that Verlaine was purported to be, someone who shirked the spotlight and took everything, including and especially himself, very seriously.

I’d already had reason to doubt the mythology of his stoicism—this 1987 interview, for example, is really charming and silly, with Verlaine doing accents and cracking jokes left and right. But the jacket clinched it for me. Although his orders for the posthumous destruction of most of his unfinished work do seem to imply a lasting self-seriousness, the jacket in its multi-hued flamboyance simultaneously undercuts that, and it’s the jacket that got preserved.

The NYT article points out that, as a result of the aforementioned stipulation in his will, Verlaine’s archive is quite lean—40 linear feet compared to Lou Reed’s 110, for example, which is also housed at the Library for the Performing Arts.

(I love that archives are often recorded in terms of linear feet. I love the dimensionality implied by it. It’s easy to imagine research as a wandering down some path, surrounded on either side by hedgerows of documents; I count my steps and pause to kneel and examine something caught under the bramble of paper.)

I’ve traversed at least the equivalent of Verlaine’s archive, voluminously speaking, over the past year while researching the Velvet Underground. Naturally, I started with the aforementioned Reed papers at Lincoln Center in March of 2025. A trip to Cornell University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection this past October brought the total distance I’ve traveled in this venture—including dozens of subway rides back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan—to over 500 miles.1

I don’t generally talk about this pastime with strangers or even acquaintances, because the response is almost always to ask whether I’m “in school,” or working on a dissertation, or writing a book. Their bewilderment visibly compounds when I tell them I’m not. I can’t deny that it seems like a hell of a lot of effort to put into an activity that yields no results, but I like that it’s unconstrained by any semblance of a final product and therefore liable to go on forever. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, or something.

When I was a kid, I spent a great deal of time downloading every single photograph of the Beatles that I found online. I organized them in concentric layers of folders within folders on my 2009 Windows XP laptop which whirred and huffed with the effort of processing so many JPGs. I did this as if Beatles imagery is in any way a limited resource.

Then I would just sit there and Look at them. I could do this for hours, and I would have, too, if my parents hadn’t valiantly tried to put restrictions on my screen time.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always been like this: covetous of images of my favorite musicians and the information they convey. My love of the music is the current that powers the machine, but the music is never enough by itself.

There is precious little documentation of the Velvet Underground, especially compared to the Beatles. Even less of it is accessible for free online, and even less of that is available in any resolution higher than maybe 5 pixels maximum. So when I felt the first tug of fixation after rewatching Todd Haynes’ documentary in December 2023, I knew that I was going to have to take drastic measures to continue this pattern of behavior. I was going to have to do my Looking in person.

The band members themselves were also masters of self-mythology from the beginning, a tendency they no doubt adopted in part from Warhol’s fantastical approach to autobiography. Rock music journalism didn’t really exist in 1966, and certainly no one cared enough about them at the time to fact check any of their claims anyway. Early coverage of the band especially is riddled with half-truths and non-truths, from misspelled names and misidentified instruments to plain fabrications.

For example, in one article published in Barnard University’s weekly newspaper, Lou Reed is described having been born in Tennessee to a Vanderbilt professor who "raised him on a dichotomous diet of cyclotrons and clavichords,” later dropping out of Andover to pursue his dream of “adapting Mozart to a cybernetic society.” It goes on to say that Sterling Morrison was discovered by Lou after he became “disillusioned with ‘civilized’ society and slipped into anonymity on New York’s Lower East Side” as a result of his wife’s murder by Richard Speck.

However, John Cale’s real adolescence was exotic enough (Welsh coal mines, US immigration via Leonard Bernstein fellowship) that his fictional biography doesn’t stray too far from the truth.2 This ultimately becomes the refrain for almost all of the information we have about the band: sometimes it’s hard to tell what was always true and what became true because it was repeated again and again.

In so many ways, the band is tethered to another time—a time before constant surveillance and digital photography and decent handheld recording devices, a time where most everything was assumed to be ephemeral by default. They’re insulated as all oral histories are by the awareness that human memory is fallible and that stories tend to transform themselves each time they’re recalled. The Velvets knew that, too, and seemed to revel in it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that after he left music, Sterling became a scholar of medieval legends.

It’s in the photographs and film footage that we get a glimpse of anything approaching an objective record, and still I hesitate to think of them as particularly representative because they’re so few in number and also because almost all of them are in black and white until 1968.3 Maybe more than anything else, the bad picture quality and lack of color from the early days allows for the mystery—or at least the idea of the Velvets as shadowy figures, as an eternally brooding proto-goth group, expressionless behind their dark glasses—to linger. There’s no way to escape the present day cultural associations of black and white photography and the impression of all-black clothing, even though they did in fact dress more colorfully.

To wit: seeing Tom Verlaine’s jacket reminded me of coming across an auction listing for the suit Sterling wore during a 1967 photo shoot for the VU’s second album, White Light/White Heat. The photo shoot took place in a weirdly barren office; the band members were dressed in custom outfits designed and constructed by Betsey Johnson, who would go on to marry John Cale the following year.

The auction listing made me realize that when I think of the Velvet Underground—even after all the research I’ve done, the inconsequential mundanities I’ve scavenged in service of making the band realer to me, whatever that might entail—I still think of them in black and white. Within the privacy of my own mind, any anecdote from their history is imagined without color. I can’t seem to avoid the false memory of them as something necessarily removed from the natural world.

It’s the same “sense of incredible aesthetic distance” described by Amy Taubin in the Haynes documentary, referring to Warhol’s silent film Kiss: when projected at 16 frames per second, “the people in those images are breathing and their hearts are beating in a different time frame than yours is while you watch it.”

The rich green fabric4 of Sterling’s suit shrunk that aesthetic distance. It allowed me to see the photograph, and thus the band, for the first time all over again. This is the thing I find most pleasurable in my research: not the opportunity to verify rumors or uncover the “definitive truth” about the Velvet Underground but merely the chance to witness them in new ways.

Mostly, I’m amazed by how little it takes to make me happy. This process has resulted in a kind of asceticism that I can only assume rivals that of the most pious monks. I’m delighted by a single contact sheet; I’m captivated by a two-sentence exchange, spoken in a barely audible undertone, between songs on a demo tape. I spent the subway ride home from MoMA in a daze after I watched The Velvet Underground in Boston because I was so stunned by the fact of the film’s color and sound. Everything looked so warm and alive, their heartbeats aligned however haphazardly with my own for 30 minutes.

Isn't it so much more exciting to remember that they really were flesh and blood, mostly unextraordinary in their affect, rather than the hazy stuff of legend?

This process has also made me patient, because I’ve had to wait, often several months, to see much of the requested material. It has encouraged me to rely on people in a way that I’ve always resisted in pretty much every other area of my life. It has forced me to admit when I don’t know things and also to ask for what I want, to push past the fear of rejection or refusal. Of course, the stakes are low because it’s literally the librarians’ job to answer my questions and bring me the material I request, but it’s good practice nonetheless.

It’s given me a new appreciation for color and sound and language, all these fundamental elements of reality, and also for the silence that can be found perhaps nowhere as reliably as in the Special Collections Reading Room.

In that room I ended up combing through a lot of correspondence between the band members and their associates, much of which has been preserved because their communication in the 1980s and 1990s was conducted via fax in the context of Official Band Business. The Lou Reed papers also have all of the holiday cards sent to him by Moe and letters from Sterling’s wife Martha, as well as greetings and well wishes from various other people like Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page.

Maybe I should feel weirder about having snooped on so many personal and often devastating conversations between people who are all very much alive (with the exception of Lou himself and Sterling). But the truth is that I only ever felt truly bad about it once, when I sat in front of Laurie Anderson at a work event and for a moment debated whether I should tell her how much I admire her music—or thank her for donating her dead husband’s old crap to the library so nosy freaks like myself could look at it, and then apologize for looking at it. Ultimately I didn’t say anything because I was too embarrassed when I remembered the birthday cards she’d given to Lou, signed with a pawprint from their dog Lolabelle. I turned around in my seat. I couldn’t possibly ask anything else of her.

Despite my dogged pursuit of these intimacies, there are many other things I’ll never see or hear or know for sure, whether the “real” reason for John’s removal from the band in 1968 or the “real” color of the floral shirt he’s wearing in Rosalind Stevenson’s footage of them in 1966. That’s okay. In an age of instant access and total information, I suppose it’s nice to have some mysteries left.

No record holds the same significance for every single person that’s ever played it, or even every person that played on it. We’re all listening to the music and we’re all hearing something else.

Will I visit the Tom Verlaine archives at the Performing Arts Library once they’re made publicly accessible? Maybe. I’m not really into Television like that, although I did wait in line for almost five hours in the August sun to buy a couple books that once belonged to Verlaine. But I like knowing what that they’re there, the way I like knowing that anything at the library is there, because it means that it’s cared for, and free for anyone to look at. You only have to ask.

— ECT

We listened to records. We kept up with our correspondence (the postal system still ran, for a while). We played shuffleboard. We washed down our Emergency Survival Ration Crackers with mixed drinks. We read and reread: paperback novels, trade magazines, board game instructions, dictionaries. TV Guides for episodes that hadn’t aired, catalogs for products that were no longer manufactured, travel guides for places we would never revisit. We watched television until we had committed every beat of all the Office of Civil Defense’s public service announcements to memory. We clung to the small domestic comforts of the Before Times, preserved within the confines of our new subterranean lives.

At least this is what I surmised from “Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar,” an installation piece by the artist Michael Smith, recently on view at MoMA. It’s an artwork that you can walk around inside of.

I got the sense, as I wandered through the space and spotted new details with each glance, that I had stepped inside a novel. I was struck by the sheer density of information. The carefully staged clutter ultimately amounted to both a “plot” involving the nuclear disaster and a “protagonist” who once lived there. The fictional stories I admire most are the ones that feel fully realized beyond what is literally written on the page, books that function as portals through which I can catch a glimpse of an entire world, which is exactly what this installation was.

Over the past year, I have been thinking a lot about physical space as a narrative medium. Smith’s fallout shelter installation was as good as any novel in terms of world-building, or the kind of environmental storytelling associated with video games. The difference was that it was a world that I, as the “reader,” could physically inhabit myself.

The piece is a clear satire of the Cold War era in the United States and is in many ways quite funny, but there’s a pervasive eeriness to it, as well. That you’re in this space at all, poring over the detritus of a stranger’s life and piecing together biographical information based on the everyday objects left in their absence, suggests that there were no survivors.

Last spring, my mother and I went to Pittsburgh, and, at the urging of a colleague, I’d booked us tours for each of the Troy Hill Art Houses. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. From the outside, the houses are pretty unassuming—they look like any other cluster of single-family residential buildings, with dingy vinyl siding and flat facades.

The first one we toured was “Mrs. Christopher’s House,” created by Mark Dion. We were greeted almost immediately by the view of a perfectly preserved living room from 1962, set around Christmastime and looking for all the world as though the family who lived there was asleep upstairs and had simply forgotten to turn off the lights. My mother remarked that the scene bore an uncanny resemblance to her own childhood memories of Christmas in Massachusetts during the same time period.1

The tour continued: more rooms, more scenes. I hesitate to describe anything in detail because part of the magic was having no idea what bizarre details the next space would hold. In the attic, we were told by the tour guide that we could examine the clutter for ourselves. One wall was stacked high with dozens and dozens of little antique boxes, while the opposite wall was lined with jars. My mom and I spent some time picking out boxes and opening them. None of them contained anything of particular value—ping pong balls, old spoons, mismatched chess pieces—but it was the very fact that we could inspect them ourselves that made it exciting.

One is so rarely allowed to touch the art, after all. In the Michael Smith installation, you can walk around the room and even sit on the chairs, but there’s a docent hovering nearby who’s quick to chastise you if he thinks you’re about to actually reach out and touch any of the objects (ask me how I know). The Christmas living room was behind glass, like a taxidermy exhibit in a natural history museum, so it was even more exciting to now be given permission to handle these bits and pieces at our leisure. The tactility served to further immerse me in the story of the space. It even smelled nostalgic, like my own New England childhood, traces of moldering paper and pine tree air fresheners.

The second tour was “Darkhouse/Lighthouse” by Lenka Clayton and Philip Andrew Lewis. The original building had been destroyed from the inside by a fire and then left to further decay; its former floor plan is hinted at through the colors of smoke-stained bricks and what little is left of the wallpaper. The building is now occupied by a fully functional lighthouse, installed in what was once the basement and stretching up past the remaining kitchen cabinets into the attic, where the light itself is kept. We climbed the metal staircase to the lighthouse keeper’s room and again I was given the sense of entering a comprehensive fictional narrative, or otherwise stepping into a real person’s life. I studied the lighthouse keeper’s personal effects: correspondence, books on naval voyages and pelagic wildlife, spices for cooking. I felt a real tenderness toward the rumpled blankets left on the unmade bed, its frame curved to accommodate the rounded interior of the space, and the person who might have slept there. I imagined a story.

And the light itself was spectacular, of course, with a surprising depth of color captured by its elegant geometry. I could have sat up there for hours, watching as the broad beam of light skated over the wooden walls and dipped into the windows, disappearing momentarily within the cold sunlight of the outside world before emerging again in the dark.

I’m really enamored of the idea of an entire house as a work of art, of each room telling a story. Isn’t that how we experience the so-called real world, as bodies in spaces? I also like the notion that an artwork can be as complex as a house, full of details and dimensions that demand exploration beyond the first glance.

Many of the things I love, or the conduits by which I experience them, are flat. Words on a page, photographs, paintings, projection screens, records, the accursed iPhone that I carry around everywhere and find myself constantly glued to despite my best efforts to disengage from it. So this kind of installation art appeals to me as an alternative to that flatness and also as a means of literalizing my relationship to the art I am looking at: inside a body with eyes and ears and a nose and nerve endings, a body capable of stepping closer.

The one term I remember from my cultural studies courses 10 years ago is “meatspace.” I was reading a lot of the basic texts associated with new media—The Cyborg Manifesto, Simulations & Simulacra, A Rape in Cyberspace, etc.—and it was helpful to differentiate between events that occurred in the digital sphere and those that took place in what we still colloquially refer to as “real life.” I remember disliking the word because of the fleshiness implied by it—I thought it was yucky! But I can also appreciate the necessity of viscera in this context, where it was not a question of reality versus unreality, but of embodied versus disembodied.

The end of the world looks different depending on who you ask. The third and final Art House2 we toured is perhaps the one with the most narrative cohesion, and the only one that comes with a detailed artist statement explaining the thought process behind its design. (It is also the only house where the tour guide warned us that we were about to see something potentially scary.) “Kunzhaus” was created by the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski, who views it as a continuation of his decades-long practice of creating counterfeit historical moments through sculpture and installation.

Kuśmirowski’s plan for the house was informed by the real family who lived in the building from 1896 to 1948.3 We entered the house after the Kunz family has departed it, sometime during the Cold War. A trip to the basement revealed a covert espionage operation, with homemade radio transistors and sonar tracking devices bleeping and hissing away for all eternity. There was a sink choked with darkroom supplies, and above it a clothesline, on which were hung several perpetually developing photographs of weather patterns, clouds frozen in their passage over the ocean. We passed through a laboratory of sorts, and were afforded a glimpse into a very clean, chic retrofuturist parlor. The sense of unease grew as we made our way upstairs and found a partially-immolated room. The sofa and upright piano were blackened with soot and the hanging portraits’ faces had melted away, while the walls and hardwood floors were left strangely undamaged.

The most magical and (perhaps) lighthearted space in Kunzhaus is what Kuśmirowski refers to as “Double Room,” where we could peer simultaneously into two stately offices that seem at first to be perfect mirror images of each other, down to the books on the shelves and the objects arranged on the desks. However, the longer we looked, the more discrepancies—certain details in the framed artwork, the angle at which a chair was placed—became apparent, and the uncanniness crept back in.

Upstairs there was also a bathroom, bland except for the mangled corpse of an unidentifiable animal rotting in the bathtub. In his artist statement, Kuśmirowski identifies the creature as “the remains of a dog (possibly the last occupant of the house) who must have come here looking for shelter or some water,” which to me makes it clear that Kuśmirowski sees this space as perhaps not strictly post-apocalyptic, but certainly apocalypse-adjacent.

Michael Smith’s architecture of Cold War-era eschatology is tongue-in-cheek, while Robert Kuśmirowski’s is far more foreboding. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the American artist’s vision is kind of cartoonish compared to that of an artist born in postwar Poland. There is a mere whiff of violence implied by the emptiness of Smith’s fallout shelter, whereas the death and destruction of Kuśmirowski’s abandoned house are much more immediate and difficult to ignore.

The Troy Hill Art Houses weren’t the only installation art that my mother and I saw in Pittsburgh—the Mattress Factory had a number of pieces that took up entire rooms, including two by Yayoi Kusama and one by Greer Lankton, as well as a separate building that was similarly filled top to bottom by the vision of a single artist and his collaborators (in this case, Luke Stettner, whose whole-house artwork conveyed a narrative about the Allegheny County area’s history of environmental activism and the looming threat of ecological collapse).4

The Lankton piece was especially interesting to consider in contrast to the Art Houses, because it is a replica of the artist’s apartment in Chicago and appears to be accessible through a metal screen door after you’ve wiped your feet on the carpet of astroturf just outside. But we were only allowed to look into the space through the windows, prevented from discovering the hundreds of little details ourselves. I had to readjust to the rules of a normal museum; I kept accidentally smacking my glasses against the windowpane when I leaned too close. I couldn’t help but imagine a utopia in which everyone could be trusted to explore art museums at their own pace, to walk around and linger as they pleased, constructing narratives and characters as active participants in a space.

Meatspace could also be woodspace, breathspace, bloodspace, dustspace, any physical thing that brings us back to our bodies and our place within an environment. The tour guide urged us to resist the temptation to touch any of the ramshackle machinery in the basement of the Kunzhaus. Not because we might damage it, she explained, but because the dust that continues to naturally accumulate on its surface is an essential element of the artwork.

— ECT

The truth is that Graham and Laura and I were only willing to endure the rest of the museum for the sake of the exhibit on its third floor, Looking At Andy Looking, which was a collection of rarely-screened works filmed by Andy Warhol on his 16mm Bolex camera in the early 1960s. We complained our way into the museum via the gift shop1, griped our way up the stairs, and later kvetched our way through the so-called Superfunland (rancid vibes). In the Warhol exhibit, though, we were mostly quiet, preferring to chat in soft tones when not listening to the soundtrack of 1960s pop hits.

As we walked around, there was one gentleman that kept appearing in the films, whether lounging on the back of the titular Couch (1964) or fellating a fellow Warhol Superstar in the Factory’s bathroom,2 someone I recognized instantly from my Velvet Underground scholarship: Gerard Malanga.

Contemporaneous accounts of early Velvet Underground performances are few and far between, and even fewer of them actually focus on the band. Almost all of the reviews center around the fact of Warhol and the spectacle of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, their multimedia event: a cornucopia of colored lights, film projections, interpretive dance, and an overwhelming wall of sound that, according to most of the journalists, barely resembled music at all.

Gerard, who danced with the group while cracking a whip, and Nico, who sometimes sang and played a tambourine, are the two performers identified most frequently in these write-ups, which makes sense: they were both blond and astonishingly beautiful, and they generally stood in front of the Velvets so they caught the light more frequently.

Most of these journalists were more concerned with getting a quote from Andy than they were in interviewing the sulky musicians who sang about hard drugs and sadomasochism—and that’s if they could even understand the lyrics through the roar of feedback that poured out of the overworked amplifiers. Everything about the event was so outrageous, such a deliberate and unprecedented assault on one’s sensibilities, that the Velvets were seen by many in the audience as a mere backing band for the larger Warholian display.

One of the most frustrating—and tantalizing—aspects of being a Velvet Underground fan is this lack of primary sources. They were around for about five years. There are only four studio albums3. There is exactly one surviving film of the band’s original lineup in color with synchronous sound. There are only a handful of published interviews, and even the photographs are limited in number. The Velvets bootleg catalog ranges from remarkably high quality recordings that still manage to cut off right as the song actually begins, to tapes that yelp and squeak with microphone feedback and often sound like they were recorded underwater.

All of this to say, it was difficult for me to not feel some resentment toward Gerard for how many words he tended to take up in these descriptions of early VU/EPI performances. Up-tight, the only semi-official history of the band, was authored by Gerard and Victor Bockris, a critic who would go on to write a number of books about other musicians4. Up-tight dedicates an inordinate of time to Gerard’s memories of touring with the EPI, complete with excerpts from his diaries. I felt like he must have been overstating his importance to the act. I found his writing and recollections kind of annoying, drenched in a self-important tone, overly affected.

Regardless of my personal frustrations with him, Gerard was an undeniably load-bearing element of the early Warhol Factory scene in which the Velvet Underground found themselves, and remained so for many years after Lou Reed had unceremoniously fired Andy Warhol as the band’s manager/producer/promoter.

Just as there is a popular tendency to dismiss Warhol’s skills as an artist, there is a similar impulse to paint Andy’s acolytes as all vapid social climbers who had no talents outside of being very nice to look at and/or entertaining to be around. In some cases this might have been true, but in many cases it was not. Gerard especially was trained in silk screen techniques, which is why Warhol hired him in the first place, as well as photography, filmmaking, and writing. And—I suppose—dancing.

It was a combination of his influence on and ubiquity in the space, as well as his handsomeness, that resulted in Gerard being in front of Andy’s camera as often as he was. He was also frequently behind a camera of his own, although those films are less lauded and not often screened.

So when Anthology Film Archives announced a screening of three of Gerard’s films a couple weeks ago, followed by a poetry reading and a Q&A with the man himself, I bought a ticket with the hopes that these films might contain unseen footage of the Velvet Underground and/or the environment in which they often worked. And because he is one of the few remaining people from that scene, I think part of me hoped that I would be able to alchemize something in his presence, memory absorbed via osmosis.

In these films I ended up getting the Velvets footage I was looking for, but I also got a lovely collage of moments out of Gerard’s life from 1965 to 1970, some longer than others, plus a soundtrack by Angus MacLise, the Velvet Underground’s original drummer. The images were by turns frenzied and meditative, marbled by imperfections in the 16mm film. I tried to identify as many people as possible but they often came too fast for me to focus on the faces: Andy and Edie and Piero and Mary and Danny and Paul and Marian and Sterling and La Monte and Candy. Bob Dylan and Jane Fonda and Salvador Dalí.

When we were at the Museum of Sex, I turned to Laura at one point and said something about how bizarre it is that you can go from being one of the most beautiful and well-connected men in New York society and the art world at large, making love to countless equally beautiful and well-connected people, and then end up just an old man posting about how much he loves his cat on social media. I was talking about Gerard, of course, and with more irony than was probably necessary. I pulled up his Instagram on my phone and showed her a recent post that he had made announcing the adoption of his new cat, a tortoiseshell kitten named Rosey.

By all accounts, Gerard has always been a cat person. He’s written dozens of poems about them. In one of the few Velvet Underground documentary appearances he’s made, a cat is sitting on his lap for most of the time he’s on screen. He adopted Rosey a year after losing Odie, an elderly cat he’d taken in from his astrologer friend A. T. Mann.

Gerard loved Odie immensely. In life he wrote long posts that described Odie’s nature using language I admit I found a little flowery and melodramatic but still charming, because I am also a cat person. Following Odie’s death (at the age of nearly 22, older than Gerard was when he first started working at the Factory), the earnestness of this writing increased tenfold. Last year he even published a book of poems dedicated to Odie.

It was strange to watch this man, whom I only knew through photographs of his younger self, mourn his pet over the internet in the present day—a man who has experienced the deaths of so many people in his life, the death of a scene he’d built and a city he’d inhabited. I’m realizing now that I was so struck by his public grief for this animal because in society’s eyes it is ostensibly a “lesser” tragedy than losing a human being. It seems as though it should almost be shameful to mourn an animal so openly, simply as a matter of scale. But none of that matters when you’re in the thick of grief.

Now more than ever I admire Gerard’s outpouring of love for his late companion.

My own cat died very, very suddenly last week. I woke on Thursday morning to find her oddly lethargic; by that evening her condition had deteriorated to such an irreparable degree that I made the decision to euthanize her. The shock of it still makes my stomach churn.

I’ve never been in this apartment without Athena. Hell, I was only in New York for two years before she showed up on the fire escape of the apartment that I shared with my college roommate in Ridgewood. It was a great story, one I loved to tell anyone who would listen: she was a part-time kitty of unknown origins that we assumed belonged to someone else, until one day she unexpectedly gave birth to five kittens in our living room. (She was a perfect mother. It’s not very common that all the kittens in a litter survive.) It was chaos, of course, to have six cats in our tiny apartment during finals week, but it was ultimately one of the best experiences of my life. I had Athena for seven more years after that. I wish it had been 22.

Even though I witnessed her death and saw the doctor take her little body away, there’s part of me that remains convinced that this was all a great misunderstanding—an error that, once rectified through mysterious means, will return my girl to me. Every time I hear a noise, my brain automatically translates it as Athena’s movement elsewhere in the apartment. Without my glasses, every pair of shoes or bag left on the floor adopts her silhouette. I keep forgetting that she’s not just in the other room; I keep remembering that she never will be again.

When I showed Laura the post on Gerard’s account, she took my phone in her hand and studied it for a while. In that moment they were piping “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” by the Monkees into the room at a very reasonable volume, while the colorless light of the film projections flickered in my periphery—a pale imitation of an Exploding Plastic Inevitable show.

“Isn’t that so crazy, that you can be the ‘It’ boy of one of the most important cultural scenes of the 20th century, and still end up as some old guy on Instagram posting cat photos?” I joked.

Laura handed my phone back. She replied, serious, “Yeah, but wouldn’t it have been nice to see them all end up like that?”

On the opposite wall was a series of screen tests of young men that Warhol had found particularly beautiful. They all sat silently in front of the camera, the planes of their faces rendered in stark contrast, shifting in their seats, glancing at something offscreen, smiling shyly, looking bored, sleepy, hopeful, real. Not one of them is still alive today. We were in a room full of ghosts, plus Gerard.

At the AFA screening, seated two rows away from Patti Smith and being very chill about it, I was thinking about what Laura had said in that wretched museum. Gerard read a poem from his new collection about his late friend Rosey Blake, for whom his cat is named. During the talkback he was articulate and warm. He mentioned that a friend of his described him as possessing an “archival consciousness,” which I really liked.

That was the root of his kinship with Andy, I imagine, though based on this screening it seems like Gerard was more inclined toward the organic when it came to which moments he captured on film. Something I noticed in his film from 1968 was the frequency with which he depicted people coming toward the camera, turning a corner or walking down the street, growing larger within the frame, and how their faces would brighten when they saw him. Gerard’s camera is more engaged than Andy’s; the impression it gives is one of involvement rather than voyeurism.

When Gerard signed my copy of his book afterwards, I intended to talk to him about cats because I knew it was a subject he was passionate about, and he’d already answered one of my questions specifically regarding the films during the Q&A. I wanted to say something about how his Rosey looks like my childhood cat, Sophie O’Shea, and that his photographs always remind me of her. I wanted to say something about my Athena, to whom I would have referred using the present tense.

Gerard Malanga has extremely blue eyes. This is apparent even on black-and-white film. It’s one of his many striking features and one that has not changed with age. When he looked up at me from under his hat with those blue eyes which have witnessed so many scenes I’ll covet my whole life, all the conversational preparation went out of my head. Instead I just handed him my book and quickly thanked him for answering my question about working with Angus MacLise, to which he replied, “You’re very welcome,” in a terribly sincere tone.

What a privilege to have been young, once. What a privilege to have been able to grow old, when so many weren't. What a privilege to love the small creatures that we come across, for the time that they’re here.

—ECT

That was my Bad Year, as I’ve alluded to before, and my time in Los Angeles was a reprieve from the angst I was experiencing back home on the other side of the country. I was excited to see my friends, whom I’d known since I was a teenager when every year seemed like a bad year, but I did not expect to like California itself. The truth is that I have never been interested in sports, nor have I ever subscribed to any other form of recreational ideology in which one cohort—particularly a geographical one—is pitted against another for ego's sake. So the imaginary New York/California rivalry that I’ve personally upheld is actually very thrilling to me in its novelty.

Somewhat against my own will, I ended up enjoying Los Angeles. I maintain that this was due almost entirely to the company I kept while there, but I nevertheless allowed myself to take pleasure in the new landscapes, the trees heavy with fruit, the unfamiliar air against my body. I was desperate for any comfort, any opportunity for wonderment, any proof that this world was worth its trouble.

Most people I know would agree that living is difficult right now. It seems we are all looking down the barrel of a very large and unavoidable gun at a whole series of Bad Years ahead. It gets harder and harder every day to resist a doomer mindset about the state of society.

These feelings are not unfamiliar, of course.

When I worked as a barista during Covid, pre-vaccine, I developed a powerful loathing for humanity. The café I worked at was in a wealthy, semi-gated neighborhood populated mostly by retirees and young families helmed by tech bros. I had dealt with difficult customers at other jobs, but there was a particular awful absurdity in being verbally abused for not putting enough milk in someone’s coffee while there was still a global pandemic happening and it constantly felt like the world was ending outside. (I was hired after the pots and pans thing had petered out, FYI.) People are fucking dying, I kept thinking. People are dying and we’re technically risking our lives to make you this oat latte and you can’t even look us in the eye when you order it. What’s the point of any of this?

The customers’ entitlement and condescension, their disregard for the safety of my coworkers and myself—it all seemed neverending. Although I disliked working there for a lot of reasons, the primary one was that it resulted in my feeling hateful toward people in general even after I left the café at the end of my shift.

I did not relish feeling this way. I did not like the resentment that festered within me during the months I worked there, how that sense of singularity made me isolate myself further in a time when we were already so isolated from each other. My attitude was basically: the only person I could count on is myself, and fuck everybody else.

This is no way to go through life. After all, we’re living in a society here.

Occasionally customers were nice—they complimented me on my earrings1, sincerely wished us a good day, remembered our names, tipped extra for no real reason. Those interactions were usually enough to power me through at least another hour on shift. When I have a pleasant interaction with a stranger, it similarly buoys up my mood for the rest of the day. Depending on the level of pleasantness, it can improve my outlook on the world for the rest of the week. Even if the afterglow only lasts a few minutes, that feeling of relief is often profound. At the very least it takes my mind off whatever horrible headline just popped up on my phone.

Since the election, I have been making a conscious effort to have at least one truly pleasant interaction with a person every day. I try to be heartfelt when I ask people how they’re doing. I compliment people on their shoes and earrings. I help people with directions. People tend to respond in kind. Even when it’s not a direct interaction I try to stay attuned to the gentle human acts around me and elevate them in my memory above other daily annoyances and disappointments: a father patiently answering his daughter’s barrage of questions on the subway; two strangers exclaiming over their matching bags; a person bopping their head along to the song playing in a bookstore and the cashier catching it and smiling to herself, proud of her playlist. How lucky am I to live in a place that allows me to witness these moments, so lovely and inconsequential?

I have to believe in the goodness of both myself and other people in order to survive. For my own sake, I have to prove this potential for honest human connection. I have to believe it is within my power to not contribute to the collective misery. I hesitate to think of it as altruism, because I am motivated by a desire to make myself feel better about being alive.

I do not believe in any great spiritual interconnectedness, or the push and pull of “good” vs. “bad” energy or vibes or karma or whatever. In these cases, I believe in simple cause and effect: when you are nice to someone, they are almost always glad, and when everything seems so unbearably awful all the time, that gladness is worth sharing, even just for a moment.

I don’t mean for this to sound self-righteous or reductive when it comes to the world’s most pressing issues. I know that small gestures of kindness are not going to be society’s sole salvation, and I know that structural change will only come as a result of broader, organized action among many participants.2 I also know that more material gestures of help and solidarity (i.e. giving money to people who need it) are just as important as daily politenesses—probably even more so. But we will still always have to contend with the everyday, the micro-est of micro-interactions that come as a result of living in a world that contains other people.

In other words, my grand conclusion is something you would find on one of those corny magnets: 𝓫𝓮 𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓭.

The source of this entry’s title is the pictured interaction between two online strangers from a couple of years ago3. A tar pit is a fissure in the earth in which long-buried crude oil bubbles up to the surface; once caught in the hot, sludgy natural asphalt, animals (or anything else) are unlikely to escape. Though it’s only 15 feet deep, the most famous of the La Brea Tar Pits in California has yielded millions of fossils dating back to the Ice Age. The Pits still pose a hazard to wildlife today, and to rescue anything from a tar pit is a precarious, often futile process.

The memorable statement that closes this conversation is so devastating in its acuity that it’s easy to overlook the original post, which I think is just as succinct and effective. Why would you ever withhold a little relief, so easily given? In some ways my attitude during my time as a barista holds true today: the only person I can count on is myself. So I have to choose, when I can, the manner in which I brush up against other people’s lives.

The feeling I associate most strongly with that week in Los Angeles is relief. I can still access it now if I think about it hard enough, a sense of something warm and vital welling up inside of me where there had previously been a desperately empty cavity. The sun was hot just as I dreaded, but the breeze came in clear and sweet through the open windows and for a few days I was perfectly at ease. Now I don’t hate California after all…and I would actually like to see the La Brea Tar Pits, so I guess I’ll have to return at some point anyway.

— ECT

“Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream,” says Didion, matter-of-factly. “The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” I would argue that while this notion may not be as universally or absolutely applicable to all writing as Didion claimed, it could definitely apply to the practice of writing and sharing year-end reviews, lists of 2024 favorites, etc.

My feeling is that once you’ve made it to the end of the year, you have probably listened to and watched and read everything you would have discovered otherwise.

I’m being silly, of course. But I do recognize that for me at least, the primary reason why I’ve read any “Best Of 2024” list has been to see if they mentioned the things I already know I liked, not to get any last-minute recommendations. Does it matter? Is anyone other than the respective authors really interested in these lists? I don’t know, but they’re fun to make anyway.

2022 was one of the worst years of my life while 2023 was one of the best, so it makes sense that 2024 split the difference and ended up being Perfectly Fine. At the end of 2022, I made a playlist to represent that worst year, with my favorite new releases as well as tracks from artists I’d seen live and songs that I’d otherwise become fixated on over the course of those twelve months. It was a pretty good playlist, although it’s difficult for me to listen to now because it recalls the feelings of that year so viscerally.

All this to say: yes, I have again compiled my own Summary in Songs for 2024, despite the possible hostility in this act. There is no attempt here at an objective ranking or definitive “best”. The main through-line, which has nothing to do with current events or any of the music actually released this year, should be apparent.

Maybe you’ll see your own faves represented here. Maybe you’ll even find some new recommendations. At the very least I hope you don’t feel tricked into listening to it.

In the future when I revisit my 2024 playlist, it will send me back to a year in which very little happened in my own life but I was nevertheless happy most of the time, maybe for the first time ever.

Happy New Year, and so on.

— ECT

1. The Velvet Underground, “Temptation Inside Your Heart” from VU, released in 1985, originally recorded in 1968.

Like many sixteen-year-olds before me, I loved the Velvet Underground for how little I could comprehend their music, and like any music-nerd-in-training, I respected them for their influence on virtually everything that came after them. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that I became properly obsessed with them, plumbing the depths of both their vast mythology and their comparatively sparse discography. Of course the Velvets were cool in their all-black androgyny, sunglasses affixed firmly to their faces—but they were also a group of friends, young and real, by turns irritable and quick to laugh. The chatter on this track is Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison talking to each other and commenting on the playback during what was probably meant to be a session to record backing vocals. I love the silliness of the song and how it provides a counterpoint to the seemingly impenetrable mystery in which the band remains shrouded.

2. Vickie & the Van Dykes, “I Wanna Be A Winner” from an unreleased single, 1963ish?

I discovered this compilation album of little-known, mostly one-off recordings from the 1960s and it sent me down the rabbit hole of obscure mid-century girl groups. This track is still my favorite of them all—I love the easy roughness of her voice, her giggling throughout. Phyllis Siano aka Vickie Lane aka Vickie Diamond only ended up recording a handful of songs for Tommy Falcone’s Jersey-based label Cleopatra, none of which were officially released. But it’s clear from this song alone that she had the star power necessary for a fabulous musical career, if that had been something she wanted (ultimately, she didn’t).

3. Lung Leg, “Maid to Minx” from Maid to Minx, 1997.

Thanks, Naomi! 🫶

3. Remi Wolf, “Frog Rock” from Big Ideas, 2024.

4. Doechii, “CATFISH” from Alligator Bites Never Heal, 2024.

5. Young Fathers, “Wow” from Cocoa Sugar, 2018.

I saw Young Fathers in April of this year and it was by far one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. In all sincerity: talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before…

7. Massive Attack feat. Shara Nelson, “Safe From Harm” from Blue Lines, 1991.

8. Spiritualized, “Why Don’t You Smile Now,” from Anyway That You Want Me (single), 1992.

Lou Reed and John Cale composed this in 1965 when they were both still anonymous sound-alike songwriters at Pickwick Studios. It was the first song they wrote together. The original track was recorded by a group called the All-Night Workers (themselves friends of Lou’s) and is also really great.

9. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, “The Piston and the Shaft” from Strangers from the Universe, 1994.

Possibly my favorite new-to-me song from this year—I think it’s so funny and sexy in a totally baffling way.

10. Pixies, “Havalina” from Bossanova, 1990.

11. The Band, “Yazoo Street Scandal” from The Basement Tapes, 1975.

If every song by The Band sounded like this, I could count myself a true fan. Instead I’m more like a fan-in-law.

12. Beyoncé, “ALLIIGATOR TEARS” from COWBOY CARTER, 2024.

13. Pulp, “Do You Remember the First Time?” from His ‘n’ Hers, 1994.

As exciting as it was to see Blur last year, I was still heartbroken that I was literally in England while Pulp was also on tour without a ticket to see them too. When Pulp announced their North American tour at the beginning of this year, it felt like all my prayers had been answered. Jarvis is still the consummate showman that he was in his youth and the songs still make me ache with the same desperate sweetness that I loved as a teenager.

14. Pylon, “M-Train” from Chomp, 1983.

15. Sorry, “Starstruck” from 925, 2020.

16. Saâda Bonaire, “Heart Over Head” from Saâda Bonaire, 1984.

17. Amyl and the Sniffers, “U Should Not Be Doing That” from Cartoon Darkness, 2024.

18. Ghostface Killah feat. Raekwon, “Kilo” from Fishscale, 2006.

My friend Laura and I have been doing a project where we listen to all of the records included in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die1. This is one of the best albums that I’ve been introduced to via the project. This track’s main sample is from a Schoolhouse Rock-esque educational children’s song from the 1970s.

14. Kim Gordon, “I Don’t Miss My Mind” from The Collective, 2024.

I saw her in Queens on a freezing cold night this past March. She is really almost unfathomably cool.

14. Naked Roommate, “Bus” from Pass the Loofah, 2024.

15. Fat White Family, “John Lennon” from Forgiveness Is Yours, 2024.

16. Faust, “Jennifer” from Faust IV, 1973.

This was one of those things I listened to and realized, “Oh, so this is who everybody else has been copying for the past fifty years…”

14. Marika Hackman, “Slime” from Big Sigh, 2024.

15. Spectrum, “Lord I Don’t Even Know My Name” from Soul Kiss (Glide Divine), 1992.

16. PJ Harvey, “Lwonesome Tonight” from I Inside the Old Year Dying, 2023.

I appreciated how serious she seemed in concert, how elegant and in control. I felt transported alongside her to a different world when she played the entirety of her most recent album, like her voice was a direct portal to somewhere beyond the veil of reality.

14. John Lennon, “How Do You Sleep?” from Imagine, 1971.

15. St. Vincent, “Reckless” from All Born Screaming, 2024.

Between this and the new Vampire Weekend album (both of which surprised me with how good they were), it was almost as though we were back in 2014 and the dream of indie pop rock was alive again…

14. English Teacher, “Sideboob” from This Could Be Texas, 2024.

15. Françoise Hardy, “Fleur de lune” from Soleil, 1970.

Hardy passed away this June at the age of 80. She has long been a style icon of mine, and I’ve adored her music since I was a young teenager. Françoise, ta grâce me manque.

30. The Monkees, “Me & Magdalena” from Good Times!, 2016.

31. Labi Siffre, “Maybe Tomorrow” from Labi Siffre, 1970.

32. Tracy Chapman, “Mountains O’ Things” from Tracy Chapman, 1988.

33. André 3000, “Ninety Three ‘Til Infinity and Beyoncé” from New Blue Sun, 2023.

I saw André 3000 at BAM in the fall and it was totally spellbinding. Laura and I were shocked when, 30 minutes into the performance, he announced that everything they’d played had been improvised. In between songs he was as charismatic and smart as you might imagine, but I was ultimately most taken with the music itself—I would have sat there and listened to him and his band for hours if given the opportunity, spiraling on and on…

30. The Shangri-Las, “Right Now and Not Later” from Shangri-Las 65!, 1965.

My 60s girl group obsession was triggered at the beginning of the year by the outpouring of love and admiration for Mary Weiss following her death in January. Elise Soutar wrote a beautiful, impassioned essay about the Shangri-Las that really made me appreciate what this kind of music represented in the mid-60s and continues to represent today, especially admist the neverending discourse about “girlhood”.

30. Faces, “Glad and Sorry” from Ooh La La, 1973.

31. The Hard Quartet, “Six Deaf Rats” from The Hard Quartet, 2024.

There’s something surreal and maybe even a little unsettling about hearing a straightforward love song from Stephen Malkmus, whose lyrics can typically be described as “oblique” at best and “utterly nonsensical” at worst. I went to Pavement’s final show (allegedly) in October—it was not the greatest Pavement gig I’ve ever attended, but it seems a small miracle that I’ve seen them often enough that I can even make that judgment. He admittedly seems much more content playing with his new band. Happy for you or whatever, Steve…I guess…

37. Hana Vu, “Hammer” from Romanticism, 2024.

38. The Kills, “Pale Blue Eyes” from The Last Goodbye (EP), 2012.

This cover is notably spikier than the original by the Velvet Underground, who had adopted a much softer sound by the time they released the album on which it first appeared. At the same time, I think The Kills evoke the Velvets’ style perfectly without sounding too much like straight copycats. I’d go so far as to say that it provides a glimpse into what the VU version might have sounded like with band’s original lineup. H/t to Gen as usual.

39. Miya Folick, “Alaska” from Alaska (single), 2024.

40. Fontaines D.C., “Horseness Is The Whatness” from Romance, 2024.

41. Slowdive, “andalucia plays” from everything is alive, 2023.

In 2014, Slowdive performed in Boston, but I was unable to attend because it was an 18+ venue and I had only just turned 17. I actually didn’t remember this tragedy at all until I found an old Tumblr post of mine raging against the absolute indignity of being barred from a Slowdive gig due to my age2. Well, I finally did get to see them this year, so don’t despair, teenage Emilia—you’ll get there eventually. It’ll take you a decade, but you’ll get there. It’ll be worth the wait.

39. Kim Deal, “Wish I Was” from Nobody Loves You More, 2024.

40. Nick Drake, “Hazey Jane I” from Bryter Layter, 1971.

41. Vampire Weekend, “Pravda” from Only God Was Above Us, 2024.

42. Television, “Carried Away” from Adventure, 1978.

43. Luna, “Friendly Advice” from Bewitched, 1994.

That’s Velvets guitarist Sterling Morrison on the solo toward the end. Dean Wareham’s first group, Galaxie 500, wrote one of the most beautiful songs ever as a tribute to Morrison in 1988, and Luna later opened for the ill-fated Velvet Underground reunion tour in 1993. It remains one of my greatest hopes that Sterling actually heard “Tugboat” at some point.

44. Wand, “Curtain Call” from Vertigo, 2024.

I was having a bad day, mostly related to household appliances—my dishwasher appeared to be malfunctioning and I’d just discovered that my neighbors had not only stolen my A/C unit in the middle of a heat wave but that they were out of the city that whole weekend, so I was going to have to wait at least 48 hours for an opportunity to beg it back from them.

I blinked at the torrent of rain just beyond the museum’s distinctly curved overhang, shimmering with the afterimage of sunlight. For a second it seemed my luck had turned around because I was able to avoid the rain by mere seconds, but now I knew this was just another needle in someone’s Emilia-shaped voodoo doll. I ventured back out into the downpour to retrieve my hat from where it was languishing on the sidewalk partway up the opposite block and crammed it back on my head, soggy and sulking.

I might have left the hat entirely (it’s just a generic grey baseball cap) if it weren’t for the button I had pinned to it ages ago: a white pinback that says “I’m Jenny Holzer”. The designer, Noah Lyon, apparently has a whole series of these buttons, each identifying the wearer as a different famous female artist—Kusama, Kruger, Chicago, Walker, etc. I’m not sure what his intention was with these, but I thought it was funny enough when I first saw it in a big bucket of badges by the cash register in the Whitney’s gift shop. I always expect people to comment on it, but they never do. It’s possible I overestimate the general public’s familiarity with Holzer’s name.

I figured that if nowhere else, the Guggenheim’s Jenny Holzer exhibit was a fitting place to wear the pin, so I was glad I got it (and my hat) back before we went inside.

Stepping out of the elevator on the topmost floor of the museum, Laura and I were immediately greeted with a large canvas, mostly blank except for a bit of text at the top, hung on the wall.

Looking for a plaque to glean some context about the artwork, I instead found a QR code pasted on the wall with instructions to download the Bloomberg app so I could learn more about the exhibit. Surely they would offer an alternative, I thought, continuing my search for another label. Instead I found another piece by Holzer, much smaller and perhaps easier to understand at first glance, installed above the hand sanitizer dispenser.

I pointed this out to Laura as she downloaded the app. “It’s taking forever because I don’t have good service in here,” she told me. By this point we were both laughing at the absurdity: we theorized that the very architecture of the museum was preventing her from downloading the app and thus preventing us from accessing the information apparently contained within it. The wi-fi required an email address signup. Eventually I realized that the labels were located in the empty bays next to each display so you had to walk several feet and essentially out of view of the artwork to get to them. Even then, they still contained no real information except for the title and the year of the pieces.

I can’t figure out whether this decision was made by the curators of the exhibit or by Holzer herself, but the whole thing felt like such a poorly conceived and frankly bizarre attempt to isolate the artwork from its broader context, and I was offended by it.

Many of the reviews of the Guggenheim exhibit have been less than favorable: several critics pointed out that Holzer’s most infamous 20th century works presaged certain norms of digital communication so well that they now seem outdated in the year 2024. Others pointed out that her more recent pieces, such as the collection of copper plates engraved with various Trump tweets, feel contrived; they self-consciously gesture toward the concept of “political art” without taking any particular side, an ambiguity that is further emphasized by the lack of contextual information. This could be true, but I’m really not interested in analyzing Holzer’s work here. What I’m interested in is where the damn wall plaques went, and why they got taken away.

Maybe I was sensitive to it because I’d just had a similar experience at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the month before.1

A group exhibit entitled “Tender Loving Care” is currently on view in the MFA’s Linde Contemporary Wing. But there are no labels accompanying the artworks, just single letters that correspond to an incredibly convoluted paper guide to the exhibit which one could retrieve from a rack near the entryway. It was a challenge to identify which description applied to each artwork while also actually looking at the artwork. I was so frustrated by the counterintuitive nature of this curation that I ended up more or less rushing through the exhibit. I was agitated by the lack of information. It felt, in a word, stupid.

There is, of course, an argument that could be made about art’s ability to “stand on its own”; i.e. it should be possible to engage with a work without any previous knowledge of the person who made it or the intentions with which it was made. I’ve never understood this. Nothing and no one exists in a vacuum, as I’ve discussed on here before. That isn’t to say I’m in favor of “separating the art from the artist,” nor am I against it. I’m more concerned about the impossibility of separating the art from the world around it.

In his excellent book Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, art historian James Elkins writes,

There is no reason looking should be easy, because pictures are not just decoration. They are peculiar objects that pull at us, tugging us a little out of the world. A picture will leave me unmoved if I don’t take time with it, but if I stop, and let myself get a little lost, there’s no telling what might happen…The experience of looking can be, should be, hard to manage.

One might say that the lack of wall plaques serves the purpose of maintaining the unmanageability of looking at art by depriving the viewers of as many extraneous interpretive tools as possible. Maybe! Although they might influence our conclusions, words still can’t tell us how to look at something. But they might tell us what to look at: a particular detail of a certain subject, or the specific angle from which it’s depicted.

Maybe I was also confounded by the MFA exhibit because it was in that same gallery that I had seen their Philip Guston retrospective a couple years prior in 2021. This exhibit was curated to an incredibly meticulous degree and included a bulging syllabus of trigger warnings and historical analysis and related imagery that served to contextualize the works on display, and for good reason: Guston’s pictures are, put simply, difficult to look at. Their tone is difficult to parse. They are ugly, incongruous, flooded with the sickly shade of Pepto-Bismol pink that was Guston’s calling card. I never liked his work before this exhibit—in fact I had more or less written it off entirely, something I find mildly embarrassing to admit to. But this exhibit, with its plethora of wall plaques and supplementary text, provided new ground for me on which I could consider Guston’s work in all of its uncomfortable nuance. It was manageable, yes, but only just.

In the case of the Holzer exhibit, there’s a kind of irony in demanding that more text be added to an exhibit that is composed almost entirely of text anyway. I just don’t think there’s anything to be gained from the removal of information, particularly in the case of art that consciously invokes politics, but also when it comes to art more generally. I don’t see the point in obfuscating the very real and essential element of human thought when it comes to both making art and looking at art, in a studio or in a museum or on the internet.

Good art writing combines interpretation and formal analysis; it does not cede total authority to the artist, but it operates within the context of the artist’s world. It is not prescriptive or persuasive. In his breathtakingly pretentious (but still pretty good) collection of essays entitled My 1980s, Wayne Koestenbaum writes extensively about other people’s art and other people’s writing. Of poet James Schuyler’s stint as an editor at Art News, Koestenbaum notes, “He used unusual words together to short-circuit humdrum comprehension; he found new ways to describe color and to enter the life of paint.” The best art writing creates new entrances, perhaps previously unseen, rather than close off potential lines of inquiry. You can still get lost in the picture, but maybe you’ll wander onto a different path than you might have before.

And I maintain that nothing is more likely to interrupt that kind of wandering than constantly having to look down at your phone. Isn’t it nice to take a break from scrolling, even for just an hour? Museums are one of the few remaining spaces in which we can engage with media without the aid of a screen, and I think there’s something almost sacred (and certainly worth protecting) about that.

I recently came across an obituary for Mike Kelley written by the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. Honestly, I don’t care much for or about Kelley’s work beyond its use as the album artwork for my favorite Sonic Youth album. However, the obituary was brilliantly titled (“Mike Kelley Got On My Nerves”) and its final three sentences in particular were crafted so adeptly with such a perfect economy of language that it gave me a sensation of screeching to a halt, an intellectual double take:

W. B. Yeats wrote of the “rag and bone shop of the heart.” Kelley made that wretched emporium visible and borderline habitable. He did so with apparent buoyancy, a seemingly inexhaustible humor that we counted on—foolishly, as it turns out.

One reference that reaches across time and space and medium, plus two immaculate sentences, and everything changed. Really, I wanted to write and publish this newsletter for the express purpose of sharing this quote with people, because I just can’t get over it. I still don’t particularly like Kelley’s work, but I ultimately don’t think it’s a question of liking.2 The next time I see a Kelley work in a museum, I will think of Schjeldahl’s perfect sentences and how they presented a door through which I was able to step into a different space of appreciation—into that wretched emporium, perhaps.

In most museums, the labels that accompany artworks are not really representative of good art writing anyway. They are usually informational rather than interpretive, and Schjeldahl’s level of editorialization probably wouldn’t really be appropriate in that setting (neither would Schuyler’s, nor Koestenbaum’s). But I think it’s a good example of how language has the potential to enhance the experience of looking at art. A museum will never be an airtight, contextless vessel for that which it contains—even if the physical space provides a safe haven from the day’s weather, the outside atmosphere tends to leak inside the gallery.

Also, in case you were wondering: no, nobody commented on my pin. But I did eventually get my air-conditioner back from my neighbors.

— ECT

Gen became one of the friends I saw most often—in fact pretty much the only friend I saw besides my roommates—during the true depths of Covid, because we happened to live so close to one another. In March, we sipped tea from thermoses at opposite ends of a park bench, six feet apart, because it was really too cold to be outside but we had no option to be indoors. In April and May, we strolled through Ridgewood as she pointed out all the darkened bars and restaurants that we might have once patronized but were now barred from. Regardless of the season and the weather, we always talked about a bit about books and writing and a lot about music: R.E.M.’s Monster, Fiona Apple’s return to the spotlight, Morphine, Kim Deal, Stephen Malkmus, Gen’s endlessly unwinding love for Spiderland by Slint, my boundless belief in the superiority of every Nina Simone cover compared to the original. But more than anything we talked about Blur.

Blur appealed to me in the first lonely weeks of spring 2020 because of their closeness. In the videos I watched, they invaded each other’s space with ease; they talked over one another; they gleefully stepped on each other’s toes, both literally and metaphorically, whenever they were given the chance. It was almost fantastical or otherwise borderline pornographic to watch footage of their concerts and witness all those people colliding with one another in the audience, all gulping in the same air without a single thought as to its viral load.

Blur were2 stupid and beautiful and difficult and brilliant. Their career and my interest in their music and interpersonal dynamics are too complex to describe in detail here, but basically: Childhood/uni friends start a band together in London at the very end of the 80s, become ludicrously famous in the UK in the mid-90s, break up in the early 2000s with one member having been fired at the turn of the millennium, reunite unexpectedly in the mid-2010s, and ostensibly break up once more upon the release of their “final” album in 2015, after which they returned to their separate careers (music for frontman Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon; cheesemaking and local politics for bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree, respectively). From 2016 on, Blur were once again broken up for all intents and purposes. I know this doesn’t sound that remarkable on the surface but you have to trust me. Any more detail might turn this into a genuine mental health hazard.

Also, their music is pretty good.

I like Blur because I have always loved a reunion, anything that retroactively takes away the finality of what was otherwise assumed to be an ending. I like that they seem helpless to the pull of each another’s orbits, always circling back to their origins. I like Blur because I like good music and what it can do, how it reaches back through our collective psyche to a time before language, before we could name our emotions and were instead powerless to do anything except feel them. I like that, in general, the presence of music is inherently paradoxical because it moves through space without occupying it. Words do the same thing. In a way, so do memories.

In the summer of 2022, I received an anonymous message on a certain semi-defunct social media platform with an ominous promise: “See u at Wembley ❤️”. I hadn’t yet heard, but rumors were apparently afoot regarding a potential Blur reunion show at Wembley Stadium in London, the site of Freddie Mercury and Queen’s iconic 1985 Live Aid performance. I responded to the message with something sarcastic and dismissive. I did not—could not—believe this nameless, faceless oracle.

A little less than a year later, Gen and I were sitting together in the stands at the largest and most iconic soccer stadium in the UK, waiting for Blur to begin the first of two concerts at Wembley. Here were these individuals whom we had spent so much time mythologizing and here was the unequivocal fact of their existence as real people onstage before us. Here were the songs that I had listened to alone in my apartment and while traversing the eerily empty streets of my old neighborhood and on the subway and in the car and over the sea as I flew toward England, where I had wanted to go all my life.

During the second show we were seated closer to the stage, but I found that the band was still far enough away for their silhouettes to affect the appearance of their younger selves if I let my vision blur3 slightly (which wasn’t difficult, given the tears in my eyes): Dave seated behind the drum set with his careful wireframed gaze, Graham to the left in his striped shirt and cuffed jeans, still prone to hurling his Tele into the air, Alex to the right with his long dark fringe and bass slung low on his hips, and Damon in the center, as always, microphone in hand, wearing a replica of the Fila tracksuit from the 1994 “Girls & Boys” music video, drenched in sweat and grinning like a madman. I could almost convince myself that they were young and lovely again, stupefyingly beautiful as they had once been, but I tried to resist the urge. I wanted to be unable to deny the truth of time’s passage, how it keeps us apart and how it can return us to ourselves, and how the music remains the same even when everything around it has changed.

They really were just men, small and strange the way any of us would have been standing on that stage at that distance. We are all of us just people capable of moving and being moved by one another. We all get old if we’re given the chance. I think there’s a tremendous humility in realizing that.

Blur's biggest criticism and most consistent strength has always been their unpredictability—from Damon’s dangerous stunts at live shows, during which he scaled the rafters of venues and tossed himself into crowds as he sang, to the habit of retooling their sound on every other release in contempt of the genre trends that they themselves had invented. It’s hard to recommend any one Blur record as the place to start listening to them because each one appeals to such different sensibilities. I personally think it’s more gratifying to start with a survey of their whole discography, so you can hear the through-lines and consistencies as well as the evolution of their sound.

Gen made a “Blur starter playlist” with commentary for her fabulous music newsletter last year, which I was glad about because the NYT version was a bit…lacking in my opinion (no hate to Lindsay Zoladz tho!). I then made my own playlist as a supplement to both Gen’s and Zoladz’s, and I tried to avoid as much overlap in the tracklist as I could. If you listen to all three playlists then you will achieve complete Blur self-actualization, or something like that.

—ECT

P.S. You can listen to it on YouTube, too, if you’d prefer.

1. "London Loves" from Parklife, 1994.

This was one of the first Blur songs I can recall listening to outside of the context of the Wii game Just Dance in 2009. I was probably fifteen or so and I inevitably heard it because someone reblogged it onto my Tumblr dashboard. I remember being totally transfixed by the squelching percussion and oddly taut guitar that then balloons into long licks of sound midway through the song, and the incongruous melancholy of the lyrics: London loves the way people just fall apart…

2. "The Narcissist" from The Ballad of Darren, 2023.

Words can’t describe the shock of hearing this song last spring, their first single since 2015. I’ve decided that its chorus is one of my favorite lyrics from Blur’s entire discography. Shining a light at someone—in hopes of blinding them?—only for them to turn the light back on you…recognizing the self through the other…could it be the mortifying ordeal of being known??!?!?!??

3. "Go Out" from The Magic Whip, 2015.

4. "Coping (Andy Partridge Version)" from Modern Life Is Rubbish sessions, 1993.

Andy Partridge, from XTC, was initially signed on to produce Blur’s second album, but he was removed from the project in favor of producer Stephen Street, who became a regular collaborator. I actually prefer this version to the one on the studio album—I love the goofy echo on Graham’s backing vocals in the chorus, and then that weird descending harmony right afterwards. The scribbly guitar sound throughout just heightens the song’s preexisting playful mania.

5. "Death of a Party (7in Remix)" from Blur sessions, 1997.

6. "Coffee & TV" from 13, 1999.

The only true ‘hit’ on this playlist. This is another Blur song that I knew in my youth, because I must have stumbled across the music video, which was quite popular into the 2000s (it even got a cameo on The Sopranos!). The guitar solo toward the end of the song was inspired by Ira Kaplan’s playing on Yo La Tengo’s “Stockholm Syndrome.” 

7. "Miss America" from Modern Life Is Rubbish, 1993.

The echoey percussive element throughout the song is apparently Graham banging an unidentified object against a chair leg.

8. "So You" from 13 sessions, 1999.

This is a nice video showing a bit of this song’s development. As a non-musical person I always find footage like this incredible because I don't understand the kind of nonverbal communication that must be happening between all the different instrumental parts. It just looks and sounds like magic to me. Dave’s percussion is so great here, too. 

9. "Yuko and Hiro" from The Great Escape, 1995.

The Great Escape is a polarizing document among Blur fans. On one hand, it’s what launched the band to the absolute apex of their fame via ‘The Battle of Britpop,’ a publicity stunt largely pushed by music magazines like Melody Maker and the NME wherein the album’s lead single (“Country House”) was pitted against the lead single (“Roll With It”) from Oasis’ forthcoming album. (There is a lot more to be said for what the Blur vs. Oasis competition represented in terms of British class politics at the turn of the millennium, but we don’t have time to get into that now.) “Country House” ended up ‘winning’ the battle in terms of record sales on the day of their simultaneous release, but The Great Escape was ultimately Blur’s worst effort since their debut while Oasis’ What’s the Story, Morning Glory? is now considered one of the best albums of the 1990s—by the general public, I should add, not necessarily by me. The band came to hate many of the songs on this album, and I would be inclined to agree that they mostly suck. I like this one, though, except for the stupid carnival music outro…feel free to skip that…

10. "Birthday" from Leisure, 1991.

I spent my fifteenth birthday compiling a playlist of melancholic birthday songs, which I then uploaded to 8tracks, of course—where else? I only recently managed to access my old 8tracks account and was surprised to find that I had apparently included this track from Blur’s first record as well as “Happy Birthday” by The Innocence Mission and “Growing Up” by (ugh) Andrew Jackson Jihad.

11. "I'm Just A Killer For Your Love" from Blur, 1997.

Thus marks the segue into an emotionally dense block of songs. Again, I simply cannot get into the complete Blur lore (Blore) here, but if you know, you know…and if you do know, I’m so sorry…

12. "My Terracotta Heart" from The Magic Whip, 2015.

The Magic Whip was composed from jams recorded during a few days in which Blur’s entourage was grounded in Asia during their first reunion tour in 2013. Damon has gone on the record to say this song—actually, the whole album—is about his relationship with Graham, the tension between them, and the tentativeness of their reunion after seven years of radio silence. Graham said this song made him feel like Pattie Boyd, who famously inspired both George Harrison’s “Something” and Eric Clapton’s “Layla”.

13. "Sweet Song" from Think Tank, 2003.

While recording Think Tank, Graham was kicked out of the band because his alcoholism had become debilitating. (Only one song on the record retains his contributions: the guitar part in “Battery In Your Leg”, the album’s closer.) Damon apparently wrote this song while looking at a photograph of Graham in his studio. 

14. "Beachcoma" from Modern Life Is Rubbish sessions, 1993.

One of the band’s only true love songs, nearly excruciating in its simplicity.

15. "Essex Dogs" from Blur, 1997.

My second-favorite song that appears on a proper album—it is too enormous for me to describe. Damon, Graham, and Dave are all from Colchester, a suburb of Essex, England. This live performance, featuring Damon and Graham alongside the pioneering electronic duo the Silver Apples, is excellent. It feels so tangible and real that I want to sink my teeth into it, like a piece of meat.

16. "Inertia (Live)" from The Electric Ballroom B-Sides Gig, 1999. [originally from Leisure sessions]

This recording is taken from a small show in Camden that featured a setlist composed exclusively of underperformed B-sides. 1999 was a difficult, ugly year for the band, but it’s (in my opinion) one of their finest concerts by far. I love that I can never determine the real words of this song: the so-called official lyrics say “I’m not sure / Of you” while I personally hear them, especially in this recording, as “I’m not sure / Are you?” The way the whole meaning of the song, its address, the singer’s agency, are all called into question by a single tiny word—‘of’ or ‘are’—is endlessly fascinating to me.

17. "Kissin' Time (feat. Blur)" by Marianne Faithfull from Kissin' Time, 2002.

Blur adopted a rather isolationist outlook early on in their career and were, as a result, not a hugely collaborative band4. This track and the French version of “To The End” with Françoise Hardy (RIP 💔) are the sole major exceptions. I admit I find it incredibly endearing that the two people that they chose to work with were then-middle aged pop chanteuses who had been most popular in the early 1960s (and also happen to be two of my favorite singers). This album has a lot of other collaborations between Faithfull and 90s alt rock scenesters, including Beck, Pulp, and (ugh x2) Billy Corgan. 

18. "Look Inside America" from Blur, 1997.

Blur’s relationship with the United States is…complicated, to say the least. With the exception of “Song 2” (you know, the one that goes Woo-hoo!!!), they were never able to break into the US markets and achieve the same level of astronomical success that they enjoyed in their native land. Their second American tour in 1992 was a disaster mostly due to mismanagement and poor venue choices, but Damon was convinced that it was the American predilection for grunge music that had turned audiences against them. This is the final and most forgiving chapter in the band’s trilogy of “America” songs and ultimately a pretty anticlimactic conclusion to the long-standing feud. Damon concedes that the titular country and its culture, when looked at closely, is just “alright”—neither terrible nor deserving of veneration. 

19. "Maggie May (orig. Rod Stewart)" from Modern Life Is Rubbish sessions, 1993.

This was my fourth most-played song of 2023. Embarrassing…but that guitar during the bridge still knocks me out every time. Fun fact: Alex hates Rod Stewart so much that he refused to play on this track.

20. "Entertain Me" from The Great Escape, 1995.

Because Damon is such a prolific songwriter/showman, and Graham is such a renowned guitar player/emotional wreck, the other two guys in the band are the focus of critical attention far less frequently. I would argue, however, that Blur’s rhythm section has had some pretty serious strokes of genius during their career. This bassline from Alex is one of them.

21. "Trouble in the Message Centre" from Parklife, 1994.

22. "Garden Central" from Modern Life Is Rubbish sessions, 1993.

23. "X Offender (Damon & Control Freak's Bugman Remix)" from 13 sessions, 1999.

This was an interview Dave did in 2023 ahead of the Wembley shows:

So here I am, reporting from the dark depths of Blur’s fandom, apparently…

24. "Jets" from Think Tank, 2003.

25. "Sticks and Stones" from The Ballad of Darren sessions, 2023.

Some things are inevitable: death, taxes, and Blur relegating their best songs to bonus tracks and/or B-sides.

26. "Trailerpark" from 13, 1999.

Hilariously, this song was initially written to be included in a specific South Park episode, but it ended up getting rejected. I’m glad of this because I have already endured so many humiliations as a result of this band, and them being featured on a South Park soundtrack really might have been the final straw for me. I actually like the song a lot despite its unfortunate origins. 

27. "He Thought of Cars" from The Great Escape, 1995.

For whatever reason this really calls to my mind John Lennon’s parts of “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles. Maybe it’s that sense of being lost and alone within an urban environment, knowing you have a practical means of escaping the physical space while also knowing that you can’t ever really get away from the spiritual monotony of daily working life...

28. "Bone Bag" from Modern Life Is Rubbish sessions, 1993.

One of the best of an already great run of B-sides (as has been established). Compare this song’s refrain of “I don’t want to hurt you, no, not ever…” to that of “Sweet Song” a decade later: “I didn’t mean to hurt you, no, no, no…”

29. "You're So Great" from Blur, 1997.

I have spent a lot of time trying to articulate just how beautiful I think this song is and how much it means to me, but I don’t think there’s enough language in the world to hold all of those feelings. I first discovered this song when I was thirteen or fourteen and then proceeded to include it on nearly every single playlist and/or mix CD I made for a friend thereafter. I now know that this was the first song Graham wrote and sang solo for the band (he was so anxious about it that he insisted on recording alone in the studio under a table with all the lights turned off), but at the time it was anonymous to me and simply the truest, most sincere declaration of appreciation I had ever heard: You’re so great and I love you. What else could anyone possibly say?

Bonus: “Parklife” from Live at Wembley Stadium, 2024.

If you listen really closely, you can hear Gen and me singing along. Probably.

1. Floss daily

2. Wear less black

3. Stop talking out of my ass

The first was because I’m deathly afraid of going to the dentist, and also it feels like something an adult woman should be doing if she has any hope of ever getting her shit together. The second was simply a creative challenge. It’s always my first instinct to pair more visually compelling clothes (aka trousers that are not black, grey, or denim) with black basics—I tend to feel like I’ve done something really spectacular, sartorially speaking, when I put together an outfit that doesn’t involve a black shirt (or a black turtleneck sweater in colder climes). Both of these goals have been fairly easy to accomplish, possibly by design: I now floss almost every night, and my wardrobe has become nominally more colorful.

The third is trickier, because it requires a significant shift in how I move through the world.

I am a bullshitter. I’m very good at it, which is something that used to be a point of private, twisted pride. In college, I took immense pleasure in talking to (male) film majors at parties and asserting my knowledge just as they were gearing up to deliver a condescending monologue on some kind of “obscure” movie like, say, Possession, which I have never seen. I am very good at talking about movies I have never seen, and books I have never read, and schools of philosophical thought I’ve only glanced at. “Oh, so you know it,” the film major would say flatly, disappointed that he and I were apparently on equal intellectual footing after all. “Sure,” I would respond, because I know it, yes, technically. “Doesn’t everyone?”

I’m aware that this makes me sound like a serious jackass. In my defense, those guys were also jackasses, because it was so rare that they actually wanted to have a conversation about the film (or whatever) in question. They wanted to establish their authority over me by referencing something lofty and esoteric, hopeful that I might respond, “I’ve never heard of that…” and give them the opportunity to reassert their conviction that they were smarter than me (and, by proxy, all women—or so I would assume). I’d seen it happen to my friends so many times before and I never wanted to give these men that same satisfaction.

That’s about as far as I can go with that line of self-defense, though. Basically, I’m good at remembering dates and names which, in some contexts, is enough to impress people or convey a certain level of expertise. My internet addiction has provided me with an enormous cache of movie stills, book quotes, historical facts, etc. to pull from even if I have not engaged directly with the various source materials. And I do, in fact, know a decent amount about some subjects on a much deeper level. But not all of them.

I find it very difficult to admit when I don’t know something. To me, it feels like revealing a weakness. I wish that were not so. I wish I found it easier to accept my own ignorance and ask questions in earnest, free of self-consciousness, rather than compulsively ducking behind the cover of my own bullshit.

The truth is that I have always hated not being in on the joke. It has long been an imperative that I understand every reference ever made; I constantly feel like I need to be catching up to everyone else’s level of literacy. But even more than that I like seeing the connections between pieces of media, moments in history, spheres of creative thought. This is mostly because I am fascinated with the endlessly unspooling web of influence that exists throughout human history, our fundamental inability to create anything in a vacuum. I embrace the impossibility of true originality with open arms. We are never solely unto ourselves. I will always take comfort in and draw inspiration from that fact.

My favorite kind of thinkers are ones who are aware of those connections and adept at identifying them, reference upon reference. I’m currently reading Catherine Lacey’s (brilliant, devastating) novel Biography of X, which is dense with allusions to other texts, some of them cited and some of them folded unassumingly into the prose so that they don’t even register as references unless the reader is already familiar with them. The nonfiction writers whom I admire most—Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Maggie Nelson, Hilton Als, Olivia Laing, Eve Babitz1—also fall into this camp because you can tell how well-read they are based on the quality of their writing. Their remarkable depth of thought is characterized by a human sensitivity as well as a level of hyperliteracy that I could only dream of.

But why dream of it? Why not simply get reading? These great writers, despite the appearance of effortlessness, all had to put in the work. There’s no way around that fact.

For a while last year I kept coming across exchanges like these online, and each time I was both delighted and oddly moved by their simplicity:

I suppose the persona of the “writer” (black beret, clove cigarettes, leatherbound notebook) has always been alluring for a certain set of society. But it’s weird to see the current aspirational, “how to get the latest look” -esque tutorial language applied to something like that, as if it’s another hot girl trend. The way to be a writer is to write. And also read. It’s really not anything more complicated than that.

But you have to believe that you are capable of doing it first, rather than twisting yourself into mental knots to convince yourself that you are a reader despite not ever reading anything that truly challenges you, that you are a writer despite never writing anything beyond funny quips online. Why should that be so difficult? Where does that mental blockage come from? Laziness? Insecurity? I don’t know!!! Why can’t I sit down to read Colette and Proust instead of jealously swooning over Eve Babitz’s ability to reference them both with such clever, effortless grace?2 And yet, if push came to shove, I could probably bullshit my way through a conversation about either author, bluffing a reference or two. I wouldn’t feel great about it, but I could do it. (Though I would ultimately much rather discuss someone like Babitz, whose work I have not only read but adore.)

The thing about being a bullshitter is that there is always a fear that someone will call your bluff and humiliate you, more so than if you had simply admitted your ignorance up front. Thankfully, everyone I know is too polite to have ever subjected me to this. Others have been less lucky.

Bookforum recently published a review of Lauren Oyler’s new book of essays entitled No Judgment, which I have not read and probably won’t ever read. (I read Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, and all that came to mind was that one tweet by Joyce Carol Oates about “wan little husks of autofiction”…) I guess everybody went nuts because the Bookforum piece was an honest-to-god hatchet job, something that has become vanishingly rare in the criticism world as published “reviews” read more and more like official press releases.3 Ann Manov not only takes umbrage with the style and quality of Oyler’s writing; she also goes into extreme detail about the shallowness of Oyler’s research, reverse-engineering her sources and walking us through the exact paths that Oyler took to arrive at her conclusions:

Oyler claims she is well read, even a “snob,” but great swaths of No Judgment rely on the thinnest of online research. “Vulnerability has come to be seen as a first principle of living,” Oyler concludes from a single search for the term on the New Yorker’s website…When a Google search reveals to Oyler that the terms [vulnerability and vulva] are not related, she undertakes “research”—these are her words—into “historicizing” vulnerability and subsequently “discovers” that professor-cum-corporate-consultant Brené Brown’s 2010 TED Talk on the subject is “accepted as the source of the concept’s contemporary popularity.” Typically, “historicizing” a concept entails finding a “source” more than fourteen years old; Oyler’s argument here is as impressive as “historicizing” contemporary discourse on “threats to democracy” with a Vox explainer from 2016. Even were she not quite to begin with Saint Paul’s “strength in weakness,” Oyler might at least have discussed Freud’s concept of “original helplessness”; instead, she drops the Freud quote that comes up when you Google “Freud vulnerability” but fails even to mention the relevant theory.

In some ways, this essay is my worst fear: someone evidently more well-read than myself meticulously breaking down every single element of my bullshit, and in front of an audience no less! And yet it’s a great review because of its unforgiving tone and its specificity and because Manov immediately follows the snark with a whole outline of concepts (with sources) that Oyler could have used to bolster her arguments:

In the ’60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his theory of the “vulnerable self,” a “true self” around which people erected the defensive “false self.” In the ’70s, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, which urged “avoidants” to become as comfortable with vulnerability as “secures” and has since metastasized into an unbelievably widespread pop psychology. In the ’80s, transpersonal psychologists like John Wenwood preached that vulnerability was “the essence of human nature and of consciousness” and that “getting in touch with our more basic human tenderness and vulnerability can be a source of real power.” In the ’90s, Carol Gilligan’s “feminist care ethics,” with its embrace of vulnerability and interdependence, came to the fore—certainly influencing Brown as she completed her social work PhD.

Of course, this makes it even more humiliating for Oyler—it becomes clear that her superficial research was not due to a lack of resources in the world but simply a lack of effort on the author’s part—but Manov is still giving something to her own readers, synthesizing disparate sources and providing new insights, challenging them on an intellectual level. That’s what makes a good piece of criticism in my mind.4

Because a critic is ultimately at her best when she cares enough about her subject to actually say something of substance. That’s not to say that Manov cares about Oyler or her work on a personal level (she obviously doesn’t). However, it’s clear that she does feel strongly about the essay as form, as well as the entire genre of cultural criticism and what it has the power to do as an intellectual and creative endeavor. As far as I can tell, Manov is most frustrated by Oyler’s apathy toward her own project, her unwillingness to put in the effort to say something meaningful and instead choosing to exert the minimal amount of work required to just write anything at all. Manov notes Oyler’s self-identification as a snob, an elitist, and a professional—but above all else A Writer. It’s a title, Manov suspects, that Oyler holds in very high regard and at the fore of her own self-image. And yet: “I don’t really know why I write criticism,” says Oyler. Oh my god, [s]he admit it!

A lot of contemporary cultural criticism is really very boring, especially in comparison to the writers I think of as the masters of the form. Today’s critical essays are frequently undercut by narcissism and ambivalence, if not complete indifference. In contrast, there is so much love and hate, care and effort, in everything the great critics ever touched. The meticulousness of their study—love as attention, attention as love, and love as, more than anything, a desire to understand—is a huge part of why their work continues to holds up and why it can still be read and understood and enjoyed, even if the reader has only a passing knowledge of the subject being discussed. Why critique something if you don't truly care about it or the world in which it exists?

Manov writes, “Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts. They entail the writer struggling toward greater knowledge through sustained research, painful introspection, and provocative inquiry.” The universe has so much to offer if you give yourself the opportunity to explore it for the sake of genuine curiosity rather than as a means of shoring up your own ego. I’m saying that mostly as a reminder to myself.

There is no “get smart quick” tutorial, no product that can be purchased online to elevate one’s intellect instantaneously, no one single trick to “become” a writer. There is an extremely simple solution to worries about imposter syndrome, or coming across as a poseur, or getting called out on your bullshit. But in spite of its simplicity, it is seen as extremely challenging by plenty of people, myself regrettably included. You have to do the work. I’m also saying this as a reminder to myself.

When I read the writers I mentioned above, I feel like my brain is in good hands. That’s how I would like people to feel when they read my writing. I think the only way to accomplish this is to admit the gaps in my own knowledge and commit to doing my due diligence. Asking questions cedes authority and implies an initial ignorance, yes. But it also conveys a certain bravery born of vulnerability, along with a willingness to overcome that ignorance. Except when shutting down condescending undergrads, bullshitting is not exactly a noble pursuit. It is always nobler to simply say, “I don’t know,” and then take it upon yourself to find the answer.

— ECT

P.S. Writing and reading about internet culture feels myopic and frankly stupid right now, all things considered. If you have the means, please donate to Gaza eSims, which provides Palestinians with limited internet access during Israel’s communications blackout, or directly to Palestinian families trying to escape the genocide. I know it might feel like an exercise in futility, but we owe it to the Palestinian people to not lose hope on their behalf and continue doing whatever we can to help them. Thanks.

The documentary was criticized for a lot of reasons upon its release, many of which centered around the conclusion that the film was fairly opaque to people who were not already familiar with the band, and it offered no new insight to preexisting fans. This didn’t bother me because, now as in the 1960s, the only people who care about the Velvet Underground are people who already care about the Velvet Underground, and people who care about the Velvet Underground already know that the Velvet Underground have never particularly cared about their fans1. Their audience’s visible discomfort and confusion was the litmus test by which the band often measured its own success. Dylan Jones put it well in his book Loaded:

The Velvet Underground both scared their audience and bludgeoned them with repetition. This was another Warhol trope, as boredom held a particular fascination for the artist. Of course, there was a considerable amount of improvisation, but a lot of what they did at The Dom was Sisyphean: redemption through repetition.

What struck me about the documentary, particularly seeing it in a cinema, was the sheer excess of it, that same sense of overwhelming repetition: collage-like sequences of images tiled across the screen, pulsing with movement, too many at a time to fully process any single one of them before the screen flickered and shifted to reveal more, and then yet more after that. It made the stream of imagery feel endless and uncontainable, which I think is the closest visual analog that exists for the Velvet Underground’s sound. The Velvets’ music always teetered on the edge of too much, of genuinely uncomfortable or even physically painful to listen to, while also seemingly coming from inscrutable sources, some unknown unseen elsewhere.2

The collage style emulates the frequently frenetic films of Jonas Mekas, an avant-garde filmmaker and friend of Warhol’s who is featured as a talking head in the documentary, as well as Andy’s own movies, particularly the splitscreen format of The Chelsea Girls (1966). It also mimics the environment in which the Velvets most often performed in the mid-60s, a multimedia act billed as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol’s Factory screen tests and other footage were projected across the stage, so that the performers were often swallowed up in shadow by their own giant likenesses. (Again, that doubling, that repetition, that excess.) The EPI was a constant riot of flashing lights and improvised movement, of images and sound conjured from the dark ether, violent and fleeting.

Even knowing its inspirations, the visual element of Haynes’ documentary still seems distinct, especially when compared to other mainstream music documentaries. (Hence the frustration it engendered in many viewers.) What other movie from recent years looks like that, except for maybe the people editing classic films to simultaneously include both “stim” videos and Subway Surfers gameplay onscreen? It’s almost strange that Haynes’ formulation isn’t more popular, or less off-putting, or at least familiar, as an editing convention. Perhaps I found it unnerving because it’s probably the most accurate depiction of how I would envision the inside of my own mind: a boundless constellation of imagery.

This is also fairly similar to how I envision the internet.

The glut of imagery available to us online 24/7 has created in our collective consciousness a reversal of the reverence once associated with pictures. Once, like any precious resource, images were valuable because of their scarcity, the limited particularities of the contexts in which they could be acquired. Now, we can’t avoid them even if we try. It’s yet another thing that Warhol presaged, if that is the story we want to tell ourselves: that one day we would be buried in images, besieged by logos every turn. The collapse of “low” and “high” culture typically attributed to Warhol’s work (and Pop art more generally) is no longer compelling because that’s what everything looks like now.

In fact images may be losing their “power” (power to replicate or record an event? power to affect a viewer’s emotions? power to inspire social change?) more quickly than ever. To me, it’s kind of similar to the short shelf life of classic comedies: Airplane! isn’t actually that fun to watch now because many of its best punchlines have been absorbed into the cultural milieu so completely that they feel stale even when viewed in their original context. “And don’t call me Shirley!” just does not—cannot—hit the same today as it did in 1980.

I recently read a book by the French writer Maël Renouard, Fragments Of An Infinite Memory: My Life With The Internet, which was very good and articulated a number of mercurial and complicated thoughts regarding the digital sphere’s implications on our perception of time and memory. Years earlier, I saw a quote from this book that has stuck with me all this time:

I have the impression, when I look back on it, that my childhood took place in an era of the scarcity of images. Such a characterization would have seemed odd or even inconceivable at the time, for we already believed ourselves to be overwhelmed by a quantity of images never seen since the beginning of the world. And yet how rare they were in comparison to the overabundance we now have at our fingertips.

We had to wait for them: wait for the films that were shown once on television and shown again only many years later; wait for the magazines that, once a month, brought a cargo of images that seems meager indeed, now that we can find on the internet, for every object and every desire, about as many images as we could wish. Images were a luxury that demanded patience. When we had one in our possession, we treasured it; we cut it out, pasted it into an album. This relative scarcity of images had even made them into a kind of schoolyard currency—a currency now considerably devalued through overinflation. Today, images come one after another, devour each other, replace each other pitilessly, as if to outmatch the boundlessness of our desire.

I find it impossible to imagine a world before our current easy access to images, a time when our understanding of the world was not based first and foremost upon graphic representations of the world. I find it impossible to imagine a world in which I cannot gaze upon any image I wish at any point in time. And when I can’t find that desired image—whether accidentally deleted or redacted for copyright reasons or god forbid never taken in the first place—I feel a genuine panic, like something has been taken from me. In some ways it feels like one of my rights has been violated—but my right to what? To see? To remember?

History tends to be organized into fairly linear narratives, obviously simplified but no less “true” in the sense that they describe a real event and its effects for practical purposes. A complication with the stories we tell ourselves is that it is one thing to “know” how people reacted, broadly, to a certain development in media, but it is another thing to actually understand how these people felt. One can know that major stylistic developments in perspective and representation, such as cubism and photomontage, yielded reactions of disbelief among audiences who had never seen anything like them before. We all know the legend of the Lumière brothers’ L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat and the reaction it allegedly provoked in audiences upon its initial screening: people screamed and cowered because they thought that the train captured on film was an actual locomotive barrelling toward them. Our current perception of images, particularly moving ones, is inseparable from our experience of growing up surrounded by them. But the audiences of the Lumière films—regardless of whether they actually reacted in such a visceral manner—were experiencing something entirely new and unfathomable. Now it is their unfamiliarity with the medium that is unfathomable to us.

Susan Sontag suggests that it is the prevalence of images that has affected our perception of reality in her 1977 essay “The Image-World”:

While old photographs fill out our mental image of the past, the photographs being taken now transform what is present into a mental image, like the past. Cameras establish an inferential relation to the present (reality is known by its traces), provide an instantly retroactive view of experience.

We view the world as if through a camera lens; our memories are recalled as if they were scenes in a film. Even the language we use to describe these phenomena becomes circular, self-propelling. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard this one before. But hearing it is not the same as feeling it. And seeing it is not the same as believing it.

There are other stories we tell ourselves with regard to the development of photographic imagery and how it was understood by the general public. Photography and the concept of time have always been intimately and inextricably linked, and with the concept of time naturally comes a shadow of death. Thus photography (and later cinema), more so than painting or sculpture, has always seemed more vital in its connection to ourselves as human beings, to what we consider “reality” (objective) as opposed to “representation” (subjective).

Some basic theses in this vein from art history courses I took in college: photography is a means of freezing time; some people were supposedly convinced that being captured on film would steal their souls; photography is a means of evading death; there is a base line assumption of “truth” associated with photographic imagery, particularly early on in the medium’s tenure, that can be and has been utilized for better and for worse.

I recently listened to an episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast where host Sarah Marshall and her guest Chelsey Weber-Smith chat about various (in)famous hoaxes throughout history.3 One of them is, naturally, the Loch Ness monster and the 1934 photographic evidence thereof, commonly referred to as “the surgeon’s photo.”4 For years, that image has been presented as the necessary proof to claim that Nessie is “real”. The photograph has long since been debunked and has a delightfully elaborate backstory, but Weber-Smith mentions another theory regarding Nessie’s appearance that I hadn’t heard of. The creature in the surgeon’s photo was based on George Spicer’s verbal description of the monster from the previous year—though Nessie sightings go back as far as the 7th century, she only gained her particular long-necked appearance after the release of the 1933 film King Kong, which features a scene with a lake monster that resembles a brontosaurus. Basically, it can be assumed that Spicer and his wife saw King Kong and, subconsciously or not, based their “sighting” of the lake monster on the one in the movie. Their perception of reality (?) was altered by the visuals of a fictional film, something they could have only had access to via the latest image-making technology.

The guys who staged the surgeon’s photo then created their Nessie puppet according to the Spicer description, which had been repeated by two subsequent people who claimed to have spotted the monster, and that’s how we ended up with that infamous photograph, reproduced in every wacky urban legends anthology ever sold at a Scholastic book fair. So the image we think of when we think of the Loch Ness Monster, the elegant parabola of her neck, her sweet little pinhead, the gentle waves eddying around her otherwise featureless body, is in fact the transmutation of an image from a film that most of us haven’t actually seen. But that one photograph was all it took for Nessie—something that never existed—to gain such a specific form, so her likeness in all its grainy glory became instantly recognizable to just about anyone with a passing knowledge of the myth. The photograph was real; the puppet in the photograph was real; the monster in King Kong was real (in the sense that it was created with the use of miniatures and stop-motion effects rather than digitally rendered); what isn’t real is the story we’ve told ourselves about it. Or, rather, the story is real, and its subject is not.

Airplane! isn’t that funny anymore because we’ve already heard all the jokes; King Kong5 isn’t nearly as scary as it once was because both the image and story of King Kong has been repeated dozens of times since the 1930s; we no longer cower when faced with footage of a moving train; we no longer feel intellectually conflicted by the image of a Campbell’s soup can in a fancy upscale gallery. The visceral impact of all of these works has been diminished by repetition over time. We no longer see the surgeon’s photo as definitive proof of a monster’s existence; we see it as proof of an image’s ability to alter the world as we know it, or as we think we know it, or, perhaps, as we want to know it.

I don’t actually think novelty is necessary in any medium in order to elicit strong emotions. If anything, my reaction to both Velvet Goldmine and The Velvet Underground was based in complete and total familiarity, the kind of relief that knocks the wind out of you with its strength, similiar to a hot shower after standing in the freezing rain for hours. But hearing that exquisite droning viola in proper cinema surround sound and seeing Lou Reed’s beautiful dark downturned eyes enormous on the screen, I’m convinced that I felt a shadow of what it must have been like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in person back in 1966, untethered to time and unbound by space: like dying, like coming back to life, over and over.

— ECT

I am envious of my friends who write newsletters similar to this one in a manner that strikes me as charmingly conversational yet still thoughtful, articulate. They are able to provide insight into their personal lives, their clever private thoughts and memories, their delicately-worded hurts, without revealing too much of themselves. I admire that kind of restraint and I find it very hard to emulate, which is why I usually write about other people’s media in the hopes that the displaced authorship will protect me from real vulnerability.

When helping my students prepare for the essay section of their college applications, I am frequently compelled to steer them away from writing about the worst thing that ever happened to them. There is an assumption among many high schoolers that discussing one’s hardships will make an applicant more appealing to admissions officers. A sob story allegedly proves the student’s resilience and suggests that they have “earned” their entry into a top school because of what they’ve endured elsewhere in their life. (FWIW, this is not universally true, and disclosing past problems with mental health especially can actually harm a student’s prospects for specific programs.) This idea of a struggle-based meritocracy is troubling enough on its own, but I flinch at these essay topics mainly because I know the people who will end up reading them don’t really care all that much. I mean, they care, sort of, but not the way a friend would care.

Admissions officers have no more “earned” a teenager’s trust and candor than the student themselves has “earned” a seat in the incoming freshman class by dint of their having been bullied as a child or having suffered some other injustice. It’s important to me that my students are discerning in what they share because I want them to have the full range of language and tone available to them when they put these thoughts into words. I don’t want them to have to self-censor, or put an optimistic twist on it, or identify a moral they learned. I want them to talk about the things that are most important to them with someone who will listen with true compassion. I don’t want their story to be a means to end (getting into college). I want the true depths of their lives to be revealed, to themselves and/or to others, for their own sake, on their own terms.

I think young people today are receiving a lot of mixed messaging about the power of honesty—people are far more open about their feelings these days than ever before, which is generally considered a good thing because it can feel nice to share one’s thoughts and experiences and engage with others’. It’s important to cultivate empathy wherever we can, especially nowadays. But I think there is also a sort of power in keeping things to oneself.

What’s intriguing to me about so-called “outsider art”1 is that the majority of it was created in solitude. Many outsider artists are from marginalized backgrounds and many of them never saw success in their own lifetimes. There are many reasons why now-famous outsider artists only garnered critical attention after their deaths—race, disability, mental illness, poverty, etc.—and there’s a reason why the work created by mental health patients in particular can only be dealt with posthumously, when they no longer pose a threat (both physically and to the narrative imposed upon them by the public). The outsider label seems to suggest that this art was made without an audience in mind—for the artist’s eyes only, so to speak. The artists are “outsiders” because they are not necessarily included in the culturally accepted fine art canon, but we are also outsiders to their work, its meanings, its motivations, especially if the artists are no longer around to explain themselves. Many of the most recognizable outsider artists, such as James Hampton or Vivian Maier, created enormous bodies of work without the intention of ever showing another soul.

It’s hard to imagine making anything today without eventually showing it to someone else, seeking the validation of another’s regard. These days it’s hard to do or experience anything in solitude—true solitude, without self-consciousness, without an imaginary audience, without trying to cultivate a brand and/or public persona. I used to like looking at pictures of other people’s journals on Pinterest and Reddit until I realized how obviously some people were tailoring their entries to appeal to an audience rather than function as a personally enriching activity. It makes me nervous and sad on their behalfs; it makes me want to upload my own journal in the hopes that an anonymous stranger will compliment it. I don’t like this urge.

With this in mind, I have no choice but to admire the dedication of someone like Henry Darger, if only for his tremendous devotion to his own artistic vision and his willingness to make such an effort all by himself. Darger is perhaps the most infamous outsider artist and a quintessential example of the mad person defanged in death—the convoluted mythology of his Vivian Girls, told over 15,000 pages of text accompanied by hundreds of multimedia illustrations, is considered mysterious rather than manic. I really recommend the chapter about Darger in Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City,2 especially for how she is able to discuss his life and art empathetically without shying away from the perhaps worrisome psychosexual implications of his work.

Committing to any project without that kind of outside validation is an extraordinary challenge for me, although I am forcing myself to become accustomed to it by not sharing everything I write or make, even if I am very pleased with its outcome. Because I know once I break that seal and get even a crumb of acknowledgment, the search for validation will distract me endlessly and the creative practice itself will be spoiled.

Having said all that, I will exercise enough vulnerability to recommend some things that I have enjoyed and/or been moved by recently:

• “you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).” by Ismatu Gwendolyn on Substack

• “When I Close My Eyes: A Poem for Gaza” by Elena Dudum for The Offing

• “This One Is Different Because It’s Us: The Smiths at 40” by Elise Soutar for Paste

• A 21-year-old John Cale playing piano on the game show I’ve Got a Secret in 1963

• Pattie Boyd’s personal ephemera up for auction at Christie’s (no need to bother with the Eric Clapton crap)

• Grace Cummings’ cover of “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim

• Tutorial for how to purchase eSims for Gazans—it’s extremely straightforward and not very costly. Please consider donating at least one eSim to the organization so people in Gaza and Rafah can remain in contact with each other and the outside world while under attack by Israel. It is quite literally the absolute least we can do.

Happy March, I suppose.

— ECT

Warhol has become so ubiquitous as to become invisible, much like the subjects of his most famous artworks. Part of what made his paintings of Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans so arresting was the very notion that he had painted them at all—that is, that he had looked at these banal, low-brow fixtures of everyday life with enough curiosity and affection to commit them to paper, over and over again. As if they were worth something. As if they were beautiful.

Today, Warhol is just like any other mass-produced consumer good with no personality or meaning beyond a recognizable name, logo, shape, and/or color scheme. Outside of auction houses, Warhol’s cultural presence has gone from the realm of high art to low art because of how successful—and therefore commonplace—it is. It’s so easy to dismiss. It’s superficial, it’s boring, it’s been discussed to death, and Warhol was an asshole anyway, so who cares? The narrative is simple: Warhol wanted to be a brand. He wanted to be a machine. He wanted to be a non-human commercial entity, and that’s what he achieved.

Last spring this image kept floating around my online spaces, to my immense consternation:

Warhol seemingly falling out of favor with the public and my own mile-wide contrarian streak have resulted in a strange impulse to defend him, or to at least consider him seriously while everybody else is dunking on him. I was irritated by this image because it is remarkably untrue. Despite its prevailing association with artifice, Warhol’s work was grounded in the actual, not the artificial. He loved things, loved them enough to preserve them forever in his paintings and photography and also quite literally in the boxes and boxes of ephemera (others might call it trash) that he collected over the course of his lifetime. As Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City, the book that singlehandedly changed my mind about Warhol as an artist,

“…[P]art of the reason Pop Art caused such enormous hostility…is that it looked on first glance like a category error, a painful collapse of the seemingly unquestionable boundary between high and low culture; good taste and bad. But the questions Warhol was asking with his new work run far deeper than any crude attempt at shock or defiance. He was painting things to which he was sentimentally attached, even loved; objects whose value derives not because they're rare or individual but because they are reliably the same.”

He pursued sameness even with the moving image: his infamous early films are basically endurance tests of varying lengths for the audience. Very little occurs in them. It’s uncomfortable to sit and watch someone sleep for over five hours, or eat a mushroom / receive oral sex for for thirty minutes straight.1 These films are monotonous; in Sleep (1964), for example, Warhol and his editor Sarah Dalton strove to excise as much natural variance in motion (twitches, sighs, etc.) as possible. He wanted it to be projected at twice the frame rate of the original recording, so all this non-movement would be drawn out even further. The camera angle changes, but nothing actually happens. Monotony was the goal.

I think these films are even more interesting in our current age, when people (myself included) admit to getting antsy after watching even a few minutes of TV without picking up their phone to poke at simultaneously. They’re more challenging today not because of their intimacy—we are no longer shocked or discomfited by the imagery of a total stranger doing something as private as sleeping or snacking or getting a blowjob, because millions of videos featuring these subjects are readily available online—but because they are so damn long and so damn uneventful. They are the perfect antithesis to the flashy, loud, ultra-condensed video sponcon that has flooded the internet and effectively sidelined all other forms of content in recent years.

In his real-time commentary on Sleep, critic / professional Warhol enthusiast Blake Gopnik notes that he’s “glad [he] didn’t ask for the WiFi code for the gallery. The 21^st century permits distractions and multitasking that the 1960s didn’t. Does that make us feel even more stranded in Giorno’s sleep, since we aren’t used to EVER surrendering to one stimulus?” I like this phrasing a lot, all that sibilant alliteration, the insistent shh, appropriate for a cinema or a nap or another designated quiet environment. I like the idea of surrendering to a film, slipping into it somehow and losing yourself in the process.

David Schwartz, the Museum of the Moving Image’s curator-at-large, makes a similar observation in his essay for Reverse Shot: “[M]ost Americans spend more than twice [Sleep’s] running time per day looking at screens; the five plus hours don’t actually feel like such a demand.” I would argue that the run time does feel like a demand still, an almost excruciating one in the eyes of most people today, and the film is all the more compelling as a result.

I find it hard to think of Warhol as superficial when presented with such works as these because they are so human, both in the plainness of their subject matter and in how much they manage to fail at monotony despite that being their express goal. Warhol was not particularly skilled with the camera on a technical level at this point (it was a recent purchase). The exposure and white balance fluctuates, the image wobbles in and out of focus, the sutures between shots are obvious and make no effort to conceal themselves via conventional continuity editing. It is seamful rather than seamless, rife with the evidence of human touch.

Nor does it strike me as lazy. In fact it seems grueling to sit and record someone sleeping for any amount of time without losing interest, and then to review the thousands of feet of film, edit out any significant motion, and splice it back together again. Dalton even made storyboards to organize the shots according to some inscrutable, non-chronological logic. Warhol spent months filming Sleep in 3-minute intervals during the summer of 1963. It must have been stiflingly hot, as many New York summers are. There must have been a fan on somewhere in the apartment that remained unrecorded by the silent footage. He must have been sweating, uncomfortable, perhaps craving the very same sort of rest he was capturing on his new Bolex 16mm.2

In short, it was a huge commitment. As such, the film feels like an extraordinarily loving, almost worshipful act—and indeed the somnolent subject of Sleep is John Giorno, a poet and Warhol’s lover at the time.3 But even disregarding the sleeper’s identity, the film transmits a profound sense of appreciation for the mundane non-activity of rest because of how carefully and attentively it has been captured. (Aren’t they the same thing, love and attention?) It’s boring, yes, but boring is not so distinct from meditative or peaceful.

Ultimately, I think it’s pretty useless to speculate as to how a historical figure might have responded to contemporary technology or political events because it’s almost always based on pure projection. So I don’t really care to wonder if Warhol would have loved AI, or if Keith Haring would have embraced NFTs, or any other shallow hypothetical that ultimately serves to only reinforce the most basic understanding of an artist’s legacy rather than consider them as a human being. And I don’t really think Warhol necessarily needs to be defended (yet again)—there exist many valid critiques of his work, politics, and artistic ethos. But I also think it’s curious that the insidiousness of poptimism, which posits that low culture can and should be approached just as critically as high culture, has not affected mainstream ideas about visual art in recent years as it has music and television.

Another Warhol cliché: he loved to look. He was a committed voyeur of both humans and objects. He took inspiration from the subjects he watched and the act of watching itself. In order to appreciate his work, we must also force ourselves to observe the world, including its most commonplace and apparently worthless elements, with as much intensity as he did. We must look, and keep looking. Even if we get bored.

— ECT

I first began writing this essay in 2018 when I was twenty years old. At the time it felt incredibly crucial, having finally identified myself as a lesbian, that I somehow accounted for my adolescent obsession with The Beatles because said obsession had an undeniably lustful dimension. I was troubled by this because it seemed like a grave contradiction. It felt deceitful to call myself gay when I could still watch A Hard Day’s Night and feel, very presently, as though I were again twelve years old, a ghost of that erotic fixation on George Harrison.1

It’s hard to remember that sense of urgency now—it seems pretty silly, to be honest. Who cares? It’s hard to remember how it felt to be the narrator of this essay in general: I read it today almost as if it was written by a stranger, or someone I knew a long time ago but with whom I have since lost touch. This is the nature of all writing and of all art, I imagine—here is an extension of the self preserved in time, evidence of a past existence that still lingers in a concrete form. It’s a little uncanny and a little embarrassing. My first instinct is to flinch away from it, to deny it ever happened at all, but the fact of the writing itself remains and now that it’s published for other people to read, I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. I think that’s a good thing.

A lot has changed since I started writing this, and a lot hasn’t. That sense of desperate urgency is gone, but so is the immense confusion and insecurity at the heart of what I was trying to say. Today the essay chafes at different wounds in ways I couldn’t have anticipated while I was writing it. It does not really reflect who I am now or how I feel about most things anymore, but it is a very accurate portrait of who I was between the ages of twenty and twenty-two: adrift and practically frantic with the need to explain myself to myself. I think I did an OK job in the end.

Thanks for reading.

— ECT

One of my favorite jokes to make about Lana Del Rey’s music is that many of her songs are just lists of strangely specific items (“cacciatore, limousines, ‘ciao amore’, soft ice cream” she sings hilariously in the chorus of ‘Salvatore’). I was reminded of Lana while reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh last year because there are a lot of objects in that novel, too, listed with a similar level of dispassion and odd specificity (chosen at random: “fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from ‘a good Japanese restaurant’”). Environmental descriptions are supplanted instead by long lists of the items that occupy the protagonist’s thoughts as well as the physical spaces she inhabits. This eventually just devolves into free word association as the protagonist slips in and out of her chemical coma.

It struck me as a terribly mean book overall, pale and lifeless in its distaste for humanity. A lot of the novel is presumably intended to satirize the vapidity of the contemporary art scene: the protagonist works in a gallery and gets away with literally sleeping through most of the job because it’s all so inconsequential and futile on a grander scale. Contemporary art is all just an ego trip, a grotesque project in each artists’ own self-obsession, blah blah blah. It’s the same conservative reactionary bullshit that people have been lobbing at contemporary art since the early 20th century. Social commentary is for schmucks. Whatever.

When the protagonist finally emerges from her self-induced catatonia, I was not convinced by her renewed interest in fine art. During a trip to the Metropolitan Museum at the end of the novel she is still mostly interested in the objects represented by the paintings—she is invariably drawn to still lifes over portraiture or abstraction. Looking at a painting of a bowl of fruit (otherwise undescribed except to note that it includes grapes), she comes to the utterly stunning1 conclusion: “Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.” She touches the painting then, as if to prove to herself the thing-ness of it, its existence as a mere object like anything else. She theorizes that these Dutch Masters2 were ultimately just as shallow as the contemporary artists represented by her former gallery:

But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.

She declares herself “free” as a result of this revelation but there’s very little textual evidence to support this idea of liberation, especially because the book ends about three pages later. I was supremely irritated by this uncommitted, listless, non-description of the character’s supposed connection between art and the world. There was no beauty in it, no grace. The protagonist maintained a cool indifference toward an object universally acknowledged as beautiful because she was able to see past such superficialities to what lies beneath, and what lies beneath is nothing. Was that really wisdom? Does indifference really translate to freedom?

I was also reminded of Lana while reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation because I am aware that Moshfegh has been entered alongside Ms. del Rey into a canon of media associated with the archetypical Sad Girl. Trends come and go but the Sad Girl is, seemingly, forever. Her different incarnations appear throughout the history of fashion and film and television and music and literature: heroin chic, Effy from Skins, whatever synonym of waif/coquette/nymphet is currently viral on TikTok. Ultimately the image of the Sad Girl comes down to things, too: which books a person owns3 (The Bell Jar), which designers she wears (Vivienne Westwood), which cigarettes she smokes (Marlboros). It is a means of coping, because being alive is hard, especially when you are a girl or a woman. But it’s not sustainable, it’s not smart, and it’s certainly not interesting.

Maybe I was so annoyed by MYORAR’s conclusion because I knew that I would have fallen for it had I read the book at a younger age, back when I wanted to incorporate the concept of the Sad Girl into my personality more than anything else. I would have seen it as a kind of intelligence that the character was able to look past the pretty surface of the world to the bare ugly nihilistic “truth” below. Now I just see it as a choice to actively cheat oneself of a deeper, more meaningful connection to the world. It makes me cringe to see my peers in their mid-twenties still chasing after a version of this archetype, embodied in tweets about how crazy they are and Instagram stories reposting sardonic memes about crippling depression. I wonder, What are they gaining from it? What was I gaining from it?

I was eating lunch in Little Italy with my best friend a couple weeks ago when I decided that I was done with all of that. “I'm not trying to make my sadness interesting anymore,” I announced. “It’s not interesting. It’s not funny or clever or cool. I’m just bored.” All at once, sitting in that restaurant, I no longer found those self-deprecating memes amusing, regardless of whether I indeed relate to the core of them. It fills me with a great sense of disappointment to see women taking up the Sad Girl mantle under the guise of self-empowerment or even just self-awareness, as if denying oneself the opportunity for discovery and joy, the opportunity for the appreciation of beauty, can ever be positive. The Sad Girl is forever fixated on aesthetics and images and objects and consumerism-as-personality, but she is not interested in real beauty, the kind of life-affirming beauty that can only be found in sincerity, in art and nature and human relationships.

I gave up on sadness because sadness gave up on me. I loved my depression for the comfort it provided, the blissful sameness year after year. My stalwart companion, my best friend forever, the fixed point around which my universe revolved. I delighted in its monotony. It never once loved me back.

For a long time I thought that if I could make my sadness fit into a recognizable, aesthetically-pleasing shape with which other girls could identify, then I would be able to bear it. In that way I understand the impulse as it still exists in my peers in the form of self-deprecating memes and tweets and posts. But trying to make myself into a Sad Girl rather than just being a sad girl gave me an identity to which I clung far past its expiration date. I have to let her go. That’s the indifference I want to cultivate. Not an indifference toward great art or my own life or humanity at large—an indifference toward the part of my brain that doesn’t always fire on all cylinders, that often makes it hard to exist in the world, that nonetheless belongs to me more than any object in my possession. That kind of indifference is freedom.

— ECT

See you in the new year.

OUT

• social media

• guilt

• true crime

Listen to (or read the transcript of) this episode of You’re Wrong About with Emma Berquist, a writer who was stabbed multiple times by a stranger in a public park. Although she herself was a victim of the sort of random violence that true crime “junkies” (ugh) tend to fixate on, Berquist argues that this genre of media contributes to a culture of paranoia that discourages community and further normalizes the police state.

• art as therapy

• the last dregs of poptimism

• youtube video essays that are 2+ hours long for no reason

I watched the 4-hour iCarly “analysis” that everyone was talking about a while ago and I wasn’t impressed.

• cannibalism as a metaphor for love/desire

Sublimating libido/lust into hunger/consumption is such a boring way of invoking eroticism from an artistic standpoint. There are so many more interesting and creative ways to do it. Hunger as shorthand for lust is the oldest trick in the symbolic book. It’s been done!!

• the word ‘parasocial’

• mark fisher

Capitalism is dog shit, and I think it’s a good thing that people are thinking critically about the oppressive structures that bind our daily lives. Having the language to articulate what’s wrong with the world is important and can be the first step to facilitate change. I also think it’s worth considering that reading texts like Capitalist Realism and exclusively looking at every social phenomenon—music, cinema, human relationships—through that lens will not exactly make you feel better about yourself and the world, and in fact it might even make you feel even more hopeless about everything. It’s worth it to make an effort to find beauty and grace and even FUN in this life which is otherwise so dreadful. Fisher’s worldview is suffocatingly nihilistic and ultimately unproductive, in my mind. He famously claimed that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” but, as a friend of mine pointed out—he couldn’t imagine the end of capitalism in 2009 right after a global economic collapse? Sounds like he sucked at imagining things.

Where does realism end and fatalism begin? Shouldn’t we at least try to imagine an alternative, or allow ourselves true, guiltless joys in spite of life’s grim truths? If you need a ~radical anticapitalist aphorism~ to cling to in trying times, consider Ursula K. Le Guin instead: “Capitalism's power seems inescapable, but then so did the divine rights of kings.”

• joking about being italian

• y2k fashion. please

IN

• memorizing poems

In my lifetime I have memorized two poems on purpose (so far!). The first was “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, which my childhood best friend and I recited aloud while marching in a circle around the dining room table until it was drilled into our brains. The second was "One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop because it was required of me for a creative writing class in high school. The poem I wanted to memorize was too close to my heart and reciting it in front of my classmates felt like an idiotically vulnerable thing to subject myself to, so I picked the Bishop poem at random. It still pops into my head every so often.

As Billy Collins says in this interview, “When you internalize a poem, it becomes something inside of you. You’re able to walk around with it. It becomes a companion.”

• those tiered chain link fruit baskets you hang in your kitchen

• one-pot recipes

• sugar snap peas

• 1960s girl groups

The Marvelettes, The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las, Diana Ross & the Supremes, The Crystals, Goldie & the Gingerbreads, The Liverbirds, The Shirelles, etc…

• meadham kirchhoff renaissance

For a certain breed of young teenage girl in 2012, the now-defunct British fashion label Meadham Kirchhoff represented theeeee platonic ideal of style: cutesy, clever, colorful, and consistently featured in Rookie Mag photoshoots. As the Y2K revival hurtles ever closer to the fashion of my own adolescence, it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to imagine that there will be a second (?) coming of Tavi Gevinson-alikes dancing around on TikTok.

• community gardens

• actually following the washing instructions on your laundry

Except for maybe “dry clean only”…sorry…

• sunscreen for health reasons, not anti-aging reasons

• joking about being irish

• pearls

• fanzines

• ekphrasis

I only recently discovered this word, which succinctly describes the kind of writing I have always loved best: vivid written descriptions of visual artwork. Pretty neat! You could start with this syllabus of ekphrastic poetry compiled by Victoria Chang. Or just this poem by W.H. Auden.

• wearing ribbons in your hair

• historical fiction novels

• nautical-inspired fashion. please

Together we can make these trends come true. Show your support today by buying a fun little sailor cap and wearing it out in public the first week of 2023.

— ECT

I’ve included more details about the tracklist after the cut (much in the style of my friend Gen’s excellent weekly playlist newsletter) but it’s rather long and self-indulgent so my feelings won’t be too hurt if you don’t read all of it. The only thing I ask is that you please listen to the playlist in order. If you don’t use Spotify, you can listen to it on YouTube here; a couple of the songs aren’t on Spotify anyway.

It was not a very good year but some very good things did happen. I saw new cities and old friends and listened to a lot of music that I’d never heard before. I felt sorry for myself most days. I stood with my feet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my memory; I was forced to begrudgingly admit that Lake Michigan does resemble the sea when standing on its freshwater shore. I managed to do some writing; I was even told some nice things about this writing. I started teaching myself how to cook! I went to museums and cinemas and libraries and playhouses and cried in almost all of them. I read The Lord of the Rings. I cut my hair. I lived.

Happy holidays to everyone. I say it every December but it always bears repeating: may the next year be kinder on us all.

— ECT

1. Broadcast, “Long Was The Year” from The Noise Made By People, 2000.

Well, what else is there to say?

2. The National, “Patterns of Fairytales” from Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, 2003.

I maintain that Matt Berninger is one of the greatest contemporary lyricists, but I can admit his songwriting is a little uneven on the first two National albums—he didn’t seem to hit his lyrical stride until Alligator in 2005, and even then that record has some extreme clunkers. The lyrics on this track from their sophomore album are unusually sharp for that period: “I guess you must be somewhere breathing / Where skin and everything still know what they are for / And blood remembers where to go…”

3. Nilüfer Yanya, “midnight sun” from PAINLESS, 2022.

4. The Smile, “The Opposite” from A Light for Attracting Attention, 2022.

5. Shygirl, “Woe” from Nymph, 2022.

6. The Beta Band, “Inner Meet Me” from The Three E.P.’s, 1998.

Almost all of the scant writing I was able to accomplish this year was done while listening to this band. 

7. Dry Cleaning, “Anna Calls From The Arctic” from Stumpwork, 2022.

“Everything’s expensive and opaque and privatized.” 

8. Jucifer, “Amplifier” from I Name You Destroyer, 2002.

My roommate Dan had been bugging me about listening to this band for a while because he thought I would like them, and (unsurprisingly) he was correct. Fun fact: the 2020 film Sound of Metal is based on the real-life couple that forms Jucifer.  

9. Wet Leg, “Convincing” from Wet Leg, 2022. 

10. Myslovitz, “To nie był film” from Z rozmyślań przy śniadaniu, 1997. 

My friend Ola, who introduced me to this band, told me that they were sometimes described as “Polish Britpop” (lol) back in the 1990s.  

11. Fontaines D.C., “Nabokov” from Skinty Fia, 2022.

12. The Mountain Goats, “Extraction Point” from Bleed Out, 2022.

13. Pavement, “Secret Knowledge of Backroads” from Slanted & Enchanted, 1992.

Stephen Malkmus originally wrote this while he was still in Silver Jews, David Berman’s band, but I prefer this version recorded with Pavement. “I’ve never felt like I do now…”

14. Ethel Cain, “Thoroughfare” from Preacher’s Daughter, 2022.

I am often resistant to the artists that become abruptly popular in certain online circles, but I have to admit the Tumblr girlies were right about this one. The histrionics on this track in particular remind me a little of some 1970s songstresses and a lot of the unspecific Americana imagery popularized by Lana del Rey. That sounds like a dig but I swear it’s a compliment.

15. Todd Rundgren, “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference” from Something / Anything?, 1972.

I finally watched the extended director’s cut of Almost Famous this year, which briefly revived my interest in classic rock.

16. Harry Nilsson, “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City” from Harry, 1969.

17. Wilco, “Can’t Stand It” from Summerteeth, 1999.

18. MGMT, “Indie Rokkers” from Time to Pretend (EP), 2005.

This EP is inextricably linked to the season two finale of Skins UK in my mind. Nevertheless I still think it holds up. 

19. Sports Team, “The Drop” from Gulp!, 2022.

Thank you to Gen for this song/album as well as the next.

20. Dogzilla, “Lunch With Ed” from Allizgod, 1989. (on YouTube)

There is very little information to be found about this Boston-based band except for a couple of frustratingly crappy live performances that have been uploaded to YouTube. (My research has been further complicated by the existence of another band called Dogzilla in the early aughts as well as a book titled Dogzilla written by the same guy who wrote Captain Underpants.) In a parallel universe they were Boston’s answer to Faith No More.

21. Viagra Boys, “Punk Rock Loser” from Cave World, 2022.

This album isn’t nearly as clever as it wants to be, but a couple of songs do slap. 

22. Outkast, “Dracula’s Wedding (feat. Kelis)” from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, 2003.

23. Young Fathers, “Geronimo” from Geronimo (Single), 2022.

I was probably one of maybe five people in the entire universe who actually saw the Trainspotting sequel when it came out in 2017 (and I was definitely the only person who saw it twice in theatres), but I’m glad that I did because if nothing else it introduced me to this Edinburgh-based band. Young Fathers if you’re reading this PLEASE tour in the United States next year!!!!!

24. Japanese Breakfast, “Sit” from Jubilee, 2021.

25. Big Thief, “Blurred View” from Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, 2022.

26. Fleetwood Mac, “Warm Ways” from Fleetwood Mac, 1975.

Christine McVie forever and ever and ever. 

27. Sasami, “Take Care” from Take Care (Single), 2019.

28. SZA, “20 Something” from Ctrl, 2017.

SZA released this about a month before I actually entered my twenties. I probably would have been less excited about that milestone if I knew just how accurate this song would turn out to be. 

29. Miya Folick, “2007” from 2007 (EP), 2022.

I admittedly wasn’t in love with this EP compared to her earlier music, but these songs sounded amazing live. If you ever get the chance to see a Miya Folick concert, I urge you to attend—she’s an incredible performer.    

30. Stereolab, “Anonymous Collective” from Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1996.

“You and me are molded by things well beyond our acknowledgment…”

31. Yo La Tengo, “The Room Got Heavy” from I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, 2006.

32. Buffy Sainte-Marie, “He’s A Keeper of the Fire” from Illuminations, 1969.

If I hadn’t gotten into Radiohead shortly afterwards, this would have been my most-played song of 2022 because I listened to it on loop for all of February and most of March. 

33. Fanny, “Last Night I Had A Dream (orig. Randy Newman)” from Mothers Pride, 1973.

Possibly the most underrated band of the 20th century—maybe even the most underrated band of all time. Please do yourself a favor and watch this live performance of this song.

34. L7, “Till the Wheels Fall Off” from Smell the Magic, 1990.

L7 is probably best remembered for the somewhat unexpected popularity of their 1992 Butch Vig-produced single “Pretend That We’re Dead,” as well as the definitely unexpected incident a few months later, when frontwoman Donita Sparks threw her used tampon at some hecklers in the audience at the Reading Festival. 

35. Hole, “Plump” from Live Through This, 1994.

“Was Pitchfork Right To Rank Live Through This Above Nevermind On Their Best 90s Albums List" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

36. Britney Spears, “Heaven On Earth” from Blackout, 2007.

37. Beyoncé, “VIRGO’S GROOVE” from RENAISSANCE, 2022.

My friend Laura said that this album sounds like the music RuPaul thinks he’s making.

38. Sudan Archives, “#513” from Natural Brown Prom Queen, 2022.

39. Anika, “Masters of War (orig. Bob Dylan)” from Anika, 2010.

They played this song over the speakers right before Pavement came on the first time I saw them. It sounded fucking incredible (those drums!), to the point that I was almost disappointed that the song was cut off by the band’s entrance. For a couple weeks after the show I struggled to discover what the song actually was, but I eventually prevailed!

40. Radiohead, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” from Amnesiac, 2001. 

In retrospect it’s a little ridiculous that I didn’t listen to Radiohead at all until this year. Then again having access to “My Iron Lung” as a teenager would have probably made me ten times more insufferable than I already was, so I guess I should be thankful for small miracles. This was my #1 most played song in 2022. 

41. Lorelei, “Caterwaul” from Asleep (EP), 1993. (on YouTube)

I was briefly obsessed with this band during my shoegaze phase in 9th grade but had been unable to remember their name for years. I finally figured out who they were a few months ago—I could have wept at the shocking familiarity of their music after nearly a decade without it. 

42. Blur, “Country Sad Ballad Man” from Blur, 1997.

43. Swirlies, “Bell” from Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, 1993.

44. Pinback, “AFK” from Summer in Abaddon, 2004.

Thanks to Gen for this one as well. “I miss you / not in a Slint way / but I miss you…”

45. Mitski, “I Guess” from Laurel Hell, 2022.

46. The Lemonheads, “My Drug Buddy (Demo)” from It’s A Shame About Ray, 1992.

47. Julia Jacklin, “End of a Friendship” from PRE PLEASURE, 2022.

48. Low, “Laser Beam” from Things We Lost in the Fire, 2001.

Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk formed Low in 1993 and remained the only two consistent members of the band until Mimi’s death a couple months ago. She just had the loveliest voice.

49. Fat White Family, “I Believe In Something Better” from Serfs Up!, 2019. 

Probably the most devastating read of my life came from Ola after I’d posted something about this band: “i googled fat white family when you were talking about them yesterday…and then i saw they are british and thought: of course they are british, emilia was posting about them. and then the next thing i saw in articles i clicked is that they argue a lot, all of them have drug problems and apparently the lead vocalist has a good creative chemistry with the guitarist???? i was like, yeah. of course. of course.” YEESH!!!!

50. WHY?, “Simeon’s Dilemma” from Alopecia, 2008.

Like most of the music I listened to in my early teens, I first discovered this song because a cool girl I followed on Tumblr reblogged it. If I remember correctly, she put this song on a mix CD she gave to her crush in their senior year of high school; if I’m not mistaken, she and that boy are still together today. Back then the premise of the song—someone’s 25th birthday—seemed impossibly far away. At the time my life felt very small and I could not imagine that I would ever live to see a quarter of a century. This year on my birthday my dear friend Graham texted me the opening lyrics of the song: “Today you’re twenty-five, I made you something fine, it’s in the palm of my new hand…” 

Last year I celebrated the two-decade anniversary of Wes Anderson’s third and best film by taking the subway uptown to Harlem, where much of the movie was shot. The exterior of the titular family’s house is at 339 Convent Avenue; in the film, its street address is 111 Archer Avenue, which does not actually exist. The Royal Tenenbaums is set in New York but like many Andersonian depictions of real-life locations, it would probably be more accurate to say that it is set in “New York.” As in, the idea of New York, recognizable yet unfamiliar, every bit of preexisting magic heightened to affect a strange surrealism—the ever-present uncanny “not quite”.

In my final semester of undergrad at The New School, I took a course about Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. That was the entire conceit of the class: a deep dive into a single film and its many everlasting echoes throughout contemporary cinema. Vertigo isn’t my favorite Hitchcock film but I enjoyed delving into it on such a granular level. Mostly I was fascinated by other people’s fascination with it, the way I am frequently intrigued by other people’s obsessions whether or not I relate to them. The academic stodginess of film criticism fell away in so many of the essays we read as if the authors, ordinarily so committed to emotional distance in their pursuit of analysis, were helpless against the force of their own love for this film.

One of the texts discussed the pilgrimages some Vertigo fans embark on to the film’s various shooting locations throughout San Francisco. Douglas Cunningham writes,

“[C]inephilic pilgrimages stand apart from the casual ogling of curious film buffs; after all, the cinephilic pilgrimage is born of love (for the diegetic world of the film), loss (the apparent absence of that diegetic world within the realm of the real) and a longing to occupy/influence a space-time somewhere between the index and the referent.”

Of course this is what I thought about as I rode the D train to Hamilton Heights on my own cinephilic pilgrimage. (In the movie, the characters themselves also make a kind of pilgrimage to the house on Archer Ave where they grew up, compelled to return by the prospect of their father Royal’s death.)

I was also thinking about the film’s economy of dialogue, which, for a movie that employs narration and features a sprawling ensemble cast, is quite limited. The characters don’t know how to talk to one another except in clipped statements that represent years and years of noncommunication. They are all lonely, desperately unto themselves. There are a lot of pauses and silences of varying degrees of awkwardness, in which the characters look just past one another. There isn’t much eye contact between them, despite the opening titles which feature the classic Wes Anderson formulation of a single character perfectly centered within the frame, gazing directly into the camera like a school portrait or a mugshot. With so little being said out loud, each bit of dialogue becomes equally weighty and equally inconsequential for both the characters and the film’s audience. Throwaway quips are delivered in nearly the exact same manner as heartbreaking confessions.

This style of speech, heard throughout much of Anderson’s filmography, often earns the criticism of being too detached, too dry. But I think the evenness of their tones belies a far deeper sorrow, a resignation to who these characters are as people, which is to say people who cannot communicate the permanent profundity of their respective sadnesses. They know they can only share it by standing, quiet, in each other’s presence, just as the film’s audience can only share it by sitting similarly in silence, watching from across the room, unable to make eye contact.

“I’ve had a rough year, Dad,” Chas says toward the end of the movie, when he is finally able to let himself be his father’s son. I cry a lot during The Royal Tenenbaums, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, but this particular line of dialogue did me in during my most recent viewing. It is such a profound, nearly absurd understatement that it circles back around to being the most accurate and all-encompassing description of that level of loss—because what else is there to say, at the end of everything? I’ve had a rough year. Haven’t we all? Royal murmurs in reply, “I know you have, Chassie.” As he speaks Royal touches his son’s shoulder so Chas glances up and they can finally look each other in the eye.

That's not really the sort of movie that Wes Anderson creates anymore. I still think his best ones are about truly lonely people and how sadness can be made beautiful in the right light with the right framing but it doesn't necessarily make you feel better to view it that way. It is just another manner of enduring the world. Now his movies are more beautiful and more precise than ever, but the intellectual and emotional bottom has fallen out of them, so to speak. There is less quiet; they are teeming with visual and auditory clutter. The humor is so obvious that it borders on gauche. His newer films are made hollow by irony and that to me conveys a much stronger sense of detachment and unreality than any of his earlier work.

At the core of The Royal Tenenbaums there exists a fully dimensional sadness, a sadness you could live in despite the surreality of the film’s visuals. Anderson's more recent movies are camp in a very literal Sontagian way (“not a lamp but the Idea of a lamp”—not sadness but the Idea of sadness). They don't have any notable pathos anymore and I am disappointed by them again and again. Still, they are beautiful to behold if nothing else.

In the cold sunlight of last December, the house at 339 Convent Avenue looked much the same as it did in the movie. It was a kind of loss to see it in person, “the apparent absence of that diegetic world within the realm of the real” that Cunningham described. And yet I was glad to know that it was preserved not only on film and in our collective cinephilic memory but also, clearly, in real life.

Although no one paid any attention to the building or to me, I still felt conspicuous as I wandered around the residential block to see it from different angles. Then I left. I walked through Morningside Park, which was already mostly ugly with the pale cast of winter. The color of the concrete steps was nearly indistinguishable from the color of the dead grass surrounding them, but there were a few hedges drooping with bright red berries and even, rather incongruously, a section of half-withered rosebushes that had managed to retain their color.

At the time I was obsessed with the song “Hairshirt” by R.E.M. despite my general dislike of the band, and I listened to it on repeat as I strolled.12 The lyrics are somewhat oblique but I think it’s ultimately about letting go of guilt and forgiving yourself your own trespasses; it’s also about recognizing the narcissism of self-flagellation and giving that up as an impulse. I think The Royal Tenenbaums is a little bit about that, too: a cautionary tale against making a martyr of oneself, however that urge may manifest.

The day passed without fanfare, as most anniversaries do. Things were about to get very bad in my life, which I vaguely sensed at the time though I could not have predicted the extent of it. I was going to be doing a lot of standing in rooms with people whose painful silences would say far more than any of our halting conversations. These scenes would lack Anderson’s meticulous curation, his exquisite symmetry, and would be lit only with the dull hues of reality. They would not be beautiful; I would endure them anyway.

That afternoon I had about five bucks from the previous winter that I’d discovered earlier in the pocket of my peacoat. I was short 75 cents to catch a ride on Comet Hale-Bopp, but it was enough cash to buy a bottle of iced tea before I took the subway home.

— ECT

This show was easily one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. There were about a dozen band members onstage at any given moment and they were all grinning as they played. They raised their guitars, triumphant, and struck dramatic poses. They dashed around the stage, dodging one another as they traded off instruments practically every other song: a guitar for a trombone for a pair of congas for a synthesizer and back to a different guitar again. They leaned their heads on each other’s shoulders mid-song and laughed affectionately, frequently. They were generous in their joy, to a degree that I have never seen in any other musician except for maybe Belle and Sebastian. And they sounded fucking great.

As if this frenetically earnest performance wasn’t enough on its own, the lead singer Kevin Drew announced before the encore that he had invited a special friend to come help sing the one song everyone was still anxious to hear. Moments later, Tracey Ullman strolled onstage and indeed sang “Anthems For A 17-Year-Old Girl” alongside vocalists Jill Harris and Amy Millan. Then they were joined midway through by Meryl Streep, who crept out from backstage somewhat shyly at first, holding up her phone as she recorded the moment. Tracey Ullman was already random (though not unwelcome), but abruptly being in the presence of three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep was quite the shock to the system, and I think everyone in the audience felt compelled to rub their eyes and blink rapidly like a cartoon character in disbelief—at least that’s how I reacted.

Ms. Streep quickly regained her confidence and jumped in to sing with the other three women, swaying with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Of course everyone in the room was singing along, too. Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me…

(For the record: Meryl doesn’t follow the rules. She had a death grip on that phone and was certainly not planning on dropping it. I’d kill to see the footage she recorded.)

Sort of related: somehow, in the span of about seven months, I went from openly disparaging the quality of Stephen Malkmus’ voice to spending [REDACTED] dollars to see his band Pavement not once but twice at the beginning of October.1 In a way this was a long time coming: Pavement is revered by many people whom I admire (this includes other musicians as well as my own personal friends) and I have been trying for literal years to hear what everyone else seems to hear, the so-called brilliance that I could never parse on my own. Basically, I thought all their songs sounded like shit. Then early this summer I tried once more on a whim and something slotted into place. What had been grating for so long was suddenly beautiful to me, almost painfully so.

It reminds me of how in the past I was always frustrated by my own lack of enthusiasm for Vermeer, how there was nothing about his paintings that moved me despite my mother and countless others loving or at least valuing them ardently, enough to steal them away for good. The first time a Vermeer painting became truly beautiful to me, I wept standing alone in front of it in the Met, mostly because it was beautiful but also because I was relieved to finally understand what had evaded me for so long. In that moment I felt a little more connected with the world, to everyone who’d ever looked at that painting since the 17th century. It felt like a discovery—"I’ve got it!”—despite having seen the painting dozens of times before.

Like with the Vermeer painting, I would be hard-pressed to articulate what precipitated the shift in my opinion about Pavement’s music, but I’m grateful for it anyway. I bought a ticket to their fourth and final Brooklyn show quite literally on my way home from the third because they really were that good—and also because they didn’t play my favorite song despite it having been on the setlists for pretty much every other show on this tour. Luckily for me, they opened with it the next night.

It still didn’t compare to my favorite-ever version of the song, taken from Pavement’s penultimate concert before they broke up for the first time in 1999, but I cried all the same to hear it. I don’t know why this song and the above performance in particular are so uniquely exquisite to me—maybe because Malkmus’ voice is more melodic, however faintly, compared to the studio recording, especially when he sings my favorite line, “He never, he never complains when it’s hot…” Whatever the reason, every time I watch this video I feel pierced, pinned. A lance straight through my heart and out the other side.

In his 1980 treatise Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote about the visual equivalent of this mercurial kind of attraction, the single element of an artwork that is so acutely moving that you cannot help but be drawn towards it: “The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Often unintentional, always tinged with pain, it’s an attraction beyond reason and language, inherently incommunicable. There is no way to force another person’s heart to stop at the one line of a poem or singular fleck of light in a photograph that grabs you over and over. But you can try—or not. You can also choose to keep it to yourself, close to your chest, safe and protected like a wound under gauze.

One last thing: seeing all of these artists who were big in the 1990s has been weirdly comforting, in that I am soothed by watching people in their 50s and 60s jump around onstage and swing their guitars and still sing so prettily as they had in their youth.2 I'm not proud to admit that I am terribly afraid of aging, a fear that has only grown stronger as beauty standards for women continue to skew younger and younger. I know women who have convinced themselves that they are wizened hags at the age of 26 because all they ever watch are videos of teenage fashion models dancing around their bedrooms on TikTok. I don't want to be one of those women. So it is a relief to have been able to see fantastic performances by people who, yes, were beautiful and successful in their teens and twenties almost three decades ago, but whose enthusiasm for their craft and for life in general has not waned at all in the years since—and why should it have?

How lovely to see the men in Pavement, who famously loathed one another by the end of the band's original tenure, playing their old beautiful music as a group once more, simultaneously forgiving and forgiven at last. How lovely to see the five hundred or so members of Broken Social Scene, who have circled back into each other's lives again and again, celebrating the end of yet another tour together. How lovely to see Meryl Streep of all fucking people unexpectedly singing a favorite song from my adolescence, waving her phone about so she, too, could have photographic evidence of that strange, magical moment.

— ECT

P.S. Here’s a fall playlist I recently made featuring both Pavement and BSS, should anyone need it (I couldn’t figure out a way to otherwise shoehorn it into the body of this essay):

Despite that, this summer has not been as bad as I assumed it would be a couple of months ago while grimly installing my A/C unit and folding my sweaters into boxes. August in particular has always loomed large in my imagination as the apotheosis of misery: an overripe fruit gone putrid in the hot summer sun, split open under the weight of its own rot. When my birthday passed and we approached the end of July this year, I felt compelled to batten down the hatches, so to speak, and prepare myself in some way. I didn’t know what this would actually entail beyond making a playlist for the express purpose of wallowing, but it got to be so that my anxiety about the upcoming depressive episode eclipsed the depression itself.

And then nothing happened. I spent a few weeks with my parents at their house on Cape Cod, swimming daily and eating my mother’s cooking every night. I winced whenever I remembered that Nirvana song: “I miss the comfort in being sad…” It’s September now and I still can’t shake the feeling that I dodged a bullet largely by accident, as if I happened to step just outside of the line of fire only because I was distracted by something a few feet away.

While I was visiting my parents, I was also able to finally return to reading after putting “read more books” at the top of my list of resolutions every New Year. Like most other internet-poisoned people of middling intellect on the millennial/Gen Z cusp, I was a voracious reader as a child but have since lapsed into a much less dedicated scholar.

The public library in my hometown was one of the few places I was allowed to walk to unsupervised when I was a kid, and I took frequent advantage of this privilege. If I had placed a hold on a book using the library’s hulking desktop computer earlier that week, I would come home from school every day and head straight to the answering machine to see if a librarian had left a message to let me know the interlibrary loan had come in. (This sounds almost absurdly archaic now.) I’ve not been able to maintain this level of enthusiasm for literature as an adult, but I’m slowly starting to return to my old habits. It feels like a tremendous accomplishment, something hardwon in the face of my own apathy.

One of the books I read most recently was The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown, about the infamous Donner Party. The book has been sitting on my shelf since the beginning of Covid, when I bought it on impulse alongside the Beastie Boys book. At the time, I had lost the ability to consume media even passively: I could barely get through a Youtube video nevermind a movie or a TV show, and I certainly could not read or write or do anything creative. I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t even concentrate long enough to browse Twitter or Tumblr: I laid in bed for hours and went through the motions of scrolling on my phone as my vision slipped in and out of focus. None of this is unique, of course. But I fear I may have been the only person who found her salvation in one of American history’s strangest, most grisly niche events, in which I had no personal stakes nor any real prior interest.

I must have listened to at least half a dozen podcasts about the Donner Party that May. It was hours upon hours of the same horrifying story, the same terrible information again and again in different voices that shared the specific cadence all podcast hosts seem to possess. And then I became disinterested in the topic again just as abruptly.

I still don’t know why any of this happened—I think I was trying to cope with how awful the world felt by learning about a situation that was objectively far worse than anything I would ever endure in my lifetime. I felt guilty using their suffering to alleviate my own, but I couldn’t deny that my apartment, where I’d been quarantining alone for two months, felt more comfortable after hearing lengthy descriptions of the Donner Party sleeping half-buried in the relentless snow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. And my canned soup certainly tasted better after listening to a detailed explanation of what they had eaten when they were at their most desperate.

Brown is an excellent writer and a diligent researcher—in the epilogue he discusses how he followed in the Party’s fabled footsteps and drew on his own observations to later craft vivid descriptions of the landscapes and environmental conditions in which they suffered. Most interesting to me is the emphasis Brown places on realism, on freeing this bizarre historical event from the shackles of legend and asserting the humanity of those involved.

It is such an easy impulse to look at history and ascribe a certain inevitability to the events now that they are placed within a greater historical context: this happened, so this happened, so that could happen and that didn’t happen. Wars are justified with a single sentence; later crises are foreshadowed the way they would be in a well-crafted novel. That began in this year and then ended in this year—but how often does the history class-approved ‘end’ of an event actually represent the final moment of its impact?

Everything that went wrong for the Donner Party was due to human choice, not destiny nor fate nor historical precedent. (What little went right was also due to choice, of course—and weather.) In resisting the urge to narrativize history, a level of autonomy is restored to the people involved in past events. Through this autonomy it becomes clearer who had control over the decisions that would shape history, who had the power to make these choices and who did not, who was capable of making choices and never given the opportunity to do so. The Donner Party was not actually doomed to succumb to their circumstances from the start. Early in their westward journey, they decided to follow the navigational advice they’d been given by men who had business interests in the influx of settlers to California, where they owned land, rather than Oregon, where the majority of the Donner Party had initially planned to go. Still, the Donner Party nonetheless chose that California-bound route for themselves in the end.

As a child, my favorite genre was historical fiction. One of my most beloved book series was Dear America, a collection of more than thirty fictional diaries told from the perspectives of girls living through major moments in American history. Even though I knew it was perverse—I did not actually want to be employed as a Lowell mill girl, or experience the treachery of the Oregon Trail—there was a part of me that secretly wished I could know what it was like to live amidst history, to feel the significance of every day as one that will be remembered for years and years to come.

I thought of this often in the first year of Covid with a pang of guilty irony, especially on the rare occasions where I mustered enough energy to actually write in my own journal. All around me people in power were making decisions that would one day be canonized as the inevitable narrative of this historical moment, and we were all watching the consequences play out in real time. It didn’t have to happen like this, I remember thinking as the death count climbed higher and higher throughout the year. There were different ways this could have gone, but they didn’t because of the choices that human beings had made. There was at one point any number of alternative possibilities that may or may not be included in future textbooks. At worst, claiming any historical event was truly inevitable allows those responsible to evade accountability.

Some things cannot be helped, of course—the weather in Utah was unusually brutal in the winter of 1846 and the Donner Party had no way of knowing this ahead of time. But I do think suffering is not as inevitable as some would have us believe. This year August came and went and I did not even spend one weekend holed up alone in my room, catatonic with the absence of emotion that is depression. At first this made me nervous because it deviated so severely from my expectations of the universe: this is the way things have always been. It’s easier to accept things for what they are than to challenge what they’ve been. But tragedy is really only guaranteed in fiction, where that inevitability is its defining feature. In real life it can be resisted or avoided, even if by accident, and the results can be told truthfully without the glossy sheen of narrative, whether or not they succeeded.

I am 25 now. Lately I have been craving sugary things: popsicles, peanut butter & honey sandwiches, all the stone fruits that the Union Square farmers’ market has to offer. (“I go to bakeries all day long / There’s a lack of sweetness in my life…”) The weather is slowly relaxing its sweaty grip on the city. I am able to concentrate once more on reading books, as well as listening to music and watching films. And I wrote this after months of writing nothing—that’s a start.

—ECT