One of this year’s biggest horror blockbusters has a rather peculiar monster: it isn’t a knife-wielding masked-man, a chainsaw-swinging madman or even a claw-donning burned-man. It’s a woman.

A twenty-something year old woman. I know. Frightening, isn’t it?

Obsession’s plot is simple (albeit effective). A male protagonist, Bear, makes an ill-fated wish to be loved more than anything by his uninterested love interest, Nikki. The story takes its main plot device from “The Monkey’s Paw”, a horror short story by W. W. Jacobs from 1902. The story adduced the trope of “be careful what you wish for” and exposed the malicious literalism of wish making. Genies, wishing-willows, etc are linguistic sticklers and take the wording of wishes very seriously, often to the detriment of verbally clumsy humans.

Spoiler alert. In Obsession, the wish to be loved more than anything turns into a rabid fixation, followed by violence and murder(s). Bear gets a lot more than he bargained for and loses his life in the process.

One thing is clear in Obsession: Nikki is the monster. However, she is not the villain.

Female monstrosity has long been explored in works such as Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Monsters occupy a very important cultural function, they set the boundaries of normalcy. The monster represents what is abnormal, what is pushed to the sides, what is marginal.

What interested me about the story in Obsession is the specific kind of female monstrosity it portrays. Not the witch, or the possessed woman, or any of the more common archetypes, but the woman-made-monstrous-by-the-actions-of-men.

It reminded me of Mother of Grendel from Beowulf, arguably, the first female monster in recorded English literature.

If you remember your AP Lit class, Beowulf tells the story of an eponymous hero coming to the aid of Hrothgar, king of Danes, whose hall Heorot is under attack by a monster named Grendel. In the course of combat, Grendel has his hand severed by Beowulf, and later dies from the injury. Beowulf brings the arm to the hall of Hrothgar. In the text, Grendel has a mother who is unnamed and referred throughout as the “Mother of Grendel.”

This is how she is introduced:

Grendles modor, ides, aglæcwif

The translation is contested. Ides can mean “lady,” or even a “woman of status”. However, Aglæcwif has historically been translated as “monster-woman,” “wretch,” “ogress,” “monstrous hag” or, in Seamus Heaney’s very influential translation, “monstrous hell-bride.” Yet the closely related noun aglæca is also applied to Beowulf and other fighters, without the monstrous connotation. In some more recent scholarship, it has been proposed that Aglæcwif could be translated into “female warrior,” “fearsome woman” or “formidable woman.” In any case, in most translations, she is introduced as monstrous.

But what makes her a “monster-woman”?

In the poem, the ides lives in the Mere, an underwater hall. After the death of her son, Grendel, the ides enters Heorot at night and kills Æschere, a close advisor to the king, and retrieves her son’s arm as partial reparation. Similar acts of vengeance occur in the poem and are legitimised (when… spoiler alert… Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother in revenge), however, because her maternal kinship exists outside Heorot’s authorized kinship regime, outside of the king’s “hall”, because she does not participate in the gift economy of the hall, because she lives in the Mere, underwater, because she is a woman, she is marginal, and her deed is read as monstrous. In other words, it is ok for Beowulf to avenge Æschere, but not ok for Grendel’s mother to do the same for her son.

Notably, the aglæcwif’s violence is not unprompted, it emerges as a result of the violent patriarchal world which she lives in, she is pushed to monstrosity reactively after her son is brutally killed. Men have caused her grief and labeled her response monstrous. Men have made her a monster.

In Obsession, Bear’s fantasy of being causes his lover to lose her autonomy. It is in this annihilation of female autonomy that monstrosity emerges. Nikki is forced to perform desire excessively. Bear wants Nikki to be fully devoted to him, passively, an object. But when her devotion (passive) turns into obsession (active), it becomes impossible to control. She goes from object to monster. In both cases, patriarchal logic dictates the terms: the mother whose grief exceeds the social order becomes a monster; the lover whose excessive desire is willed into existence also becomes a monster. When Nikki loves too much, she becomes, no pun intended, un-bear-able. Once the threshold of excess is reached, once the boundaries are crossed, the woman is cast as monstrous. Notably, men both set the threshold and push the women over its edge.

The threshold in Beowulf is described through the kinship structures (gift giving, etc.) which exist in Heorot. As a woman living in the Mere, the aglæcwif is excluded from them. Being outside of the system, she has no recourse for retribution after her son is killed, all she has is her excessive grief with no convened route for retribution. In this absence of a middle path, she is forced to her state of monstrosity. Grendel’s mother combines maternal kinship with male violence, an overlap which did not exist in Heorot’s kinship structures. Because of the gap in categories, a monster is produced. When social categories fail, the excess gets characterized as monstrous.

In Obsession, the kinship structures are contemporary Gen Z dating codes: attraction, availability, consent, detachment, the performance of nonchalance. The structures assign names, rights and obligations to relationships. One can be a friend, crush, hookup, lover, partner, ex, or the dreaded situationship. These categories determine who is allowed to demand attention, intimacy, exclusivity or explanation from whom. Bear’s wish puts undue strain on this structure by making one of its ordinary desires extreme. He destabilizes the order of his friend group. He wants Nikki to cross from friendship into romantic love, yet, he does not want to persevere through the uncomfortable social process by which this transition usually happens. The wish abolishes that transition and, in doing so, leads her to behaviors outside of the structures. She’s clingy, texts too much, overbearing, lies, etc. Nikki performs a desire that contemporary dating culture cannot regulate. Her possession thrusts her way outside of the accepted kinship structures. When social categories fail, the excess gets characterized as monstrous.

Grendel’s mother reveals that motherhood can contain violence, sovereignty and a moral claim to vengeance. Nikki reveals that the fantasy of perfect feminine devotion depends upon the abolition of female autonomy. Both characters expose contradictions that their respective social orders would prefer to leave hidden.

The monstrous woman spawns when those contradictions can no longer be contained. Female monstrosity occurs when femininity exceeds the emotional and social forms assigned to it. Grieve too hard or love too much and woman is deemed monstrous.

Both texts are examples of abjection. Philosopher Julia Kristeva defines the “abject” as what scares us because it destabilizes social thresholds and boundaries. The monstrous woman is abject because she exposes the instability of said boundaries, in our examples, the ones between love and obsession and between heroic violence and monstrous revenge. Importantly, the “abject” is also beguiling, fascinating, it is a kind of horror we can’t look away from. This may explain why the movie is so popular.

The brilliance of Obsession is its contemporary setting. Monsters in stories play a very important social function: they tell us what is normal and what is not. But Obsession casts the monster in a novel light.

It asks its audience (us!) which behaviours are normal and which are not. I’ll let you think about that!

The movie’s denouement is clever. With the third and final Wishing Willow, Nikki, the monster, curses Bear with the same wish, thereby turning him into a monster. Notably, the man cannot handle the monstrosity and dies! Through the mirrored act of monster-making, she seems freed from her state of monstrosity, yet is surrounded by its carnage. The other monster, the male monster, has perished, breaking her curse, but the damage is done, the wreckage abounds.

If Nikki is the monster, Bear (and by extension the monster-engendering men of literature) are the villains. Nonetheless, this verdict of villainy does very little for Nikki. She cannot escape the consequences of her unwilling actions, she cannot return within the bounds of kinship, she has crossed over indelibly. The epithet is permanent. Whether cursed by male violence or male desire, the woman, even when liberated, remains a monster.

Georgica also recently published a book entitled "3 Plays" which features her three first plays. They're stellar. (It's the book on the table)

We discuss Georgica’s early video work, why she found it ugly, how she got into theater, her love of dance, etc.

There is a bonus section at the end after we wrap... the conversation was so great I thought, in the spirit of In Our Time, that we should keep going!

I also want to note that with the immense help of Silica (run by my friend Sean), I was proud to support Georgica's last play, "Seconds, Minutes, Hours".

being-on-line

Hearth or Why Screens Should Be Big

This essay was written for the catalogue of Luke Shannon’s solo show “Replacement Character” at Heft Gallery The catalogue is also available for sale. (It makes a great Christmas present…

Read more

10 months ago · 21 likes · 1 comment · Ruby Justice Thelot

The talk is the intro, Luke’s contextualization, a reading from A Few Essays and a conversation with Josh.

Hope you enjoy it!

A Few Essays on Taste is still available for purchase in its second edition.

(1) South Africa, specifically Plett and Cape Town

I went on a trip to see my dear friends Ruby and Sam with Zarina and Rara. We hiked, we swam, we grilled. Absolutely epic.

These shrimps straight from the nearby ocean. To die for.

Spectacular…

(2) The Steven Cohen show at the Iziko South African Museum

Rarely have I been so uncomfortable with an artist’s work. Cohen knows how to disturb, push buttons, a true provocateur, even in the age of the internet, his artistic choices give me great pause and make me reflect on the role of the artist. I winced and grimaced and was left with many questions.

When provoking, what responsibility does the artist have towards their unconsenting audience?

The infamous performance Chandelier from 2001 takes place in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The settlement, where disenfranchised people lived, is being actively dismantled by state officials wearing red jumpsuits (Red Ants). Steven arrives in a tutu made out of a chandelier, barely-dressed.

The spectres of apartheid, of white privilege, of class haunt the piece, and perhaps make it so much more salient. Steven boldly presents his queerness in an era where such an identity was still shocking but simultaneously taunts, agitates and provokes the nearby Black populations who are literally being unhoused. The whole thing is deeply unsettling. Though, I am happy art exists to make us have these terribly difficult conversations.

Also. Across the museum, some works were covered by a black tarp because the museum administration decided not to show the works anymore because of their offensive nature. Instead of removing the works entirely, they merely draped them… which meant that I could, when the guards weren’t looking, peek under to see! I had never before encountered such a display of censorship in an arts institution before. (I would assume that the works would just be removed entirely instead of the dramatic black veil).

Recommend.

(3) The house of Beezy Bailey

Sometimes you step into a home and realize that every inch of it is the expression of the person who lives there. Hand-painted tiles in the kitchen. Even the fridge is painted. The ceilings. Every detail the result of an intentional decision.

(4) The Mount Nelson Hotel

For geopolitical reasons, I had to stay an extra day in Cape Town. I decided to stay at the Mount Nelson. I got a facial. Went to the spa. Cold plunge. Sauna. The staff is the nicest. Service is impeccable. I highly recommend.

(5) Overkill by Lamb

yearner anthem, on repeat

We had a really lovely time and decided to continue the conversation.

RJT: I’m curious why you chose electronics as a medium. Did you already have a fascination with it, or what prompted that shift?

Brian Oakes: In undergrad, most of my work was installation-based. I was trying to express ideas with whatever materials I had. You’re a student, you don’t have money, so you use whatever is around. I built it with two-by-fours and random hardware.

One year the school cleared out their IT department. I found a garage full of electronic waste. Suddenly I had unlimited monitors, media players, and computers. That pushed me into electronics. I started building my own circuitry, making custom boards by hand. I drew PCB traces with Sharpie, etched them, drilled and soldered everything manually. They were messy one-offs.

RJT: When you say ‘drew’ it, you mean literally hand-drawn?

Brian Oakes: Yes. You draw on copper with Sharpie, put it in an etching bath, and wherever the Sharpie isn’t, the copper dissolves. Then you wipe it clean and the traces remain. After that I drilled and soldered by hand.

RJT: Where did you learn all of this?

Brian Oakes: YouTube. RISD didn’t have much physical computing at the time. They were just starting a computation program. I helped pilot a concentration in computation technology and culture. I also took coding classes at Brown, though I struggled with them. I just wanted to learn JavaScript and they were teaching low-level systems.

After moving to New York, I kept prototyping. A lot of YouTubers were sponsored by JLCPCB, so I tried professional fabrication. Initially the boards were meant to be controllers inside sculptures. I was building small-scale fusion reactors out of trash (lunchboxes, vacuum pumps made from jars) extremely dangerous high-voltage systems. Eventually I stopped because of the risk.

RJT: What strikes me is that building electronics from scratch feels opposed to mass manufacturing.

Brian Oakes: Exactly. Making your own circuits feels inherently defiant. Electronic culture is built on massive global production and extraction systems. Building one yourself resists that scale.

RJT: There’s something happening culturally with robotics. Artists seem to be approaching robots differently from industry.

Brian Oakes: Yes. A lot of robotics art rejects utility. Instead of optimizing tasks, the machines wander or behave strangely. It challenges expectations about automation and control.

RJT: You mentioned wanting to get closer to “the dirt.” What does that mean?

Brian Oakes: It means moving toward analog electronics. We’re taught that computers are binary: transistors switching on and off, logic gates, then suddenly full computers. That jump always bothered me. I became interested in the space between, the hard-wired logic systems.

I started building circuits that convert binary inputs into seven-segment displays using AND and OR gates. It’s a forgotten language. Once you build the circuit, it does only one thing. That limitation became important to me.

RJT: That seems opposite to contemporary design, where everything tries to be multipurpose.

Brian Oakes: Exactly. Microcontrollers can become anything. Analog circuits are single-purpose. There’s a mastery in that constraint.

RJT: Your work seems tied to projection, oftentimes people attributing intention to machines.

Brian Oakes: I was reading Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It describes simple machines that appear emotional because we project onto them. A motor connected to a light sensor can look afraid or curious depending on how it moves, but it’s just wiring.

Many of my sound pieces recorded and replayed audio randomly. Visitors thought the machines were responding to them personally, but the system was completely indifferent. That projection is central to the work.

RJT: Do you think technology amplifies that tendency to project meaning?

Brian Oakes: Definitely. Every new medium acquires mystique. Radio felt spiritual when it appeared. AI feels similar now. People search for sentience, even when systems are deterministic.

RJT: I think images themselves are dangerous. We mistake them for reality.

Brian Oakes: Yes. Movies, interfaces, voices: all of it shapes expectations. Even AI voices feel designed to evoke intimacy. These are decisions made by designers and product teams, but the consequences are cultural.

RJT: How does extraction factor into your practice?

Brian Oakes: I became interested in the materials themselves. Electronics rely on extraction — rare earths, minerals, labor hidden within global supply chains. So I began making synthetic gemstones in the studio: rubies, emeralds, opals.

Rubies are aluminum oxide with chromium impurities. I strike arcs with a modified spot welder to fuse the material. It fluoresces under light, which proves the transformation. Opals require generating nanoparticles and letting them settle for months. Much of my recent work explores bringing geology directly into electronic sculpture.

RJT: So the material process becomes a way of collapsing the supply chain?

Brian Oakes: Exactly. It’s about bringing extraction closer to the work, understanding where everything originates.

RJT: You mentioned working with magnetic core memory.

Brian Oakes: Yes. Early computers stored data using tiny magnetic rings hand-woven with wire, often assembled by teams of women. Reading the memory erased it. That destructive quality fascinates me.

I’m trying to build a memory grid that stores an image. To see the image, you must destroy it. There’s poetry in that, preservation through loss.

RJT: The circuit board feels like a new artistic substrate.

Brian Oakes: It is. For the first time in history, artists can fabricate PCBs at scale because global infrastructure exists to support it. Governments subsidize the technology, factories print full-color silkscreens, flexible boards, transparent boards. The same systems used by industry are accessible to individuals.

That makes circuit boards one of the most compelling contemporary mediums. They’re the literal foundation of modern life.

RJT: Looking at these pieces, it feels like the circuit board becomes both image and object.

Brian Oakes: Exactly. It’s painting, printmaking, photolithography, sculpture, all at once. And they’ll outlive us. That permanence is part of the work.

(1) The food at Vue de Monde in Melbourne

I went to Melbourne in early February and my first stop was at Vue de Monde. I’m not often flabbergasted by food, but it was an absolutely tremendous meal. The red kangaroo and mushrooms. The rich macadamia butter with caviar and kelp. Everything was extraordinary. The staff printed a list of must-visits in town and sent me an email with my custom menu including the drinks I ordered.

(2) My collection of Casa Brutus magazine. I’m currently renovating my house and I absolutely loathe the idea of going on “Pinterest".” I bought a bunch of all AD’s and Apartmento’s and books made by both of these publishers, which I’ve been manually bookmarking. I’ve especially been enjoying my collection of Casa Brutus magazines from Japan which have served as incomparable inspiration for the project.

(3) My hair beads. I recently designed and produced a set of brass hair beads inspired by the Benin Bronzes. The Bronzes were a set of sculptural artworks in the kingdom of Benin in current time Nigeria that were stolen during a British expedition in 1897. The project explores how design can act as a way to create new memory devices and form new bonds with ancestors.

Full spread here:

(4) This incredible short film. (I’ll count it as one of my movies this year!) I can’t remember where I found this. It was in one of my tabs… I cannot tell you much more about the director etc. All I can say is watch. Like, right now. Beautiful!

(5) My friend Quasimatt put me on to this unreleased Sophie and Easy Fun track called “Everything to Me” featuring Nicola Roberts, which has been on repeat for the past weeks. Apparently, it was played at the Broken Flowers (another certified PC Music classic!) release party in 2015…

In Ruby world, check out my piece for SSENSE on looksmaxxing if you haven’t yet.

The conversation was recorded in September 2025.

RJT: You’re about a week into the run. How does it feel bringing The Cat’s Meow to New York?

Trajal Harrell: New York is loaded for me. I lived in San Francisco for two years, but I began my early choreographic life here. Being back has been wonderful and fast. We’re already more than halfway through, and the final week will be over in a flash. I’m trying to stay present and let the performances deepen.

This is special because they speak my language. Normally, parts of the show are translated. So for it to be entirely in English, and entirely in New York—it’s refreshing. The other performances are wonderful too, but as a friend said to me the other day: it’s oddly a kind of homecoming for the piece.

RJT: That was going to be my next question. This idea of homecoming. Especially because there’s a climactic Americanness in the work. The piece premiered outside the U.S. first, and now, four years later, it’s being performed in New York in what some might call a fraught or contentious American context. What does it feel like to have that climactic part of the piece exist here, in New York?

Trajal: It premiered in 2021. And context is important. This piece is really a product of the German state theater system—also present in Switzerland and Austria. I was choreographic director at Schauspielhaus Zurich for five years, and the piece was made in that system: the resources, the scale, the support.

It also wasn’t necessarily meant to tour. In Zürich, some pieces were designed from the beginning to transfer or tour, and this wasn’t one of them. That meant two things: usually my pieces do tour, and there are co-producers and other stakeholders involved. But for this one, I didn’t have to find co-producers. I had a huge space and a good budget. I could do what I wanted.

So I tried to come in with no theme. Of course themes emerge, but I truly did not go in saying, “This is what it’s about.” I made sections. I made things. I resisted my own impulse to connect everything and make it coherent. There’s a dramaturgy element to it, but I fought myself: I didn’t want to force it into one coherent argument.

A work is a text. It isn’t only my intentions. I try to stay open to how people receive it, and what meanings they produce from it.

We performed it many times in Zürich. It was the third piece I made there. The earlier pieces did well too, but this was the one where the audience truly embraced me—there was a bigger wow, like excitement in the air.

Before it we did a piece that we performed here last year at the Whitney called Deathbed, about my experience with Katherine Dunham—very beautiful, and the art world was captivated. But with this piece—Monkey Off My Back (and I love that you call it Cat’s Meow; maybe that’s what we should call it)—there was a different feeling. The scale was huge, the cast was huge, it had an extravagance. It was also the first piece I made there that integrated actors and dancers together in a significant way: seven actors and nine dancers. The artistic directors wanted cross-disciplinary collaboration, and I think that created a texture that people felt strongly.

People saw reflections of themselves. After performances, more people than usual came up to me and said, “I want to be in this.” Curators, audience members—people were like, “If you ever look for people to be part of this, I’d love to do it.” It wasn’t just “I want to dance because you’re dancing”—it was “I want to perform this piece.” That was striking to me: that people felt they could approach the work like that.

As an artist, I hope the piece can be preserved so that it might speak across time: fifty years from now, a hundred years from now. Some works will be preserved; others won’t. This one will be difficult because it’s large and requires resources.

Right now, there are aspects of it that people respond to intensely because of what’s happening in the world and in this country. I understand that, and I welcome it. But sometimes people think the piece is a direct response to “now,” and it wasn’t created that way. It was made in 2021. Of course live performance always produces meaning in the present—people experience it through their current lives—but the piece was not built as a reaction to today’s headlines.

There were two main influences that people may not understand.

One was New York, when I came here in 1998–2000. Downtown—East Village, Lower East Side. There were figures who walked the streets like they were larger than life. The way they dressed, the way they carried themselves. Some worked in clubs. They had attitude, they were known. They were their own kind of celebrities. Many were people who had left small towns and came to New York and reinvented themselves. I was struck by that self-invention. It operated on many levels, including identity. There’s a section that tries to recreate the feeling of that parade of people.

The other influence was my family. We don’t gather for Christmas or Thanksgiving—we gather for the Fourth of July. I’m from a small town in southeast Georgia, and for whatever reason, that’s when everyone returns and we comes back home.

In 2021, I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to reread the Declaration of Independence. I hadn’t read it in decades. I started reading and thought: this is beautifully written—courageous, floral language. Of course, it’s a flawed document, and it belongs to a flawed system. I understand that. But I became interested in the question: how do we hold all of that at once?

I was also an American Studies major. The American project—what the United States is, what it claims to be—has been part of my education. So I thought: let’s read it together and see what it produces.

In that section, we use a strategy from an earlier work of mine: the costumes are carried alongside the body, so it isn’t only our physical bodies; it’s memory, ghost, history. It’s an imaginative proposition. That helped people receive it as something open.

Someone said to me they understood I was proposing something: that even though those freedoms were closed to many people, in the act of reading together there’s a possibility of reopening them—despite the flaw. I thought that was a really beautiful reading.

RJT: I’m struck by the idea of performance as a response to the immediate moment. I want to go back to those East Village figures you described and how they walked the street, their gait, a way of carrying themselves. In the piece, the walking is so present, there is the relevé [ballet movement where a dancer rises on the balls of their feet for a demi-pointe or toes for a full pointe] very fashion-like, upright, poised. What does the way the performers move across the stage mean to you?

Trajal: Runway movement is part of my language. In every piece I’ve made, since 1999, I’ve been working with the operation of turning runway movement into dance. It’s kind of my signature. That came from early works, the Twenty Looks series, Paris Is Burning at Judson Church, where I looked at the relationship between voguing and early postmodern dance. Early postmodern dance claimed walking could be dance. Then I saw voguing and thought: voguing turns runway movement into dance, fashion into dance. And I found it strange that no one was connecting those histories.

So I’ve mined and developed that language for many years. Most of the people in this piece have worked with me for a long time—one for 17 years, several for 15, many for eight. So the runway language is part of how we dance.

This piece is different because the runway is literally a runway. It’s the first time I said: we’re going to do a big runway—this Mondrian grid—and we’ll have stadium seating. So the operation is unmistakable.

But I tell the performers almost every day: we are not dancers trying to be fashion models. We are postmodern dancers using runway as a formal device. That distinction matters because I’m not replicating the fashion industry’s ideals. I’m an artist. I’m using the runway as a critical space, as a framework to think about identity, behavior, politics, social legibility, all the things that are operative when we walk down the street.

Also: when I started this research in 1999, runway culture wasn’t as publicly accessible as it is now. Fashion was more private; tickets were hard to get. But even then, I realized: almost everyone knows how to read a fashion show. They recognize the gaze, the attention to clothing, the staging, even if they hate fashion. That shared literacy is powerful.

So in this work, I try to carve out many different walks. Not just the “confident model walk,” but awkwardness, sensitivity, anger, not fitting in, craziness. All those states are present in the walking. That mattered especially yesterday with teenagers in the audience. Yes, there’s one performer who is just fierce, and many young people will see themselves in that and feel excited. But the awkward performer also matters: the person who doesn’t fit in and still belongs, still needs to walk and be seen. There is always someone in the audience who doesn’t feel seen. They might not cheer, but they feel it.

That’s connected to those East Village figures. They claimed space. New York has changed; many of those worlds have disappeared, both economically and culturally. But they were often people who’d been bullied or discriminated against elsewhere, and then in New York they could become the stars. They walked the runway of Second Avenue. People respected them. They held court. I was young, and it impressed me deeply. Part of me wanted to honor that.

RJT: One thing that’s striking, in comparison to a fashion show is duration. A runway show is usually brief; here the runway becomes durational, and the language accrues meaning over time.

Trajal: What’s interesting is: I had the sections, but the piece wasn’t working. It was interesting, but something wasn’t clicking. I felt torn—like maybe I had to connect the scenes, explain why we move from one thing to another. But I didn’t want to make that kind of sense.

Then I realized the key: there always has to be someone walking. Always someone on the perimeter of the runway. Once I did that, it worked. The perimeter holds the time. It anchors the audience, and then people are free to associate. They can move from one section to another without needing a narrative bridge, because the walking holds it. That’s how the hour-fifty can be carried.

RJT: That reminds me of the Mondrian grid, shapes that invite reading but are also simply shapes. Was Mondrian connected to that structural idea?

Trajal: I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Almost fifteen years earlier, I saw the Yves Saint Laurent Mondrian dress in my fashion research and thought: this would make a great dance floor. I held that idea for a long time because I didn’t have the resources. And then with this piece, I said: okay, now we do the floor. That was it. I knew it would be beautiful and produce meaning, but I purposely didn’t go into Mondrian analysis or try to connect the dots. It was “another thing I put there,” like the folk dance at the end.

This kind of freedom is rare. Usually I have to convince people, raise money, explain, negotiate. That’s the meaning of this work too: not having to over-justify, and what that opens in the imagination. With seventeen people, with real resources, you can create a different kind of space.

I’m also thinking a lot now about legacy: what will be preserved, and how, and by whom. I don’t want to build a huge institution. I respect the people who do like Alvin Ailey, for example. But I don’t want that kind of structure.

RJT: With those resources, the work can move into a kind of raw free association, almost surreal. Is that connected to Butoh and your relationship to it?

Trajal: Yes. This piece is part of the second period of my work. The first period was the relationship between early postmodern dance and voguing. The second period looks at theoretical lenses between early modern dance and Butoh. So yes, you’re right.

There’s a piece from 2014 called The Ghost of Montpellier Meets the Samurai: an imaginary meeting between Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of Butoh, and Dominique Bagouet, a French modern dance figure who died of AIDS. That piece became legendary in the company’s history because it caused a scandal in France. I came in as an American, irreverent, playful, and people were furious. People were throwing bananas at the stage. It was intense. That could have been career-ending in Europe, except that then I was invited to make work for the Avignon Festival, and that shifted things.

A lot of material under the table comes directly from Ghost. The bird sequence also comes from Ghost. Sometimes I get an idea that feels ridiculous like “are you really going to pretend to be birds?” and then I argue with myself: why can’t art be that? And I have to try it.

We’re not Butoh dancers. We work in imagination. We talk about getting close to a Butoh “mind,” a different way of moving than ballet or modern. I’ve been researching that since 2012, and I ended that research cycle in 2025.

But again: I did not allow myself to become overly interpretive while making this. Normally I’d chase the references: surrealism, lineage, the art history. Here, I stopped myself. I wanted to paint. The first draft came quickly, only five days. It was fast, like action painting.

And with something like the bird class: who hasn’t tried to flap like a bird? We take something childish and do it with the seriousness of ballet. That seriousness is what makes the imagination collective.

This is what I’m always after: the shared imagination. Theater at its best is togetherness. I’ll never forget hearing Tania Bruguera say, “My work is about the belief in the impossible.” That hit me hard. Because that’s what theater can do: make a room believe in the impossible together.

And another element in my work, especially against the contemporary dance climate around 2008–2012, is emotion. Contemporary dance was deeply conceptual; no one emoted. Then we were crying onstage, being dramatic, bringing back expression. People resisted it at first—but I was tired of boredom being treated as virtue. I wanted feeling to return.

RJT: What’s the meaning of the title Monkey Off My Back?

Trajal: It came from this sense that for once I didn’t have to write a proposal. I didn’t have to do all the pre-explanation. That “monkey” of always having to justify—funding, words, persuasion—was off my back. I’m not against it; it’s part of the job. But for once, there was a different territory of freedom, and I wanted to question it: is it really going to be “the cat’s meow”? Is it really that simple? So I went in with that tension.

And Cats Meow is Southern. It can mean something delectable, or it can describe a woman: “she’s the cat’s meow.” I also had Maggie the Cat and Cat Walk in my work already, so there are layers.

RJT: One last thing: the sharing of the playlist at the end. What does that gesture mean to you?

Trajal: People always ask about the music. I have a strategy in my work called the “guide.” Sometimes a person speaks at the beginning, sometimes we pass out papers, like wall text. In dance we rarely help audiences that way, and I wanted to.

With this piece, the guide comes late because I’m reluctant to give music beforehand. I like the surprise. But it felt like a beautiful gesture to give it at the end, directly from my notebook.

Also, I love being there at the end to meet people. I don’t take that for granted. I have fewer performances ahead of me than behind me. I want to be there as much as I can.

Talking to you now makes me think: I might want to make a three-hour piece, not for duration itself, but for time with people. I want to see how long I can be in that space. You start to realize you have to use the time you have, responsibly. It’s an amazing idea: that at 7:30 tonight, until 9:30, I get to be with these people. I don’t know who they are or where they’re coming from, but I honor it. I spend my whole day preparing to be with them.

So yes, the playlist is a gift, a way to extend myself further, to say thank you for being here.

RJT: Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Trajal: Thank you.

The show I reviewed was by an artist named Tom Lloyd, who made these unique light sculptures in the late 60s. One of the early examples of artists working with engineers (Tom worked with Alan Sussman, an engineer at RCA.)

Tom was a truly fascinating artist who expanded the definition of Black and whose activism as an art worker is, to this day, inspiring.

I had to say “No”.

When I open Spotify, it’s hard to know where to go. I start on a grim gray background with white sans serif text and sterile, vectorized icons. Blocks of dim rectangles and squares with rounded corners, stacked as columns, greet me with overwhelming sameness. Some rectangles contain a collection of recent listening across albums,mixes, and podcasts. On a good day, one of the rectangles’ dull greyness is ruptured by a still blue dot indicating a new episode of my favorite podcast has dropped. The design hypothesis being that if I listened to it yesterday, I may want to listen to it again today.

Before reaching the comically endless recommendations of audiobooks, shows, and episodes in the Home tab, or the sea of HEX code tiles in the Search tab, Spotify serves me a new release from an artist I follow. Today, it’s Bjork and Rosalia’s new single “Oral.” Being a fan, naturally, I already listened to it. This section displays the name of the artist and the cover art prominently as a way to catch my attention. I scroll down and recommended podcasts, a section called “More of what you like,” then another named “Discover new songs.” When I peruse the list, the songs are tailored made for who I am today, right now, leaving little room for me to grow, explore or “discover” much of anything at all.

Eddy

Eddy was one of the first people in high school I bonded with over a shared fascination for music. I remember standing, on the non-descript hard floor, next to his locker, after class, the humid air of the northeastern summer flowing through the garden level floor where some unknown authority had assigned us as neighbors.

Around that hour, the room filled with the sounds of steps and a melodic cacophony unique to an all-boys school; some plodded slowly towards the exit, heavy with the day’s learning, others rushed out to make the most of the early June afternoon. I asked Eddy what he was up to, and he replied that tonight, like every other night, he was going home to download new music and upload it to his iPod. It was his personal routine, how he stayed up to date. I admired his pursuit and how similar it was to my own weekly musical explorations. At the time, we spent countless hours on Hype Machine, reading Pitchfork reviews, browsing Pigeons and Planes, blasting the latest DatPiff releases, and, in my case, arguing with anonymous strangers on 4chan’s /mu/ board. Listening to and discovering music was not a neatly designed experience with rounded corners and algorithmic recommendations, it was messy, filled with letdowns, subpar mixtapes, animated by vociferous confrontations with online trolls and haters, and passionate prose posted on “rateyourmusic”. It was a truly social activity. The adrenaline spike of pressing “submit” on a court-worthy defense to a post arguing that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was sub-par, or feeling my heart drop reading an account of how Vampire Weekend was repeating the same appropriation Paul Simon had done with “Graceland” decades before or being accused of parroting Scaruffi by someone who saw right through my teenage cultural plagiarism.

I sat, with spine-warping posture, hunched over my keyboard, in my periwinkle room, a color handed down by the daughter of my suburban home’s former owners, in a white plastic chair, fidgeting, refreshing the page, hoping I had convinced my interlocutor, hoping foolishly that I had turned a hater into a fan. My mother brought me a glass of juice (orange, never apple), hoping to interrupt my obsessive screen-staring bout. I thanked her, hand still shaking from the rush.

Music was sound, harmony and melody but also the companionship of these digital strangers who on cold Canadian Saturday nights taught me all I know about krautrock, new wave, and high life. My internet friends and enemies devoted their precious time writing guides on how to approach obscure genres or difficult artists. For the Talking Heads, they told me to start with “77,” then move on to “Remain in Light.” As I dove into their discography, I discovered Brian Eno, ambient music, no wave, and so many things that did not exist in my immediate physical surroundings. Music was and still is a labor of love and time.

Time has become increasingly scarce with age. The obligations of adulthood have proven to be the ideal fertile ground for convenience to creep in and take over. Since graduating university, my life has revolved mainly around work and my practice, which means that music, one of my favorite activities, took a backseat. My first job was as a financial analyst at an aerospace company. I commuted from the suburbs for an hour and a half, enough time for one or two albums usually, four total, there and back. I found the workplace to be less conducive to music listening than the university library. The interruptions, the pings, the slacks, the meetings severed the listening experience into de-contextualized fragments. Eventually, I found my groove and usually managed to listen to one new album every day.

Like all worthy things, it was an effort. I consciously forced myself to listen to music I “didn’t like” or didn’t know in order to be more acquainted with the melodies, harmonies, and dissonances of genres I hadn’t grown up listening to. The first cover-to-cover run-through of a metal album was jarring for someone who only listened to Motown, hip-hop and R&B for the first 14 years of my life. I made an intentional effort to investigate sounds that were outside of my comfort zone, using secondary sources like reviews, interviews and videos to provide additional context to the music. I had to educate myself.

What I lament from Spotify still today is the absence of sociality to the music listening experience. Historically, musical experiences were group experiences, whether it be concerts, performances in churches or even someone playing at home, due to the waves music emits, it affected all those around. With the advent of portable music players, first cassette players, the CDs, the experience of music listening has shifted from shared to individual. Users appreciate the flexibility and portability of the experience but one core feature of the musical experience which is still missing from portable music players is the communal aspect of music. Eager to regain this lost community, users, at the dawn of the digital age, eager to share their thoughts on music poured into forums and blogs. As a digital and internet-enabled portable music player, Spotify had the opportunity to use the affordances of new technologies in order to recreate the communal experience of music listening and tap into communities of music fans.

I left my Spotify family because I was tired of being stuck in an algorithmic loop of Drake, Indie Mixes and workout playlists. I had, pre-streaming, cultivated a disciplined habit of finding music I liked on blogs, fielding recommendations from friends and magazines, but I completely stopped in the last 5 years. Convenience got the best of me. I had my own personal music library, and I could look through and re-listen to mp3’s that were getting dusty. With Spotify, there is no more dust, a forgotten album simply disappears in the algorithmic ether. To cultivate a love for music is to cultivate a personal music library, physical or digital, it is to accept chance and randomness, shock and disappointment, it is to revel in arguments and conflicts, it is to be let down, to wait for years for a new album, it is to know that the magic lies in the social context of the listening experience, outside of the algorithm and inside of a community.

The interview is profound and we dive very intently into ideas of representation, storytelling, and even fashion as a semiotic system.

Hope you like it!

At the time, writer Dean Kissick remarked that most publications converged on their favorite songs of the year. He wrote, “We each live in our own atomized world but also in a cloying, suffocating monoculture.”

In my essay “The Age of Recuperation” from 2023, I noted that Pitchfork, in my experience, was an alternative platform providing exposure and press to lesser known indie acts, and that they had abdicated that position in favor of more popular artists, that it had gone Pop, but is that true?

I decided to look at some data to test the hypothesis. The dataset I used is Nolan Conways’s Pitchfork Dataset on Kaggle. I also used the Components Pitchfork Review dataset.

In the last few years, journalists have correctly identified Pitchfork's poptimist turn. By “poptimism”, I mean the belief that pop music is just as worthy of critique as "rock". Anecdotally, writer Jamie Brooks mentioned that in 2012, when they wrote for the publication, the internal edict was that “we don’t cover mainstream pop” and reviews of “mainstream pop” required an explanation.

Here’s what I wanted to test.

1. Has Pitchfork reviewed more Pop in recent years?

2. Have Pop records been reviewed more favorably over time?

3. How do Pop scores compare with Non-Pop over the same period?

Pitchfork's increasing willingness to review pop is best exemplified in this chart. From '99 to '18, the percentage of Pop albums reviewed more than doubled from 5% to 12%. Note: “Pop” heres is defined as reviews that contain the word “Pop” in the genre field as labeled by Pitchfork staff.

So they were reviewing Pop but how did it compare to other genres in terms of score. Were they panning it, lauding it, etc? As you can see below, in all years but 2 (2005 and 2016), the average score for pop albums was lower than their non-pop counterparts.

They were reviewing Pop slightly less favorably than non-Pop records. That being said, the difference in rating has radically decreased over time. Before 2003, the difference between Pop and Non-Pop records was notable but it falls precipitously starting 2003.

During that same period, there has been a slight score inflation. The average record in 1999 was rated 6.9. In 2018, that average score was 7.2, or a 5.46% increase. One would expect Pop albums to see a similar % of score inflation so roughly 5.5%.

But, the average scores of Pop albums increased almost two-fold or 10.38% (from 6.4 to 7.1) over the same period (compared to 5.48% to their non-pop counterpart from 6.9 to 7.3)

The convergence that Dean notes is a result of the abdication by ex-alternative outlets of their initial cultural positions. They've moved towards the center, towards pop.

1. They’ve reviewed more pop.

2. They’ve reviewed it more favorably.

3. The gap in scores between pop and non-pop has decreased over that same period.

The data is not perfect, it uses Pitchfork’s definition of Pop which may have evolved over time. And many artists fall under that umbrella.

Many ways to read this. Potentially, pop has just simply gotten better in the last years. Or P4K has adapted its publication to a changing market and audience, including more pop over time and reviewing it in a new lens that reflects a changing culture?

Blame Conde Nast, monoculture, anti-hipster poptimism, but P4K is no longer the "alternative" platform it used to be. Maybe it never was? Perhaps we've grown past the need for it, through small blogs and Youtube channels, people can now access reviews for their own specific niches.

Will future generations care about the review of their favorite artist's latest album from some NY-based writer or will they care what their favorite TikToker or YouTuber thinks about it? It's a no-brainer. Criticism is becoming atomized. It's not the death of gatekeepers, it's their balkanization.

A step breaks the silence. The sound of a leather sole on a hardwood floor taps intermittently. Click clack click clack. Like a confident debutante, my father appears at the top of the stairs, illuminated by the living room’s soft warm light. From top to bottom. He is wearing a navy blue double-breasted blazer with strong shoulders and almost military brass buttons. The sleeves cut perfectly, letting the starched whiteness of a dress shirt poke through and the glimmer of a gold watch appear. A polka-dotted ascot is fastened tightly around his neck, with the excedent silk tucked in the shirt like an extravagant bib. I frankly cannot remember the trousers. But I remember the shoes. The shoes. The color of a Romanée-Conti seen through the rays of a bistro’s candles. A leather so creamy and shiny it brought to my mouth the taste of caramel. Click clack click clack. He steps proudly in front of the mirror.

An act of redemptive narcissism (to use Lyle Ashton Harris’ term). Self-love as a “form of resistance to the tyranny of mediocrity.”

My father called it “lightning”. The irrefutable feeling that an outfit was unmistakably it. Prior to my arrival, my father had accumulated a few grails that he wears to this day. This navy blazer from Holt Renfrew and these shoes that I famously wore to prom. Both older than me, both still engendering the unmistakable feeling of lightning.

The spectre of the Black Dandy haunts every bit of my style and is revived in every outfit I put on. Most of what I know about dressing came from my parents. They dressed me sharply with no exception, no days off. Their meticulous paranoia that their “lytle Blackamore” had to be a reflection of their own success in the predominantly white spaces I spent most of my time in. As James Laver reminds us, “Clothes are never a frivolity. They are always an expression of the fundamental social and economic pressures of the time.”

The Black Dandy understands the gravity of superficiality and the superfluousness of seriousness. The Black Dandy is the three-dimensional space of play where anxiety and subversion juke endlessly in poetic and troubling intersections. The Black Dandy’s clothes allow interstellar time and class travel. They speak loudly of possibilities in a world where orality is the main mode of communication. Fashion like money talks. The Dandy’s aesthetic ruses reveal the performativity of identity itself, the fiction of race, gender and all other categories. For their final trick, the Black Dandy makes themselves visible but not fully legible. The trickster is unknowable because he is always in disguise.

The Black Dandy, in the words of Glissant, clamors for the right to opacity. They construct an amethyst of Blackness rich with refractions (like Howie’s opal). A Blackness so unique, so strange, so queer, so full of complexity, depths, breadths and multitudes, that it ominously leers back. It screams back. A Blackness you could lose yourself into.

It goes without saying but you should absolutely buy and read Monica Miller’s “Slaves to Fashion”, which is the direct inspiration for this essay.

Happy Met Weekend to those who celebrate.

Amalia, through her work, uncovers the aesthetic archetypes that are so pervasive on our social media platforms. In the interview, we focused on Fotolog, an image-sharing platform founded in 2002, that served as the breeding ground for a lot of alternative subcultures in South America. Amalia wrote a great essay in 2012 on the topic.

Excellences & Perfections expounds abstractly on commodification of aesthetics. Through the personification, for a few weeks at a time, of three archetypes, Amalia Ulman demonstrates that certain lifestyles are essentially represented only through aesthetics and images and how that provides them an uncomfortable proximity to fiction, and that there is a fundamental difference between the life we live and the life we portray in images.

Today, this feels almost self-evident. But it’s important to remember that Excellences & Perfections was performed in 2014, over a decade ago, at a time when we had not yet reached these same conclusions about the nature of digital life and representation.

What’s particularly notable is the rapidity and fluidity with which Ulman was able to embody these archetypes. The performance lasted just four months—not four years. You could move rapidly through different personality types and lifestyles, simply through the mechanisms of image production. While the labor behind these images often remains invisible, it is still clear how relatively easy it is to adopt these commodified, highly recognizable aesthetic templates.

An interesting insight from the conversation. These archetypes are influenced not only by culture but also by the platform. Fotolog had a few distinctive platform constraints—users could post only one image per day, and there was a limit on the number of comments—which shaped a slightly different relationship to self-presentation than what we now see on Instagram.

The first group was the “Pokemónes” in Chile. Best understood as hybridization of otaku sensibilities, punk politics and Emo hairstyles, the Pokemónes utilized Fotolog as a place to share their outfits and meet one another.

The second group were Floggers.

Known for their scene style, bright-colored clothes, emo haircuts, skinny jeans and eclectic accessories, the Floggers are directly intertwined, as their name may suggest, with the platform Fotolog. The medium and the affordance of image-sharing led to its growing popularity, as Floggers adopted the platform as their digital home-turf.

However, as much as platform-based aesthetics benefit from the correlation with a platform’s growth and network effects, so too do they enjoy the downsides. Agustina Villera, known online as Cumbio or “La Reina de los Floggers” (“The Queen of the Floggers”), the group’s informal leader wrote in 2011 about the movement, “The climax was in 2009. But Facebook had a lot of influence on the fashion disappearing. Also, Fotolog became very commercial and now they charge you for everything. Sometimes I see photos from when I was a flogger and I wonder, was this what I used? It looked like a massacre!”

Cumbio’s quote reminds me of the Shock of Alteration which I explored in my book “A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints.”

The “Shock of Alteration”: the feeling of confusion that occurs after a notable change is pushed to an interface. You wake up, you discover that your favorite platform has deployed an automatic and mandatory update, and nothing is the same.

From A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints

Over time, however, there was a convergence toward a more homogenized, highbrow visual culture on Fotolog. Evidently distinct subcultures and aesthetics grew out of Fotolog—namely the Floggers and the Cumbieros. The Floggers represented a more polished, unified, upper-middle-class aesthetic, a more Eurocentric sensibility, while the Cumbieros, at the margins, developed a much more punk, queer, DIY aesthetic. In response to this divergence, the Cumbieros, the users from working-class backgrounds, built their own platform: Fotocumbia.

Fotocumbia represents a radical act of technological and aesthetic sovereignty. Rather than simply pushing back within the enclosure of Fotolog, users aligned with Cumbia Villera culture created an entirely new network where their working-class aesthetics could converge on their own terms. Instead of aspiring upward to the dominant aesthetic, they generated an alternative grounded in their own reality through technology.

When we consider this in the context of today’s internet, it feels all the more inspiring. We know there is now an "Instagram face," to borrow Jia Tolentino’s term, we can perceive the aesthetic convergence. Yet despite widespread dissatisfaction, we rarely imagine building our own platforms to counter it. Fotocumbia remains an extraordinary example of what it looks like when users refuse to accept dominant visual regimes—and create spaces of their own.

What does an image-sharing platform for your own subculture look like? Why aren’t we building it, now?

There’s a common litany about the current hollowness of contemporary art. The litany is often far hollower than what the critics complain about.

I went to see DOOM earlier this month, a larger-than-life performance and installation by the German artist Anne Imhof.1 (I had the great pleasure of interviewing the performance’s co-director and costume designer, Eliza Douglas, for SSENSE.)

For context, this is how I described DOOM in my piece.

“DOOM is hard to explain. Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a group of performers move from SUVs to stages across the Armory as different vignettes are acted out over the course of three hours. The crowd, dwarfed by the installation, plods along, tailing the group of performers as the story unfolds. A large ticking doomsday clock looms over the murmurations of the intelligentsia as bold red numbers illuminate the face of vague acquaintances. The experience is eerie and bemusing. I let myself be carried by DOOM. Bewitched by Douglas’s voice, confused by the erratic motions of the crowd, I waited anxiously for the final grand resolution as the countdown ended over “We Can”, an original song by Douglas.”

“The play-performance-installation features a dozen youths dressed in contemporary urban clothing, somewhere between Bushwick and Berlin but animated by the tribal characteristics of the Capulets and Montagues. These aesthetic groups fight as the tragic heroes’ love-stars cross.”

Shortly after opening night, the litany commenced again.

Hyperallergic was the first to publish a review, a rather negative one, with the tagline: “‘DOOM: House of Hope’ is comically apolitical and tragically hollow beneath all the hype.” I knew this sort of commentary was coming. It is obvious we are in a crisis of criticism. Newer generations of audiences are more swayed by streamers and TikTok content creators than they are by award-winning journalists when it comes to culture. Criticism, at large, feels insular. We write essays for other critics and our artist friends who subscribe to the magazines that will eventually cover them.

I believe this position of influence was not lost to the internet but rather abdicated through an atrophy of emotion. Hyperallergic’s review is a great example of how through incessant search for overt political themes, critics have alienated themselves from the experience of the work of art itself, always looking at it at arm’s-length, checking blue cookie-cutter boxes, never fully engaging, never fully letting go, lest one may be seen enjoying something “hollow” and “apolitical”. As Susan Sontag reminds us in “Against Interpretation”, “for the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text, but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances.”

The new critic’s disease is their inability to revel in the fullness of superficiality, their rejection of “appearances”, of experience in favor of interpretation and, by extension, politics. The new critic’s only language is that of politics because they understand the world only as a place where power is exercised and not where emotions are felt. In that world, emotions should be weaponized for obvious political cookie points. But, cui bene? Not the audience.

Hyperallergic’s overall description of the set/installation is correct. But the critic loses me when they ask the reader to “trust them” when they claim that “the vibe is half of it”, without expounding on the vibe’s effect. I do not trust them because after reading the piece I know that they did not feel it.

​​After 15 years of internet social justice activism, much of which was important, we’ve seemingly installed permanent blinders on the group of people whose job it literally is to see. The new monolingual critic only sees politics and activism. What about feeling! What about emotion!

She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

The critic from ArtNews, where another negative review was published, complains that “[..] DOOM did not liberate me.” Was it supposed to? In a hopeless world, the new critic turns to the work of art in search of a call to action. Without the telegraphed talking point, they scoff and deem the work otiose, pointless. The work of art is not an Instagram graphic. Sontag again, “interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

The new critic says “I felt nothing at all” and believes it is a negative imputation on the work. Perhaps you felt nothing at all because you approached the work with disdain, with the disgust of interpretation, because it did not rapidly satisfy some sort of loose checklist, because you did not open your heart to the work’s sensuous energy, the lovers’ embraces, the live close-ups of Juliet’s face, the beauty of ballet, because you treat the work of art as something to be decrypted, and not something to be experienced.

The ArtNews writer accuses the piece of being inscrutable. “DOOM’s inscrutability seems purposeful, especially since Imhof provided no program notes explaining the plot. The work instead appears to unfold in segments that are vaguely linear, with the plot of the Shakespeare play abstracted into moving tableaux.” The piece, first of all, is decidedly non-linear, beginning with a segment from the play’s final act, (Act 5, Scene 3) where the star-crossed lovers drink the poison. Thus we’ve already encountered the tragedy, we’re in its aftermath, from the very beginning, we are doomed!!! “But the details surrounding the characters of DOOM, their motivations, and their actions are intentionally shorn away, creating the sense that this is a work guided by an inner logic knowable only to the performers themselves.” We know the source material, we can intuit their motivations and fill in the gaps through the scenes. I am unsure what was so hermetic about it if you were familiar the original text.

The Hyperallergic critic throws out cheap jabs like calling the show a “Balenciaga ad”, a seeming dig at Eliza Douglas’s relationship with the brand. The costume design felt representative of what one may see outside a Bladee show or at Rash. It felt accurate, apropos, an astute construction, topical and thoughtful. This incessant excavation for the political is both tiresome and lazy. There are political rallies happening all over the country right now. If I was looking for a policy agenda, that’s where I would go. I came to see an artist’s perspective on one of our great tragedies, recast in our own Doomed Generation, I came to feel the slow drag of time, the apocalypse’s untimely uneventfulness, yes, it is tedious at times, but, trust me, so will the End, so will the Revolution.

“When the revolution comes / Some of us will probably catch it on TV with chicken hanging from our mouths.” (The Last Poets)

Were you dancing and moshing with the performers when the band played? Were you singing along to Jeremih? Were you sitting down when Eliza laid on the ground, performing her ritual? If not, how can you accuse a work of emotional stiffness? How can you be moved if you are not moving?

“DOOM meets a fraught moment with no answers.” Get your own answers! Why are we expecting a single German woman to provide an “answer” to the apocalyptical moment we are experiencing? This is unreasonable. From Severance to Marvel, this desire for answers observed across culture and its related relentless cravings for interpretation is sadly, in the words of Sontag, “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling.” To beg the work of art for answers is to beg the stone for milk. The work is a loose metaphor not a didactic fable. Morals are found in La Fontaine not Pollock.

Modern forms of communication understand this. For instance, you understand memes obliquely, from the corner of your mind, the synapse triggers a loose association, the smile occurs before the thought, the retweet before the comprehension, the feeling before interpretation.

The clock hits zero. Eliza is still singing. The End has occurred. I look at Kara and bring her close to me as we silently revel in the last few hours. The 0’s red glow illuminates on her face and she smiles at me. We reflect telepathically on what to do now, erring in the grandeur of the Park Avenue Armory. Where is Miles? Where is Emma? Where to go next? All things I would wonder about in the End Times. The presence of dear friends and great company.

And I would wonder about you, my love. I have my answer. I still will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart again.

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

If it isn’t obvious, the answer to DOOM is LOVE.

I have a new piece out today in SSENSE. It is an interview with the talented multidisciplinary artist Eliza Douglas who designed the costumes for Anne Imhof’s latest performance “DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE” which premiered last week at the Park Avenue Armory.

I was really fascinated by the costumes and how they captured this generation’s disaffected style and its oscillations between individuation and conformity. I spoke to Eliza about that juxtaposition, how she came up with the inspiration, etc.

Here’s a quote: “The work, which revolves around youth and our current “doomed” generation, presents a uniform for our era: light-washed low-rise jeans, a mix of old and new, transatlantic styles inspired by the internet and SoundCloud.”

Without further ado, here’s what I’m into right now.

(1) I've been exploring the work of Richard Kern, director and videographer who collaborated with Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch. He has a new book out with No Agency which I bought. (There are six copies left...) I really liked the rawness of his early work, you can find some videos still on Vimeo etc. There was a frenetic energy and perverse boundary-crossing in that work. The book is, however, not for me. It was unclear what the perspective on the subjects was. The images felt a little hermetic. Also, as a standalone concept, photos of hot models simply does not do it for me. This music video for “Death Valley 69”, on the other hand, I love.

(2) I've also been spending a lot of time with the work of Peter Hujar, a queer photographer whose images have a dear space in my heart. If you want to talk about perspective and warmth! I encountered Hujar’s work years ago as his portrait of Candy Darling was the cover of Anohni and the Johnsons’ 2005 record “I Am a Bird Now”. If you know me, you know how much that album is meaningful to me. That image. Candy Darling on her deathbed, surrounded by fresh flowers. A single rose. Black and white. The End’s shadow looming over the white hospital sheets. Candy, beautiful as ever. Candy, Candy, Candy.

(3) I’ve been listening to a lot of Gary Stewart. The “King of Honkytonk”. The album “Out of Hand” from 1975 in particular. “Back Sliders Wine” is so good.

(4) My friend and I saw Laraaji at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston. I can’t stop thinking about it. I am still dazzled by Zach Lieberman’s incredible projections during the show. Zach remains goated.

(5) Besides that, I finished reading Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. Amazing. I’m slowly making my way through his bibliography. I just finished Bulkagov's “Morphine” which was tremendous. I should probably read “The Master and the Margarita” Loved the epistolary style, the slow descent into madness. Reminded me of Gogol's The Nose. I also just wrapped up my fantasy back-to-back suite. Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre” followed by Rosemary Jackson’s retort “Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion”. Todorov does a great job outline a pretty foundational theory of fantasy: how it differs from fairytales, what its main essential characteristics are, etc. Jackson, in response, highlights its blind spots, namely Todorov does not dwell on the socio-cultural and psychoanalytic aspects of fantasy (he mentions in passing but that’s all), and expands it in a very compelling fashion.

(6) I recently copped a beautiful grey knitted silk (!) jumper from Rick Owens from the FW15 collection “Sphinx” which I’ve been wearing a lot. My black 2022 Re-Nylon Prada pants have also been getting a lot of wears this month. Perfect for the office. I may add photos next time.

In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)

We are staunchly in the Age of Para-Content.

Para-content is not new. Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)

The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.

The phenomenon is extremely popular in hip-hop where “reaction videos” to songs can help make or break the popularity of new singles. The reaction videos help the audience understand how the song should be received. The highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant. In the Midrash, the rabbinic authority serves as a reliable certitude in the soundness of one’s interpretation of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. The music-reaction-video helps the viewer reliably assess whether something is good or “mid” (see DJ Akademiks falling asleep to Certified Lover Boy), and which parts tend to generate the most hype, two highly valuable pieces of socio-cultural information.

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience. It underscores the active role of the audience in interpreting and imbuing texts—whether literary works, films, or media content—with meaning, emphasizing that a text's significance is not merely excavated by readers but is co-constructed by them. Both the text and the audience “give”. The theory acknowledges that each act of reception is a unique encounter, suggesting that texts are not closed systems but open horizons of possibility, subject to the interpretative freedoms of their audiences.

Specifically, German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss coined the term “Horizon of Expectation” (“Erwartungshorizont” in German) to describe the encounter between text and audience. In essence, this word refers to the framework through which an individual understands, interprets, and evaluates a text, relying on the cultural norms and standards specific to their historical period. Thus, these change over time and readers may perceive and esteem a work differently than those from past generations.

Back to our streamers. Now this theory traditionally places a large emphasis on the reader as the maker of the horizon. The notable shift in our era of para-content is that the reader (reader as a broad term for the audience of a media artifact) has fully abdicated the horizon-making to the “contextualizer”. Contextualizers, such as reaction video creators or fan analysts, guide the process by highlighting specific elements, framing interpretations, and modeling emotional or intellectual responses. They do not provide an open-ended range of possibilities, they prescribe a defined one! They shape how audiences situate themselves within the text’s horizon, directing attention to particular meanings and experiences.

This is not new. The radio DJ played a similar role. Think about the infamous DJ Funk Flex live premiere of JAY-Z and Kanye West’s Otis on July 20th, 2011. Funk Flex is performing a kind of interpretive choreography that affirms the song’s cultural resonance, bombs and all. This guidance acts as a compass for audiences, helping them align their interpretations with shared values and communal touchpoints (the bombs!). In this sense, the contextualizer becomes an active participant in the dialogic creation of meaning, reinforcing reception theory’s assertion that texts are not closed systems. The text’s reception is curated, crafted, and collectively navigated through the work of contextualizers. What is notable today is that the singular monocultural radio DJ of yore has now been replaced, in the our age of para-content, by a decentralized field of contextualizers all contextualizing simultaneously. There are so many reaction videos that there are compilations of reaction videos. See this one for “TV Off.” This channel which creates these reaction video compilations (para-content about para-content lol) itself has 156,000 subscribers.

The American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context. Reaction videos, analyses, and reviews function as bridges, offering audiences a way to make sense of and engage with cultural artifacts. In an era where the sheer volume of available content overwhelms individual capacity for interpretation, contextualizers step in to synthesize, curate and create meaning. As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.

Works of art were being contextualized before by friends, curators, record store employees, grandiloquent critics, etc. Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons. This creates a paradox: while contextualizers help audiences navigate the abundance of content, they narrow the interpretive field, reducing the audience’s autonomy in engaging with the work. In her study of the Midrash, Gafney reminds us that the exegesis also leaves the door for the believer to answer questions themselves. I love context, but there is a looming danger in its omnipresence. No more reaction videos! We must resist the lure of context and, once again, feel and think for ourselves. Do you like “TV Off” or have you just seen a thousand memes and videos about it?

This interview is a continuation / response to the Indie Sleaze post. Lina’s book is a seminal text on the topic and it was great to hear her perspective as both a participant and a journalist.

Her book details the story of Bloghouse, the given name for a musical genre and movement from the mid-2000s, defined not so much by its style but characterized by its unique mode of distribution. It was fueled by independent music blogs, a network of DIY creators advocating for music outside the mainstream. It thrived from 2006 to 2011 before platforms like Spotify and Apple Music existed, making it a fascinating precursor to today’s music-sharing ecosystem.

Bloghouse connected the internet and the dance floor in a way that felt revolutionary at the time: songs shared freely on blogs, supported by unmonetized communities. Beyond music; it was a novel way of creating and consuming culture before algorithms took over. The rise of bloghouse was powered by independent music blogs, like Gorilla versus Bear, Hipster Runoff, and LinaLovesIt, that acted as tastemakers and distribution channels for emerging artists. These blogs weren’t driven by monetary incentives but by passion—a DIY network of people offering free downloads and sharing underground music globally.

What we call “Indie Sleaze” these days is analogous to bloghouse. Think The Misshapes parties, the Cobra Snake photos, American Apparel, etc. Indie Sleaze as currently represented does have a strong influence from the indie rock scene as well which was detailed in the book “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011”.

The interview also includes a brief “Jameson Interlude”, a moment of reflection of the work of the great American philosopher and literary critic who left us this year. Jameson’s definition of postmodernism, historicity and pastiche are prominent ideas in the essay on Indie Sleaze.

Hope you enjoy the interview.

Step #1

Turn off the computer. Go live in the world of objects. Go to the stores in your city or town. Touch things. Try them on. Sit on them. Peer, leer, jeer!

Step #2

In the world of objects, you’ll find “helpers”. People will come up to you and say, “Would you like this in a different size?”, “Do you need this in a different color”, “Have you heard their last album?”. These people will become your allies on your journey to taste. Ask them questions: “What is this?”, “Who made this?”, “What or who is this for?”. Come back often to see the new things their store has stocked. Often, they will be moody teenagers (like I was), but sometimes they’ll be passionate, and you can learn mountains from them. Shopkeepers know objects better than most people, learn the tales of things from them.

Step #3

Taste is ultimately a compound of three ingredients. The first two, knowledge and curiosity, are important because they introduce you to new fields of knowledge. You must be adventurous. For the first year of your journey, always say Yes!

You get invited to a noise show: say Yes!

Someone invites you to a gallery opening: say Yes!

Colleagues are trying a new restaurant: say Yes!

Too many have stunted taste by fear of trying new things.

Trying new things can expand or confirm taste, which is good.

Go high, go low, be omnivorous. Say Yes!

Step #4

Knowledge is social, it’s shared. When you enter a cultural space, listen. Seriously, shut up for a second. Listen. Be open. Be present. Maybe you’ll meet the booker who’ll explain why this band from Michigan is playing, here, in California. Maybe you’ll overhear the curator explain how they chose the artist. Get closer. Listen. Maybe you’ll hear two x-heads debate their favorite record. Listen. Taste is being exercised all around.

Step #5

You’ve listened. And you’ve tried a few new things. Now, catalog them. Make a list (it can be mental). Draw contrasts between your experiences. Note similarities. What engenders strong reaction from you? At this point, you’ll have fragments of information. What you will be missing is context (“that which is scarce”, comme disait l’autre).

At this point, you can open the computer and attempt to obtain context. Listen to the whole album. Look at the whole collection. Read another book in the series or another by the author.

Act in ways opposite to your instinct. If you hate something, find out more about it. Again ask. “What is this?”, “Who made this?”, “Who is this for?” Genuinely. Never stop doing this.

Try to pinpoint why. Which segment of the song makes you cringe, which chapter of the book makes you lose interest, which part of the dress makes you say “No!”. Develop your critical muscle. Don’t let it atrophy.

Step #6

Now, the fun part. If there’s one new thing you love, time to descend into the rabbit-hole. I recommend listening to the whole discography. Watching all the movies from the director. Making your way through the creator’s oeuvre. You will develop an irreproducible connection with the work. That’s when the magic “love” comes into play.

This isn’t obligatory. Some people are just too prolific. Think of it more like a goal. Get to know the artist as you grow old. Year by year, movie by movie, painting by painting. Rewatch the ones you love. Go see their shows if they are near to you. Learn to love art and make time for it.

Step #7

It’s getting serious. You should be animated by an incurable virus. You’ll want to watch every interview. Read old magazine features. Find B-Sides. Samples. Misprints.

Read what critics said at the time. If you can, find out what audiences at the time thought as well. It’s a good time to return inside and spend whole afternoons on niche fora and blogs dedicated to your topic of interest. Tell your friends about your new discoveries.

Buy or rent art books! They are amazing repositories of knowledge and context on the work you love. I love them because many of the images in them aren’t even on the internet. Google searches will yield academic papers written about your darlings. Read a few of those. Look at the footnotes, the bibliography. Look into those too. Build a map of who knows what about the thing you love. You now have context, critical perspectives, and historical understanding. You can place work in a lineage, link it to other works in the canon, create novel connections with other works.

Step #8

In your perusals, you’ll learn who inspired your current favorites. Look them up. Repeat the process. Find out who inspired them. Investigate their work. Rabbit hole. Boom! Fantasize about what if X met Y, and the kinds of conversation A, B and C would have had in 1917 Zurich.

You’ll grow a network of references, a personal canon, a set of imaginary friends who perched on your shoulder will opine on your aesthetic judgements and thoughts. You’ll have the confidence to rely on them or to say, “No, not today.”

Step #9

Your shelves, hard drives, Tumblr, Are.na, should be teeming by now. You’ve built a personal idiosyncratic archive of culture. You know what you like and what you don’t. There’s a painting, a print, a poster, or a poem on your bedroom wall, kitchen door, that book you hate is a doorstop. You live with art.

Here comes the most important part: Randomness. Pick random books from give-take municipal streets libraries. Pick them off the street if you find them. Ask hosts at house parties to borrow a book if it catches your eye. Ditch the algorithms and pick a random record based on the cover art alone. Walk into stores you’ve never been in before. Travel tends to increase randomness. Visit new cities. Go to flea markets, tradeshows, pop-ups. Then, with these new finds, repeat the above steps. Find new things, experiment, stay open.

Step #10

What do all these steps have to do with Taste?

They have to do with the third ingredient of Taste: Love. And, above critics, experts, and academics, Taste is about Passion. It is Love that sends you down the rabbit-hole. It is Love that makes you cry at a concert. These steps are for you to find things you love, not just now, but throughout your life. Things that will live with you. Sometimes as thoughts, sometimes as objects. They’ll remind you of personal eras, victories, heartbreak. They’ll hold memories like columns in Yates’ palace.

If you love Barbara, why don’t you get a jukebox, fill it with only her songs and put it in the middle of your empty apartment. It would be oh so tasteful.

The fictionalized words of General Patton from the 1970 film “Patton” echoed through my cranium as I watched Kendrick Lamar announce his upcoming Super Bowl performance. Like George C. Scott playing Patton, Kendrick is placed in front of an abnormally large US flag, addressing the audience. “No round two’s”, Kendrick says, as a football shoots out at an unseen player. A nod, most likely, to his victory against Drake in their recent rap beef. Of course, the reference to Patton here is clear. He is the artist playing the Super Bowl, because “Americans love a winner.” The image is an example of the many coded references present in the work of Lamar.

Lamar exemplifies through his subtlety the importance of gatekeeping, not saying everything, leaving clues for the viewer to seek out, do their own research. The content is widely available, the songs are streamable, the videos watchable, but their message, their meaning remains encrypted. You need to know the reference to Patton to comprehend the full extent of the flex.

There is a strong tension for artist and creators between safeguarding culture and making it accessible and legible. Bear with me here, but the recent rollout of Charli XCX’s 360 music video encapsulates this tension.

I love Charli and her music. I’ve been bumping that since Pop 2. However, the “360” music video is an example of culture portrayed as something to be put on display, fully visible. Julia is everywhere, she is in the business of ubiquity. There is nothing cryptic about being “brat”. The implication here is clear: there are influencers and it-girls to follow (they are in the video!), places to frequent, podcasts to listen to. “Bratness” is not gatekept, it is accessible through consumption.

In stark contrast stands Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, a work that, while highly popular, draws a distinct line between public accessibility and cultural encryption. On the surface, anyone can listen to the track, understand the lyrics, and even dance to it. But there’s a deeper layer that’s reserved for a specific community, notably people from Compton. The symbols and meanings Kendrick weaves into the video are encrypted—they require deeper engagement, context, and understanding that’s often only available through presence in that cultural context or deep analysis and research (see the many videos breaking down the symbols in the Not Like Us music video). It's a coded language, and not just anyone is given the key.

The video opens on Compton City Hall, a site familiar to those who have been there, but unknown to those who have not. There is Tommy the Clown, the legendary figure in the LA dance scene, who appears in the video’s third scene. There is the room where Kendrick does the push-ups, first a nod to Drake’s diss but the room’s design is eerily similar to the room Milla Jovovich was photographed in 1997. Milla was infamous in the 90’s for appearing nude at age 15 in the 1991 film “Return to the Blue Lagoon” and was discovered by Jean-Luc Brunel, who was accused of allegedly supplying girls to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. (The Guardian, 2022). The 16 push-ups. The puerile hopscotch. The repeated appearances of crip walks, which originated in Compton.

These are two very different modes of cultural interaction. Charli’s approach invites participation: the memes exist for remixing, the portrayed scene and its participants exist to be followed and engaged with on social media—the culture of Brat is open and participatory, giving anyone a ticket to join the global digital party. Kendrick, on the other hand, erects a metaphorical gate, around hip hop and black culture, emphasizing that some aspects of the culture are not for everyone. To truly belong, to truly get it, you need to be from a specific place, rooted in a unique culture.  Kendrick’s message in Not Like Us is more profound: this isn’t something you can just buy into. He’s speaking to Drake, but also to us, the wider audience: You can’t just mimic this culture. We’ve been accustomed to fluidly entering new subcultures, claiming appartenance left and right, shifting shapes digitally. Lamar is adamant: You have to live it, be born into it, breathe it. Some things are not for sale, not for show. There’s an essence in certain communities, in certain experiences, that cannot be replicated. This is what he’s reinforcing: “You are not like us, and you never will be like us.”

Few figures are as reviled in our modern cultural landscape as the “Gatekeeper”. Called pompous, haughty, pretentious, the gatekeeper excludes and hoards. The gatekeeper prevents the free flow of information. The gatekeeper is greedy in a world where sharing a link is free.

My friend Raihan, a notable foodie, loves this copypasta.

i find mfs like u really interesting bro. i ain't gon lie this spot is kinda like a personal thing to me you get what i'm saying. it's just like a personal vibe u feel me. what's really crazy is you wouldn't even wanted this if u ain't see me post it u get what i'm saving. i don't even think u really hungry like that tbh bro. so go ahead find yourself something to eat bro go open your fridge bro this not the fridge this the internet u get what i'm saying. this shit taste insane though shit wild seafood pasta uk what i'm saying this shit market price u feel me shit i wish i could put u on but its really a personal vibe u know. i bring my loved ones here so u know what i'm saying u be easy bro

This copypasta can be interpreted through René Girard's theory of mimetic desire. René Girard (1923–2015) was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science.

Girard's theory posited that human desire is not autonomous or self-driven but rather imitative. People desire things because others desire or possess them, not because of the inherent qualities of the object itself. In this copypasta, the speaker implicitly accuses the other person of wanting the seafood pasta simply because they saw the speaker post about it, thus initiating a mimetic cycle of desire.

As Girard writes, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

Or as Frank Ocean reminds us, “Niggas love to steal”.

The “personal vibe” in the text is important. The speaker positions the meal not simply as someone that is consumed but rather something to which there is a personal, emotional, and potentially, as it is frequent with food, a cultural value. They act as a gatekeeper, preventing access to someone who is perceived as merely wanting to consume out of mimesis and not out of a desire to cultivate this personal vibe. To extend this reading, if they had cultivated this personal vibe, say a love of seafood, they probably would have found this place already. The speaker introduces friction to access, a cultural repellent to what Chapman calls in his 2015 analysis of scenes “sociopaths”, cultural extractors who capitalize on scenes and subcultures for their own personal gain, financially and cultural. Lamar would call them “colonizers”.

The Office of Applied Strategy sent me their upcoming dossier called “Hyper-Optimization” and the theme of friction recurred throughout and seems very applicable to the role of Gatekeeper.

The writers define “hyper-optimization” as the “event horizon before which we can no longer control the speed of culture because it has become frictionless.” They add a quote by Creative Director Phil Chang, “Culture is what emerges as a product of the friction between people and ideas. Friction […] is what makes culture exciting to begin with.”

The Gatekeeper is important because they provide the friction. The Gatekeeper is not truly exclusionary, rather they introduce labor to access the culture, they introduce a rite of passage, of initiation. The gatekeeper creates the fence which the enthusiast happily hops and stops the dilettante.

The clues area actually all there for you, the enthusiast, to find. Go to the place, meet the people, live there. The Gatekeeper is the reminder that culture requires labor and that access is not a right, it must be earned.

Now, you know how I feel.
That’s all.