The Hollywood version of this couple, written by Beatty and Trevor Griffiths (a former Labour Party propagandist from the north of England) portrays these radicals as somewhere caught between a shallow and somewhat reactionary commitment to free love and an aloof but often jealous alliance with a vague commitment to radical politics as a center of gravity where traditional marriage values might otherwise be. After tapping out as a journalist due to an increasingly censorious political environment, John becomes obsessed with the capital-R Revolution happening over in the motherland, with his relationships and health suffering dutifully for it. Louise, for her part, struggles to hold onto her marriage while trying to establish herself as her own person outside of John’s large and looming shadow. She cares about the Revolution, but her direct involvement comes only after John goes missing trying to sneak out of Russia and she goes to find him.

Stone’s dismissal of the political proceedings in the film is really just a platitude that lost its edge about fifteen years ago: who do these men think they are, sitting around sucking the air out of rooms with debates on strategy and theory because they love the sound of their own voices, and not because what they’re discussing is particularly important? It’s a little strange to portray these debates simply as opportunities for men to feel self-important, seeing as what they were discussing was one of the most important events in human history and all. But if the politics aren’t what the movie is “about,” then we are free to chastise the hubris of these men and Keaton’s “insecure” and “Woody Allen”-esque performance. Worse yet, it’s indicative of the fact that Beatty and Griffiths aren’t capable of writing “a female character that they maybe wouldn’t want to fuck” — an even more exhausted criticism than the one about men and the sound of their own voices, except this one literally doesn’t mean anything. (Maybe it’s true that Bryant was much more confident in real life than she was in the film, but have you ever heard of art?)

Maybe it’s precisely because the American radicals weren’t successful at launching their own revolution that Reds is able to explore the characters and their relationships underneath the political goings-on. But as far as personal transformation goes, Louise is the only one afforded that. When we first meet John, he’s already established in his career, reputation, and political commitments, nonchalantly drifting in and out of rooms large and small full of rousing speech. We don’t get a glimpse into his inner world; his conflicts remain obscure to us. Louise, however, undergoes a profound change that is only roughly parallel with the cultural one taking place. In Seattle, married to a dentist, she is an unsatisfied housewife who keeps her home so poorly she doesn’t even live in it. In New York with John, her desire to engage in the world becomes impossible to suppress. She finds success as an international correspondent and makes a name for herself as a radical and a feminist.

So it’s not so much that the only thing worth fighting for is love, but it’s love that inspires us to fight in the first place; Reds the love story isn’t separate from Reds the historical drama. And even though its screenplay was (God forbid!) written by men, it shows us how the fantasies that sustain John and Louise’s relationship and their cause are still necessary. Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill, with whom Louise had a brief affair while John was away on one of his many trips, admonishes these fantasies by comparing them to “Irish Catholicism” and attempting to make John and Louise out to be self-serving middle class radicals, waxing poetic about the beauty of revolution because it lets them borrow some meaning against the emptiness of their own lives. Unfortunately for Gene, he’s wrong, even if the words he’s saying are true.

I know that I’m using Stone’s review as a lightning rod for my own frustration at the trend of political ambivalence the majority of social critics hold today. Plus, you have to understand, it came out at that moment when people were discussing the political dimensions of the murder of a mother caught on camera in Minnesota by ICE, when The Free Press’s Kat Rosenfield punished us with the take that the victim was overtaken by a social media-induced delusion that she was the “main character” of a potentially politically important but ultimately deadly moment, and everyone was disagreeing with her for the wrong reasons, because they wanted to feel that the sum of their personal choices is greater than their whole.

But as the discourse waxed and waned its wretched little way back into another one of its phases, which we now call “heteropessimism,” I had realized what was so frustrating about Stone’s ambivalence was the insistence that “love” was somehow separate from the rest —the politics, the gendered dynamics of John and Louise’s relationship and lives more generally, the changing cultural norms; that love was its own pure thing, not to be tainted by anything from the outside.

So while we’ve all decided that it’s good riddance to 2010s’ ultra-lame pseudo-feminism of “toxic masculinity” and girlbossery (or so I thought?), and the backlash of the “manosphere” was all but too inevitable, what we’re really seeing, as Mana Afsari pointed out, isn’t just gender trouble as usual, but a revolt – willing or otherwise – against romance. And what does romance entail if not the fantasy of what an encounter with another can do to us by taking us outside of ourselves and revealing something bigger? It’s no wonder this prospect feels so distant now, what with the increasing unreality of social life and all.

All over the web, there are people supposedly trying to bring back romance, which I see as a rebellion against the sterility of everyone’s corporate-driven lives. What tends to be missing in these notions of romance however is the social. These “romantic” images and fantasies have become mostly solitary ones, as if romance means turning inwards and backwards, retreating, if you will, to the “natural” state of oneness, of having very little — of a potential rejection of social life altogether.

I guess it’s true, then, as Magdalene Taylor wrote in the NYT recently, that it’s never been more passé to be coupled. But what is the true cause of this trend? It could be the apps, or capitalism, I guess, but only in the most abstract sense. I think it has more to do with the unintended psychological effects of progress. Never before in history have people — women, especially — had more options on the table. In theory, at least, we can basically do whatever we want to do with our lives. Social ruin will not come to those who don’t follow the one, given script. A casual connection is only a few swipes away. The accessibility of birth control and abortion mean that compulsory parenthood isn’t a thing anymore. In a broad sense of the word, this freedom is progressive. We are no longer bound by material or cultural obligations to do one thing over another. But in another sense, the lack of external compulsions has made us more paralyzed than ever. How are we supposed to know what we want when the possibility of pursuing even our most fleeting desires is so new? And if social cohesion is no longer necessary for survival, is it any wonder that people might begin to view it as a risk not worth taking? Maybe social compulsions are actually good for us.

All of this is to say that the gender war discourse has made me weary, because it feels like even asking that question is forbidden. Yes, times have made us alienated, cynical, reduced to atomized nodes on a marketplace forced to optimize certain traits over others — but that just goes without saying at this point. The lack of social obligations has somehow made us more inept in our social lives. Heterosexuality, which was at one time compulsory and not just an unfortunate reality through which many of us have to suffer on account of having been neuroticized in one way rather than another, has taken on a pathological position in the broader discourse. Ironically, in the absent of a true private realm, we behave as if nothing can be what it appears to be, there’s a deeper meaning behind every interaction, no matter how small. As Jean Garnett put it in one of the most tortured personal essays I’ve ever read: “On the bed, the ‘female demand-male withdraw’ pattern pulses with sensuality; in life it sometimes feels like it will drive me out of my senses, and it creates work — tough, tragic female work… (Arlie Hochschild) calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues ‘hermeneutic labor,’ and she posits it as a form of ‘gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.’” Call me cynical, but I don’t think that examining the micro-politics of a man not texting you back is going to usher in a new phase of feminism, nor make for a good sex life, for that matter. (There’s something incredibly non-erotic about how these pieces talk about men and relationships, as if an international summit is required for every negotiation two people enter about the “terms” of their private relationship.)

If it came out today, Reds would make little sense to the contemporary critic, well-versed as she is in ~power dynamics~. The central (heterosexual) relationship of Reds would not be allowed to be the device upon which the greater conflicts of the changing landscape of the twentieth century are unspooled, much less the mechanism through which the film’s central character (Louise) becomes politicized, being as it is a real life encounter with another that actualizes her as her own self and makes her more aware of the social reality around her. Today, it’s much more common to view the social as something not in dialectical tension with the individual, but fully subsumed to it.

In closing, I can’t help but think of Alain Badiou on the similarities between love and politics. He says that while both are fundamentally about being in relation to others, they must also, and beyond that, be not static but generative acts:

we have to build something. Love [like revolutionary politics] cannot stop at the epiphany of the encounter, but also has to become a construction. And precisely what has to be constructed is an experience of the world ‘for two’. This is wholly extraordinary, for we habitually experience the world as our own personal experience: what I see, what I feel. With love, things really have to happen ‘for two’… And every little decision of this kind is ultimately transformed by the fact that it is not the decision of an isolated person but a decision taken by two people… Sometimes that fails, just as the socialist states failed, because at a given moment one of the two or even the two together can no longer bear having this duality within themselves, this duality in their decisions. Contradictions emerge that we do not manage to resolve. I think that the fortune, the power of love is when it succeeds in overcoming crises.

❣️

When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
We will fling the winding sheet
O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
- Song for the Luddites, LORD BYRON

“There is nothing new under the sun,” my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother have said many times via Ecclesiastes, which is, if I remember correctly, the coolest book in the bible. The older I get the more I believe this to be true, but not in the sense that everything is a perfect facsimile of everything that came before—it’s a little more ~dialectical~ than that. But to the untrained eye, there are many trends and developments that might seem new—even urgent—but upon closer inspection you will find that there is in fact nothing essentially original in anything that has ever happened—historically or epistemologically. Everything just expands.

Some of these not new trends include whether AI is “good” or “bad,” a switching of what is “right” and what is “left,” scarcity and abundance, why our culture is “so bad” and getting worse, and what is to be “done.”

One thing that seems new, though, at least for the modern era, is that that we have been suffering from a prolonged retreat of mass politics and organization and thus, political imagination. This has fundamentally affected the way we think about culture and politics and what power even is. The terrain of culture appears to be the most salient and obvious battlefield, and as a result of this consistently reified depoliticization, a dark cloud of nihilism has settled over everyone’s heads.

There are many symptoms that come from this lack of political imagination, which are too plentiful to list off here. This is something the left predicted and diagnosed long ago, roughly beginning with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) going all the way to Mark Fisher’s blog k-punk (2003~2016) and beyond. Less insightful pundits are finally starting to understand this, at least for the time being. Democrats are MIA when they should be tapping a successor movement to the failed Biden-Harris loser show, and their base seems to suffering from an atrophying hysteria. Their only real hope for electoral victory is backlash to Trump’s tanking of the economy and (mostly) unprecedented excessive use of executive power—but there is little reason to believe that they will scale these expansions back or regain any kind of cultural or political dominance. At best, elite cultural and intellectual production will just kind of go back to normal after fears of political deportation are over (and by normal I mean exactly as the same as they are now just without the fanfare).

While the cultural battlefield remains the preferred site of struggle for many, liberal geniuses Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson attempted—to the best of their combined yet limited ability—to provide a framework for an alternative political program in their new “book” Abundance, in which they deride bureaucratic red tape for contributing to housing shortages and “innovation” stagnation. The response to this less than brilliant manifesto-of-sorts has been informative: “we don’t need more things”; “this is just neoliberal deregulation repackaged for 2025”; “they want us to eat bugs and lab-grown meat” (true actually); “YIMBYs are bad”; “NIMBYs are bad”; and so on (David Sirota, for example and as usual, needs to calm down).

While there is no doubt in my own fairly limited mind that Klein and Thompson didn’t identify the best prescriptions for solving these issues, the sentiment behind it seems good enough to me: we need and should value growth, and we need it to serve more people, better.

I have not and will not be reading the book—I have more important things to do including living in and thinking about reality—but while I agree that we need more (affordable) housing, the idea that we are suffering from a lack of “innovation” seems, on its face, ridiculous to me. We (the plebes) have been debating amongst ourselves the merits of soon to be ubiquitous AI feverishly for like, 10 years at this point. A private company Jurassic Parked a wolf puppy, which proves that we have the ability to bring DNA back from 13,000 years ago which I’m sure poses absolutely no risk to existing ecosystems. Our tax dollars go to Elon Musk’s exploding rockets and shitty, offensively ugly vehicles in droves. The US has long since barred China’s vastly superior and cheaper EVs from the US to protect Musk from competitive pressure + we need to engage in petty geopolitical rivalry at the expense of everyone else for some reason. The Trump administration is actively gutting publicly-funded and life-saving research and development that’s the result of many generations of human capital improvements. Technological innovations aren’t absent, at all, they’re either not valued on ideological and political grounds or used to cut labor costs by taking people’s jobs and skills away. We could probably have 100% clean, renewable energy (nuclear!) by 2026 if we wanted, but it’s still profitable to extract and sell carbon-producing fuels, so it won’t happen. Societal levels of wealth are higher than they’ve ever been, it’s inequality that’s rising at an out-of-control pace. In short, the problem isn’t that there’s no innovation, production, or wealth: it’s that there is no democratic control over the political economic structures that are responsible for it.

I am not, by any means, a tech aficionado nor an expert on anything having to with innovation, policy, or how corporations “work”. I’m not a “tech-optimist” nor a “tech-pessimist” either. But let’s go back to AI, which obviously has the potential to radically transform the lives of every person on earth (probably) in the span of like half a generation. Everyone is understandably talking about what AI will do to creative professions (and consumption) and what other kinds of jobs might be automated out of existence. This isn’t because technology as such is only meant to do that, it’s because the relations of production in the capitalism compel that to be the case. We might be tempted to forget, though, that if the nature of our laboring activities change, our “species essence” (as Marx put it) changes too. What will AI and high levels of techno-digital development do to the creative parts of our consciousness? Literacy rates are already dwindling, apparently, because kids just can’t get off their damn phones. They need constant dopamine hits or they suffer from literal withdrawal. AI is doing their homework for them. Adults, too, are losing their ability to think for the same reasons. Similar to how industrialization destroyed old ways of thinking and producing, it’s easy to imagine an even creepier future in which AI replaces all types of creative thought in daily activities, at work, school, and play.

I think it’s fully possible we’re staring down the barrel of a future in which many forms of creativity will be stripped from people’s cognitive abilities. Some are starting to wonder whether or not we’re going to see a “neo-romanticist” movement, which honestly might just be a pretentious way of claiming “my nihilism is good, actually, and I do not believe politics or progress are possible nor desirable.” Fine. I don’t really care about the people who seem hellbent on rehashing discourses from centuries ago every time the tide changes—especially when it seems to me like they’re just the ones whose dicks are left in their hands because they lack the critical abilities necessary to understand what is, in fact, subversive, and what is thoroughly mainstream. Anyway. I’m not actually “against” romanticism as such. There’s something interesting, though, about the discourse around it, AI, and abundance: I don’t think that people really understand what their desires are or what’s possible, and whether or not we as a collective have the ability to determine this. There is, on the one hand, a backlash against the abrasive hideousness of AI-generated art and conversation as well as the potential damage it can do to intellectual thought and critical human development. There are also more material fears about what AI will do to people’s livelihoods. So there is a natural parallel and draw to the often conservative romanticism that took shape around the Industrial Revolution. But romanticism wasn’t actually a movement exactly, it was an aesthetic and affective reaction to the development of those industrial productive forces that were radically changing people’s lives at a breakneck speed. I don’t fault them for that, but I also don’t think it’s an accident it was basically moribund by the time the revolutionary movements of the mid-1800s started taking shape—or, for that matter, when Marx and Engels’s epistemological revolution made most strains of idealism seem thoroughly archaic; these kinds of ideas and affects simply don’t survive in an environment in which people are actually trying to fight for something.

The Luddites who inspired Lord Byron (who, to be fair, was very involved in politics) and other romanticists weren’t rebelling against technology because of some abstract desire to get back to nature, they attacked the machines that were actively taking their livelihoods away. They knew that all of the innovation—which was most assuredly being rationalized as an objective advancement for human kind—was being used for the opposite ends: to further alienate them from their own concrete abilities, making them easier to exploit. The machines of the Industrial Revolution weren’t hated for their machine-ness, they were the symbol of their real present and future toiling.

If critics of AI are falling into the same technological fetishist trap that the Luddites did, critics of abundance might be falling on the reverse side of the commodity fetish. Maybe we can also say that the self-proclaimed neo-romanticists are partaking in an aesthetic fetishism. They see the “things” produced under capitalism—bad art, microplastics, artificial intelligence—as the culprit for everything that’s wrong, rather than the logic of the production process itself. Marx’s focus on fetishism in this economic regard was important: the fetish, or the outsized analytical attention paid to the end result of the capitalist process rather than the process itself, is one of the psychosocial mechanisms through which modern subjects are obfuscated from the truth.

It’s easy, in times like this of rapidly changing technology, to confuse the forces with the relations of production, but it’s up to the left to tease these things apart. How are we supposed to feel about the rapid change when so many people still don’t have the things they need to live good, healthy lives? Is AI being developed in order to save us from tedium, or to save someone else from having to pay for creative human function?

In the hullabaloo of the discourse around tariffs, AI, abundance, cultural (and economic) downturns, I don’t see a lot of people standing up to say anything like “I want many beautiful, nice things, and I want a dynamic and democratic society to produce them”—but I think that’s exactly what most people want, and maybe the only world really worth fighting for. How this kind of world could come into being is successfully obscured, however—technology, art, and things themselves become the objects to worship or fear. That’s largely because innovation is a double-edged sword in a capitalist society: on one hand, it develops the forces that make abundance possible and scarcity an irrelevant concern; on the other, it mechanizes labor to the point that everyone becomes increasingly separated from their creative species-essence—moving perhaps towards an elimination of the need for imaginary thought at all. The contradiction here is not one that will be solved under the current relations of production, in which technological advancements are fashioned in the pursuit of endless accumulation. Ironically, it might take some acts of collective imagination to solve.

On that note, the next best thing, Criterion Channel, has a featured collection this month of my favorite genre: New York Love Stories. There are some great rom-coms (best genre) in there, all set in NYC (the center of the world), with great exteriors, interiors, and outfits (the 3 most important aspects of a film). Unfortunately for them they did not consult me for this programming, because I am the leading expert in these types of things and am probably the most qualified person on earth to give guidance on this particular type of project. In any case here are some of the best options on the CC (Criterion Channel) right now, as well as my personal CC (Caroline’s Choices) additions:

Something Wild

This movie is directed by Jonathan Demme. It’s also very good and unlike anything made these days (at the same time it seems to have inspired a whole subgenre?). The beginning is kind of ridiculous and also basically just a weird opportunity for Demme to inundate us with his obsession with Haitian culture (not something that could get made today, etc). But it doesn’t really take away from the film itself which is a combination of the road movie genre with a John Waters-esque light-hearted yet campy darkness (cameo alert!), indie rom com (one of the first manic pixie dream girls?), and crime thriller. It’s completely unpredictable and fun. I love that Melanie Griffith was considered a knockout in the 80s, and how Ray Liotta isn’t necessarily a good actor but looks interesting and unique!

Goodbye Girl

My favorite thing about rom-coms from before this century is that they don’t moralize or whitewash the way people speak to each other. This is certainly the case here, where we have a strangely well-rounded but neurotic actor played by Richard Seymour (who does a gay Richard III) (and he’s only 30 in this movie which is absolutely crazy) and a hopeless romantic-cum-cynic, out-of-work single mom played by Marsha Mason in clever, theater-like dialogue. Woody Allen should’ve taken notes! My favorite parts are the scenes in which she obsessively redecorates their apartment—it reminded me of when I moved into my boyfriend’s apartment which was probably one of the least fun experiences he has ever gone through in his entire life.

Moonstruck, obviously

A perfect movie in my opinion.

Crossing Delancey

This is one of my favorite movies and a frequent rewatch. I have been trying to find a way to watch Chilly Scenes of Winter, also by Joan Micklin Silver, but will settle for Between the Lines, Hester Street and this one when I’ve inevitably failed. They really don’t make New York filmmakers like this anymore. :(

It Could Happen to You

Another weird and ridiculous premise that almost kind of works but it’s mostly worth watching for the New York scenery and 90’s nostalgia.

Frankie & Johnny

Love!

Falling in Love

This movie is so melodramatic it’s almost unbearable. Love the visuals though!

Non-CC (Criterion Channel) CC (Caroline’s Choices) programming

9 1/2 Weeks

This isn’t a funny movie but I really like it. I think it’s very well done, organic, artistic yet realistic, and emotionally compelling. Kim Bassinger = perfect; Mickey Rourke = pre weird face. The contemporary BDSM community probably wouldn’t approve of this cinematic re-imagination of the original memoir, which is an added bonus.

Funny Girl

If you haven’t seen this movie yet what the hell is wrong with you.

Party Girl

Different type of girl but also a good movie.

You’ve Got Mail

Don’t at me. This movie provides a great example of what I’m talking about with respect to the development of retail experience under capitalism in urban environments, which Ephron also reflected in design, interiors, and food (so quaint!). Technical change and capital concentration are spewing the labor force and petit bourgeoisie out left, right, and center and deskilling everyone who’s left at an astronomical rate. It creates hollowed out shells of production and retail sites that are basically unnavigable and most definitely crazy-making. This is a movie about that but with a star-crossed-in-any-other-universe love story on top of it! Poor Meg Ryan was powerless in the face of history—but she used her romantic business sense to land a more successful mate who will elevate her class position after the market chewed her up and spit her out!

I understand why they are frustrated: the cars in front of them aren’t moving forward. What I don’t understand is how even a kindergarten-level critical thought would enlighten them to the fact that actually, every single dolt in front of them shares the exact same frustration and if they could, in fact, move forward, they would. In other words, there is a reason why the cars aren’t moving forward: they can’t.

This is a truly revolutionary insight, but it is not one I have the ability to spread to these pitifully ignorant creatures. So instead I lie in bed fantasizing about all of the things I could and will do to them. These fantasies first led to an almost real plan to buy golf balls in bulk and throw them at the windows of every single car, honker or not, that passed my apartment. They have since progressed to much more violent and debased visions of torture and mayhem. In short, I am becoming just like them.

I have always been a political person, but I also grew up where there is no radical political infrastructure whatsoever, and very few seem interested in those things anyway. It was very alienating, and when I moved to DC to get more involved, academically and organizationally, I was surprised at how awful liberals and leftists were. They were obsessed with their careers and grand-standing, their political commitments seemed vague, and not being in their social or professional groups was enough to raise their suspicions. These people also weren’t “cool” at all, which was surprising to me for some reason. I had aesthetic interests and didn’t see any need for my whole life to revolve around my political engagements, but their politics were one with their tastes. I also just wanted everyone to be nice to each other, and they weren’t, at all. So I was still alienated, but this time from people who grew up much better off than me, in places that were not nearly as conservative from whence I came.

Letting go of my political commitments after the Bernie campaign and following a personally harrowing experience with the “left” coincided with the so-called vibe shift. It seems like this was the case for a lot of other people too. I left the left1 not in the sense that I stopped having political preferences, but because I don’t think you can call yourself a leftist when all you do is look at a Twitter feed and shitpost. I saw a lot of magazines and media outlets be born during this time, with very confused commitments to “left” politics that did not seem to extend beyond it being the right thing to do to attract an appropriate audience and investment situation. “Left” became a lifestyle, which didn’t surprise me at this point, but it was still upsetting.

So I don’t think it should shock anyone on the left to learn that their complete cultural alignment with the liberal consensus has caused a widespread reaction that we are now broadly defining as a “vibe shift.” I don’t think it’s even remotely a mystery why this happened, either. I remember the squabbles when Bernie threw his hat in the races in 2015 and 2019 between people who wanted split hairs about identity and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Bros; I was taking notes and I don’t forgive or forget2. I remember the DSA purges and the complete rejection of “orthodox Marxism” and more. I remember being called a fascist because someone tried and failed to psychoanalyze a retweet I made. Their case wasn’t helped when after the murder of George Floyd, they all marched in lock-step behind the DNC to get Biden-Harris and their PMC platform elected.

I go forward trepidatiously into the vibes discourse, not because I don’t have thoughts about it, but because it’s silly and implicates very little in terms of the “real world”. Of course media personalities and academics (who are media personalities at this point if they know what’s good for them) are so out of touch with the “real world” that they think a so-called vibe shift is worth commenting on. It’s entertainment for the most part, and to the extent that it can really affect anything outside of these people’s social and professional lives depends on whether or not they learn from it and incorporate that new knowledge into a change in their behavior or strategy. They won’t do this, though, and in many ways my writing this is an exercise in the same masturbatory practice. Some are lucky enough to get a paycheck to participate in this navel-gazing. Not me, though. I am just a masochist.

And so, because of my masochism and that I am of the same class as everyone else who has opined on this, if only barely, I will proceed.

A lot of the vibes discourse is simply a contemporary iteration of much older, more sophisticated debates that have been endemic within the left since Marx wrote about the True Socialists—which, combined with the hyper-individualist orientation of every downwardly mobile subject of the early 21st century, has mutated into a vicious culture war with literally no hope of dying down. The question of vibes is more of a stand-in question in a long history of theory that may have started with Hegel or Plato or Kant or Rousseau but is now in the hands of Bannon, Dugin, Yarvin, Yglesias, and Klein. The other problem is that everyone who should be trying to develop smarter “political theory” is completely—to borrow a phrase from zoomers—cooked. They can’t see outside of their own zeitgeist and any attempts to do so are denounced on site by their deeply unserious peers, or they have to find more right-wing outlets to make these inquiries because, I’m sorry, the left does not have a culture of free speech3. They are all a part of an astonishingly embarrassing “vanguard”, and as long as they can continue to do whatever they want, undisciplined by a genuine working class movement—one with real stakes that have nothing to do with a podcast or literary audience or an academic career—they’ll be about as useful to the left as a bullet in the head.

This culture we’ve created isn’t just distracting and divisive, it is entirely—and I mean this only in the truest possible sense of the word—meaningless. It simply doesn’t matter what anyone in the media-intelligentsia class thinks about phenomena that is endemic to it, even when it spills out and infects the masses. The ouroboros of vibes can’t be stopped by anyone whose subsistence is a part of the loop; the motor of the system is not dynamic with any other systems. Everyone will stay locked in place because, whether they want to admit it or not, their livelihoods depend on it. It reaches a fever pitch when someone tries to break out of it and says: hey guys, I think I know why people hate us so much. Their feelings get hurt if you dare to imply that they’re unlikeable, or that their efforts towards the “left” aren’t affecting anyone but themselves. It’s because they don’t actually care about anyone “out there”, in the “real world”, even though it’s literally their job.

I read this report a few days ago of a panel that included Chris Smalls, Josh Citarella, and a few other people I’ve never heard of that I think is very informative about the current state of vibes. It’s not an indictment of one side of the vibe shift, even though the target is one side, it’s an indictment of the whole of the discourse.

Some of the words, phrases, and even sentences that came out of Citarella’s mouth are not incorrect. But his inability to talk to Smalls—the exact type of person any so-called Marxist or leftist concerned even loosely with “strategy” should be able to talk to—is telling. Smalls is sharing an actually fairly harmless preference concerning consumerism as an ideology and practice, which he acquired from observing people’s consumer behaviors, his experience working for Amazon, having to actually provide for his family, and more generally, watching market dynamics play out over a long period of (his life) time. Citarella, however, sees an opportunity to (poorly) make the case for leftist pro-growthism or anti-degrowthism4, for some reason. He stops listening to Smalls, even though Smalls goes directly from stating his ideological/lifestyle preference to making an extremely salient point about the nature of late capitalism: that it has a profoundly atomizing effect on people, that everyone is becoming more and more pulled apart, and that this is happening everywhere from workplaces to malls. Spaces that once brought people together don’t exist anymore, or are completely empty, and this is a direct result of the autochthonous capitalist processes he refers to as “desires” of the system. What an astonishing insight that Citarella can’t even register because he’s so preoccupied with finding an opening for a potential provocation that he misses a perfect opportunity to connect with Smalls—to cultivate common ground. It is, of course, only through common ground that we can actually build a movement5. Any leftist propagandist should not only know that but turn it into a creed.

This is a common problem for people on all flanks of the left and right who think it’s fun or are maybe sadomasochistically addicted to engaging in the culture war. The vibe is a battlefield; the battlefield is about vibes. More often than not they’re just responding to aesthetics and discourses rather than actual arguments, which is why it all rings so shallow. They see something they have already decided, before it was even out there, that they don’t like. So they blast off a response talking about how deeply bad things are, how their opinion is actually the most “left”, or maybe about how they’re actually so, so busy helping save the world by writing books, protecting their students from all the evil other less perfect people don’t take seriously, and so on that they don’t have time to read something that rubs them the wrong way. Who do they think they’re kidding? They are a part of the military industrial complex of the vibe war, and it is their job to engage with it. It is what they get paid to do, and what they have explicitly chosen to do with their lives.

But the irony of the situation is that the debates about what the vibe shift is come out of this culture and finds very little outside of it. People don’t like it; it’s unpleasant to be subjected to intra-elite ideological warfare, and a lot of people are just going to choose the more conservative side because they don’t really understand why we’re talking about this stuff when there are so many other things wrecking people’s lives. This isn’t a one-track analysis, and it doesn’t occur in a simple, cyclical motion6. Some people really do become radicalized or bigoted, especially when their more material concerns are left repeatedly unaddressed and all they see are hysterics on Fox News and MSNBC, so they’re just going to choose to stay put or go back to more familiar ground. That there has only been one project that speaks to these concerns since 1984, Bernie’s democratic socialism, and that it was and still is rife with disagreements and confused objects of focus is proof. To turn that once-in-a-generation project into a real movement requires a lot more than one person and one campaign—it demands a culture that has a real and sustained interest in doing whatever it can to foster coalition building capable of actually winning a political battle or two (a hundred years ago, the way to do this was to tie media output to movements directly—unfortunately the state of media production doesn’t really allow that anymore, the fact that there’s no movement worth propagandizing is just icing on the cake).

So where does all this leave us? As you can see I came at this topic from a particular normative standpoint: I expect to see socialism in my lifetime. My boyfriend regularly says this, and I reflexively laugh every time because I guess I think that’s ridiculous. I can’t help that I feel that way, but I’ve decided to, in true dialectical fashion, embrace the fact that I clearly think it’s absurd but also hope against hope that it’s entirely possible. If I don’t, what’s the alternative? To become a miserable fuck like every other miserable fuck? If there’s anything redeemable about the vibe shift discourse it’s that I genuinely believe the participants are trying to figure out exactly why vibes are important, and what kind of project could even manipulate them.

Beyond the question of vibes is the question of hate, and I am, like everyone else, filled with hate and rage right now. I just started the new translation of Capital, and in the Introduction, written by German scholar Paul North, he frames the motivation for writing Capital as a product of the transformation of Marx’s hate. He argues that Marx realized as a young journalist that his hate would have to find an object other than those who commit injustices if he was to really contribute to the project of socialism. He would have to identify the structure beyond the individuals that is producing such debased compulsions and outcomes. How difficult this is, but if he had not done it, then we might not have ever had a scientific argument for socialism, and would still be arguing for a utopia7. Alexander Cockburn’s famous question, “is your hate pure?”, is similar. Ask yourself this question, and honestly answer it. Do you like the answer? Is your hate directed at the structure that produces injustice, or is it for your comrades and potential comrades, even if you disagree so fundamentally on something you think is important? Do you attack the powerful from a place of morality, or because their interests are opposite of yours? Does it enrage you when someone expresses a different opinion, or a fact that is not true? Do you speak every time you feel the rage?

Here is the unadulterated truth: everyone’s vibes are bad. Putrid, even. Anywhere you go where politics are being spoken, you will be standing in a gigantic pile of shit. The only solution to this problem is not to think in terms of vibes at all. Don’t even try to identify what yours or your enemy’s vibes are; place them in the coconut tree context and turn it into an object to be scientifically and rigorously scrutinized. No one should know where you personally stand on the vast majority of issues. It’s not about you, and it’s not about your enemies. To do this, you will need help, because you cannot go at this alone, with only your rage fueling you. You will have to discipline the hate and rage in service of a higher power. Otherwise, you will just be another psycho throwing golf balls at automobiles.

Trump

It occurred to me that a lot of people on here are probably around the age I was when Trump was first inaugurated, and that maybe they could benefit from an older1 and wiser individual’s perspective on the whole thing. A lot of the people who are upset are well meaning and concerned citizens—something I appreciate on an abstract level. But I want to throw some words of caution to those who might find themselves on occasion feeling a little hysterical or even distraught, due to all of the no doubt extremely stupid, weird, and bad things2 that Trump will be doing coming up here very shortly: relax. There are a lot of things that Trump will do that will make you feel insane, and this insanity might lead you to do insane things, too, like post Facebook status updates and purchase subscriptions to somewhere like The New Republic. Just calm down, because if you don’t, you might even be driven to do something that is so insane it should be outlawed: go to grad school. Under no circumstances should you even consider this as an option, and if you have any questions about that or are absolutely convinced that you are somehow the exception to this blanket moratorium that I’ve graciously imposed for everyone’s own good, please get in touch.

I’m under no illusions that a (my) Substack is going to have an audience that is looking for serious political discussion, and even though that is a large part of my “work,3” I don’t have anything particularly erudite to say about Trump 2.0. The worst is yet to come, I’m sure, but the Trump hysteria I felt 8 years ago subsided almost immediately, and hasn’t really returned. Most days, I hate the Democrats more than anyone else, even though I think that Republicans are some of the most tasteless, debased people to ever exist (If you’re gonna be fascist, at least apply that sensibility to your aesthetics, too4). I am hopeful that the labor movement will find its savvy by working with Trump, though, to avoid a potentially existential blow, and I am not looking forward to the dolts who are inevitably going to hand-wring about it. Most of those people are profoundly unserious. They are academics who have no real stakes in the outside world—the extent of their concerns mostly moral yet profoundly anti-social. But more on that later.

The New Kellogg’s Diner

Whatever mid-tier PR firm the New Kellogg Diner hired can relax: I went to the New Kellogg’s Diner. I would rate my experience there as: acceptable yet disturbing. The first thing I noticed when I walked in is that I felt 143 years old. I kept wondering to myself: where are all of these children coming from, and where are they going? The guy at the table in front of me took a picture of his nachos with a film camera (???). There was a large table of young people wearing nice5 outfits drinking glass after glass of natural wine. Again, where could they possibly going???? What are they doing here?? Was this their evening’s destination??

What it also made me think about is that the younger generation of people I was suddenly and newly surrounded by, at that moment, is actually deeply confused, and has only ever gotten information about how to live in a society from their phones. That is why they were behaving the way they were—taking pictures of extremely mediocre food with a film camera (???) and ordering glasses of natural wine at a 24/7 diner in Brooklyn, NY. It was uncanny. By the time I left, I felt like I was about 500,000 years old, thus resolving to never set foot in Williamsburg again.

My experience at Kellogg’s Diner—a place I have been known to patronize since around 2014, before its new patrons were even born—unfortunately made me think about Baudrillard and “simulacra” and “simulation”, which are in general very embarrassing things for anyone to be thinking about in 2025. However, there is really no better description for what was “going on” at Kellogg’s Diner that night than that it “is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have” and so on.

David Lynch

Speaking of the hyperreal, David Lynch died (☹️). We knew it was coming because he announced that he was going to die soon a year or so ago. He told us that despite his raging emphysema, he was not going to quit smoking because it was his favorite thing in the world—which warmed my heart and was very inspirational to me, in addition to it emotionally preparing me for this moment. Obviously, Lynch’s movies and TV shows are very important to me (millennial), but he also might have been the best person to ever live (two cookies and a coke, phenomenal!):

I was driven insane by the MTA

New Yorkers have a habit of being short-sighted and stupid, and I am no exception. I was lulled into a complacent if not blissful state about congestion pricing finally happening and did not realize that the bad trains were going to get exponentially worse immediately. The situation is on the whole, unbearable. In any case, I’m going to serve as a conduit for advice on “how to deal” with this from my analyst: “Americans” have to start acting like “Latin Americans,” because we “don’t live in a first-world country anymore” and we need to “adjust” (her words) (this basically means we need to start factoring in two more hours of travel time per 30 minutes that you’re supposed to factor in). I thought that this was beautifully put— almost as beautifully put as “two cookies and a coke, phenomenal!”.

TikTok Ban

I have never been on TikTok. I have never downloaded the app nor browsed the app in any capacity, not even for one second. When I absolutely had to watch a TikTok (horse video), I would forward it to my boyfriend and make him download the app and then show it to me as if it were a video on any other app, so as to avoid the entire TikTok situation altogether. For that reason, I am fine with the TikTok ban and might even be happy about it. If you are not, let’s do a quick thought experiment: imagine you are you, but you are approximately 75-350% less mentally ill and stupid. That is how you will be once you no longer have the ability to watch videos for 14 hours a day that are deliberately designed by the Chinese government6 to make you as dumb as possible. As a burgeoning Substacker (please pay me real dollars), I am actually not worried about TikTokers coming here because I, as I mentioned, think they are stupid and mentally ill, and I’m not particularly worried about their abilities at the moment.

There are a lot of ““smart”” people who are saying things about the TikTok ban being “Bad Actually,” because it’s political and the decision to ban an app is solely based on the president’s personal feelings. I agree that this is in principle Bad Actually, but what they don’t realize that I do is that history basically proceeds as a series of outcomes (sometimes and often good) that are the indirect result of something that is Bad Actually. Banning social media apps will undoubtedly be, and let me be very clear about this, a huge net positive for society and human beings. There is simply no way in which that cannot be true.

All that being said, I am not a tech-luddite, and I don’t think that “touching grass” is as important as people pretend on a political or cultural level, but that is mostly because people do it wrong. I have been online my entire adult life, and as an adult, I have found the right balance of being on the computer and being off. I don’t think that everyone has, though, and I am concerned about the children. The pace of technological innovation is too fast for any people to keep up with in a way that won’t damage their psychic health, but banning TikTok is basically a drop in the bucket.

*****Breaking news just in that TikTok is coming back, which is basically irrelevant and sad simultaneously to me for the reasons mentioned above. My life will go on just as it did before, and I trust that everyone else will be just as normal about it.

Movies I watched

Sick of Myself: I have followed the director Kristoffer Borgli on Instagram for ~8 years, and back in 2019 when Joker came out, he was somehow interviewed by a local news station who was cashing in on the Joker mass shooter hysteria, and he said this:

https://www.koco.com/article/law-enforcement-monitoring-local-theaters-amid-opening-of-joker/29375330

I think about it pretty often. I think he might be one of the funniest people alive, and although I like hyperbole because I find it effective and sometimes humorous, I’m not even remotely exaggerating when I say that this scene sent me straight into a crying fit, which disturbed my boyfriend so much he almost called the police7:

80 for Brady: If there is an opportunity for me to watch Grace and Frankie stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin together again, I will simply take it. Rita Moreno is 93! My favorite part of the film was yelling the stars’ ages: they look great and seem happy to work! Nicole Kidman could learn a thing or two from Jane Fonda’s wig stylist. Unfortunately, NFL is the most boring thing in the entire world to me, so I can’t say anymore about the film at this time (I turned it off after 22 minutes).

The Truman Show: My boyfriend regularly claims that he went to “film school”. He even has “Tisch” listed on his resume, tells stories about when he “went” to “Tisch”, and even uses “skills” he learned at “film school” everyday. And yet, there are approximately 692 movies I have seen that he has not. The Truman Show is one of them, so we watched it. It is a perfectly serviceable film, and has some almost compelling things to say about Truth (one of the subjects of this blog). Its biggest flaw is that it has Laura Linney in it, while its greatest strength is that it has Ed Harris in it.

Gattaca: Gattaca is—and this is the best way I can possibly describe it—a really dumb movie made by a potentially smart person (I say “smart” because he also made In Time, which is a movie I watched and thought was good because Vincent Kartheiser was in it). My (alleged film school graduate) boyfriend was polite during the entirety of the production—except for a scene in which two brothers face off in a rematch swimming contest to the death—while I on the other hand couldn’t stop roaring with laughter. Most of my smaller qualms with the film were overshadowed by the fact that this was a space movie that didn’t take place in space at all, and was instead about DNA, which prompted me to say: If I wanted to watch a movie about DNA, I would’ve watched Jurassic Park, not this movie about space that doesn’t actually take place in space. Some of the highlights of the film include Jude Law literally crawling around like a cripple, legs dragging, and incinerating himself alive (so, so undignified and hilarious), some of the dumbest lines ever uttered on film, a pretty respectable attempt to make Uma Thurman beautiful, and Gore Vidal (?). Basically the only reason I kept watching is because I had to see the movie that is responsible for Maya Hawke’s existence.

Two Lovers: Joaquin Phoenix is too hot to talk like that, and it made wonder if there is something wrong with him and he needs my assistance. This thought also made me feel an instant pang of guilt, for who am I to even quietly judge the star of films like Joker and Walk the Line, two of the most important blockbusters ever made? On the other hand, this is the first time in my life that I saw Gwyneth Paltrow and didn’t think: why is Gwyneth Paltrow here?

To Die For: Joaquin Phoenix sounds dumb again, but on purpose this time (?). Still hot, also, which is the most important thing.

Birth: I am regularly watching Jonathan Glazer’s films and thinking, “ok why?” and Birth was no exception. However, the score and many of the shots were absolutely perfect. Glazer is the type of director who pulls you into a seemingly and potentially complex situation, only to drop the ball in the last instant on what turns out to be an extraordinarily stupid and banal “story”, probably because his subjects are so bourgeois they can’t even think straight.

All of that being said, and in spite of me being a well-rounded and mature adult who is not generally scandalized by anything that is “going on” in a cultural or political sense, there is absolutely nothing that could have prepared me for this:

Postscript: It snowed!

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My New Year’s Resolution was more fun, more beauty. But winter is a drag for myself and most. I decided to shoulder the burden of traipsing around the city to find some of the few remaining pleasant places worth leaving the house for.

These are institutions of a certain ilk. They are old school, high quality, and enjoyable to patronize. They have historically catered to a variety of crowds, but are (sadly)—like their traditional clientele—a dying breed. This is not a definitive list, just some of the places I’ve enjoyed recently.

I compiled the list in two separate categories, with each starting at the top of Manhattan going downtown and then to Brooklyn. Happy consuming and—to invoke a cliché that creates some friction with my actual politics—shop small.

Shops

Zitomer/Zittles

Zitomer is the perfect combination of luxury and basic. It has a beautiful, gilded interior with glass counters for cosmetics, a drug store in the back, and a second and third floor for men’s and women’s general department store offerings like clothes, pajamas, hats, gloves, hair accessories, and cosmetic bags. You can find some affordable things in there, but they definitely cater to an upper class, Upper East Sider.

Accessible only through a staircase located on the back side of the third floor, Zittles is Zitomer’s charming children’s store. I enjoyed browsing here when looking for gifts for my young cousins.

Schweitzer Linen

This shop is really nice. They carry high quality linens, bed clothes, and nightgowns with embroidery service and are actually fairly affordable. I loved their Christmas display and snagged a catalog to look through for my next set of bedding. I love the color and design options and plan to get one of their beautiful nightgowns now that Peress has closed.

If you have time to kill, pop across the street to Cocktails Boutique—a small consortium of venders who carry bespoke goods, including a talented seamstress who makes her own white oxfords and wool coats that could easily be mistaken for Max Mara.

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Greenwich Letterpress

A tiny but very well curated stationary/gift shop, Greenwich Letterpress is a perfect place to stop in if you’re in the neighborhood. I used to work halfway down the block and would stroll in at least once a week. Before Christmas, I became enamored with their vintage sticker wall and grabbed a few squares ($1 each) to put on gifts for a special touch.

CO Bigelow

One of my favorite places in the Village, it’s easy to accidentally spend hours in here even if you walk out with nothing. They have a large selection of high end beauty products, but the real star is their signature house-brand items that smell really nice and have beautiful classic packaging. They also have a large selection of novelty hair clips.

Tarzian West for Housewares

I love this tiny shop in Park Slope. They have most of the things you might need for a kitchen, including a decent selection of Le Creuset wares.

Food/Drink

I am not going to include the obvious places here (Dante, Bemelmans, Cafe Gitane/Select/Reggio, Russian Samovar, Brooklyn Inn) mostly because I haven’t been to these places in a while but also because I imagine my readership not needing to be introduced to these classic choices because they have taste and did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday. If you did, feel free to add Lovely Day to the list, stop by the negroni/martini hour at Dante NYC and Dante West Village, respectively, and to get the $6 affogato at Cafe Reggio, which is a perfect dessert.

These are joints I recently happened across or rediscovered.

Café Sabarsky

A typical choice for a Neue Gallerie sojourn, Café Sabarsky is also my preferred recharge station after visiting any of the museums on the Mile. Sabarsky is a beautiful place with cozy booths that allow you to stalk the foot traffic on 5th with a Central Park backdrop. Try the espresso with whipped cream and whatever pastry strikes your fancy that day (they have a display on a sideboard for your perusal).

JG Melon

There aren’t many places I make it a point to go to if I’m in the neighborhood, but JG Melon is one of them. I love the atmosphere, the staff, the plastic gingham tablecloths and of course, the burger. It’s a high demand spot, though, and the first-come-first-serve bar is often crowded. It’s worth the wait. End the meal with chocolate chip cake.

Don’t Tell Mama

An old school cabaret joint, this is a place you can take your out-of-towner parents to but will have such a good time at you are almost embarrassed. Don’t be, though, because this is precisely the type of place that the Theater District was built around.

Anyway Stories at Pangea

One of my favorite places, Anyway Cafe, a Russian-themed cafe and bar with excellent food and drinks and frequent live music, used to occupy the first floor of my old building in the East Village. It was rustic, fun, cozy, and delicious. Unfortunately, they had to shut down and I was, truthfully, very angry about this. My soul was somewhat soothed when they partnered with Pangea on 2nd Avenue to do a pop-up on Sundays. In fact, I decided to host my birthday party there last year, and it was a smash hit. We were treated so well and it really felt like old times.

They still do pop-ups there, the next one is this Sunday the 12th. I implore all New Yorkers to patronize them so they have the resources to re-open with the new employee-owners. And tip the musicians well!

Veniero’s

If you’re looking for a classic, Italian-American pastry or fluffy cake with whipped icing, Veniero’s is your best bet. I would suggest it more for take-out pastry boxes or a place to find a surprisingly affordable whole cake than somewhere to sit for table service, but it is a genuinely beautiful shop with decadent displays.

Buvette

I’m including Buvette for the timeless atmosphere and quality of menu and service. Although their burger comes with bleu cheese (a sin, in my opinion), their rillettes, currant whole wheat scones with orange marmalade and butter, and cappuccinos are divine. Sit at the bar or window shelf any time of day and it will be an hour well spent.

Shade Bar and Crêpes

Probably one of my favorite places to get a drink in the whole city. I discovered this place one day when I was walking by looking for somewhere to have coffee, a drink, and a snack while reading. At Shade, you can do all four plus use their wifi (they’re open from noon to late, so I wouldn’t pull out my laptop at 10 pm on a Friday night, but a day-time or post-work laptop hour won’t bother them).

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That’s all for today. I hope this inspires some to remember the good things about living in New York, and to reflect on the things that urban capitalism and the internet have taken from us (rent that non-corporate business owners could afford, brick and mortar retail customs like window displays, intricate/detailed design elements, employees that don’t wish you were dead, places that prefer understated background music over extremely loud dance music at all hours, colors that are not gray).

[Title is inspired by cultural historian Gary Cross’s 2015 book, “Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism", which I think is fitting, for obvious reasons.]

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Forlini’s (RIP) Postscript: