The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?

Twilight of the Public Access Idols

It’s a long-time cliché of art history that kitsch eventually turns into a high art. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Victorian gingerbread was seen as the disgusting affectation of a less enlightened time, and it was only in the past 10 years that Anglo-American brutalist architecture has been reappropriated as the signifier of a more optimistic era rather than just some gray concrete shit. If we’re going to extrapolate further, it’s so easy to mistake age for wisdom, and stupidity for prelapsarian virtue, that I always have to caution myself against it, to put certain automatic skepticism triggers in place, lest I be deceived.

But if you have that crate-digger mentality, a desire to go through the archives and find past ideas and expressions, you’ll always be tempted to find enlightenment therein. It’s something I used to do a lot, in the hope that I could somehow recontextualize and redo what I saw, to make my mind palace into a Joseph Cornell box. Like most people, as I have aged, immediate and quotidian requirements have taken precedence, and yet there will always be an allure in the grainy filmstrip, the library book last checked out in 2003, the potshard. 

And in that context I recently watched 2004’s Public Access Hollywood (available in its entirety here), and it was an opportunity to revisit one such strange world, the legendary LA public access channels, widely regarded as the best in the country, and the strange personalities who inhabit it.

I’m not sure how many people under the age of 30 have even watched public access, but I’m sure many of them know the aesthetic of it – grainy video stock, ill-fitting polyester, primitive digital effects, and general amateurism and incoherence. Famously crappy, famously occasionally very weird programming produced on non-budgets in local cable markets across America, a frequently parodied (see any number of classic SNL sketches from Wayne’s World to Goth Talk) format from a pre-Youtube era where the idea of any audiovisual media beyond the family vacation video being homemade was novel. A clear lineage to the two ferns that Zach Galifianakis sits between (by god, is even that reference long-outdated?). Even by my day, public access was viewed as a strange and quaint thing, something we found through early Youtube clips. The last memory I have of even watching it on an actual tee vee was in my early 20s, in the margarita-and-marijuana haze between viewings of Project Runway with my gay housemates. 

The first viral public access clip I remember was The Spirit of Truth, in which a borderline street preacher randomly cites Bible passages without quoting them from what looks like a telephone book while insulting callers, against a backdrop of Yosemite while Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” plays. Across America, his quotes were dropped in the same way Antwone Dodson’s would be a decade later. He’s not in Public Access Hollywood – a little too ephemeral.

 

So who is in the documentary? The focus is on the mainstays, who, while perhaps, less intense in their insanity, are their own variety of eccentric. There’s David Liebe Hart’s Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program, starring his puppet Chip the Black Boy, with crack-is-wack messaging and songs about helpful aliens. More intentionally weird, there’s Dan Kapelovitz and the team behind Three Geniuses, slashing the media form of television to bits, and commenting on the rebirth and “re-death” of psychedelia, a stage of weirdo anti-humor somewhere in its evolution between Andy Kaufman and Devo on one end and Gen Z Dada on the other. Or the bro version, Zuma Dogg shouting shit on Sunset in his Oakleys and ‘90s condom beanie, a kind of demonic Ashton Kutcher. For more informative content, there’s Dr. Susan Block’s sexual education program, a cavalcade of bizarre proto-sex-positive theater, dressed in vinyl and spanking her guests. Mediating it all, the sort of cultural arbiter was Michael Devine of Hollywood and Devine, whose variety show featuring the lovely freaks and weirdos of Los Angeles feels like a chopped and screwed version of Letterman. And the one who garners the most screen time and most pathos, there is Francine Dancer, chubby and dancing in her lingerie while maintaining that she would never do something so classless as to dance nude, confined to a wheelchair when she’s not dancing. No fixed address, much beloved within her niche community but at best an absurdist artifact outside it.

I think you get the idea. Cranks who interrupt municipal council meetings worldwide, desperate souls, who, above all else, want other people to listen and understand, pranksters and ironists in it for the lulz who could probably cite Baudrillard and Debord off-camera, or at the very least Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren, and the dreamers in rattrap apartments who still believe they can make it in real Hollywood, despite their often-dire circumstances. This studio was their home, and you kind of love it for them. 

But what the makers of Public Access Hollywood didn’t know was that in 2004, they were already at the end of an era.

One thing they acknowledge is that by that point, reality TV had already become an institution. From its inception point in the late ‘90s, it had spread to become the standard for the cable networks, deliciously cheap to produce and packed with mass appeal. Like the public access stars, it provided an ostensibly (adverb doing some heavy lifting there) authentic appeal, and a lurid opportunity to see one’s fellow man at his ugliest and most depraved.

And what they further probably couldn’t have anticipated was that the ecosystem of public access television, one which claimed to bypass the gatekeepers of audiovisual entertainment, was about to expand to the whole damn world with the rise of Youtube (the irony being that that is the very platform where I watched the documentary). 

It logically follows that this is something that the drive towards algorithmic correctness inevitably destroys, not only preventing us the audience from seeing the wilder and weirder side of things and trying to get us to watch preapproved slop, but also incentivizing creators into producing things more algo-friendly (with the occasional oddities like Elsagate videos representing a genuine flaw in the system, fucked up as they are). Sure, previous forms of media were beholden to a hooting and hollering public, but the algorithm seems even worse.

Which might be why, despite the similar hypothetical freedom, few of the public access stars would find a home on this new platform. And beyond that more coldly rational lack of economic incentive, there’s also a deluge of competing content, rather than a particular zone of permitted bizarre. In a world where everyone is a weirdo, and you can turn on or shut off their weird at will, it’s irrelevant. But when you turn on the television and randomly flip to public access, it’s something different entirely. 

“I miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’…

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’ 

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Book You Should Read Even Though People Will Call You a Lit Bro 

But concomitant with the rise of Youtube was the rise of another media machine – Adult Swim. Here, the aesthetics of public access, along with industrial video, low-end public broadcasting, and every other ephemeral form of media from the cable-and-VHS era would be recycled into the lysergic mandalas of Tim and Eric et al. We could view the original vomit of the era on Youtube, and we could view the avant-garde pisstakes on Adult Swim. Indeed, Heidecker, Wareheim, and Co. had the wisdom and foresight to bring some of the LA public access idols to the national stage. I’m guessing a lot of the readership will be more likely to know David Liebe Hart in this capacity. All the food is poison. Keep your meat ice-cold.

But his story seems to be one of the few successes here, and even that success is pretty circumscribed. 

Maybe they would have always been fated to obscurity, but maybe they could have been fortunate enough to breach containment and find their improbable sliver of success. I’m reminded of another LA icon, Angelyne, the bleach-blonde daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors known more for her billboard poses – an early stab at guerrilla marketing – than any of her purported entertainment talent. It would be hard to imagine her transposed to today without a couple seasons on Bravo, or at least a horny Twitch following.

Part of the reason the documentary works in 2025 is that it plays at this historical disconnect, and part of the reason it would have worked upon release 20 years ago is that it plays on the very fundamental feels of the desperate attempts to keep a dream alive. One of the oldest of LA cliches is that of a graveyard of aspirations, a place where the ideology of individual merit runs headlong into bitter reality. And every year, we hear new stories that reinforce the trope, whether lasciviously documented for TMZ, or as the backstories for stalkers and mass shooters. 

I put in some hours, but the fate of most of the performers in Public Access Hollywood is difficult to suss out in casual searches. David Liebe Hart’s latest credit involves Lloyd Kaufman of Troma / Toxic Avenger fame, so he’s continuing to participate in weird media. Dan Kapelovitz still seems to be invested in making fucked up shit, and for that he is to be saluted. The latest project in his IMDB profile is 120 Days of Sodom… Literally, a cut-up of Pasolini’s Salo with a 120 day runtime (feel free to watch it streaming, it’s ongoing), and he seems to be pursuing a side passion for left-wing electoral candidacy (seeing someone else tragically ahead of his time?). Zuma Dogg still seems to be doing pranks in his sunglasses, to a tiny audience. Susan Block simultaneously had a career as a sex therapist and regular on Real Sex on HBO – raise your hand if you remember furtively watching that in the basement, only to be deeply deeply disappointed – and still has the Susan Block Institute, but the website looks like something from 1998, which seems awfully appropriate for a woman seemingly designed for that very 1990s precise balance of lewd, subversive sociosexual commentary. Michael Devine seems to have died from cancer in 2006. And Francine Dancer is still out and about in Hollywood, occasionally popping up on someone’s Instagram, still smiling.

But all of that being said, I ran into quite a few dead ends. Whole swaths seem to be likely dead media, and I doubt I could find much more than the minima I’ve already found, unless I were to chase down moldering basement VHS collections and chase the performers for follow-ups (something I’d totally do if I wasn’t doing this whole thing on top of a full-time job plus freelance writing for actual cash money). Honestly, more than anything else, I just wanted to find signs of life, and maybe it was parasocial, maybe it was morbidly curious, but I wanted confirmation that they were OK. 

Maybe I held hope because in their own way, these were truly the last bohemians, scraping by on the fringes of Hollywood. They said fuck it, did their own thing, on the public commons, with minimal regard as to market incentive. The things that followed inevitably come off as moneymakers, aping authenticity as part of their branding. Reality television, of course, or the monstrous sponsored-content machine that Youtube has become. Even those weirdo Adult Swim shows, as much as I love them, are shaped by the requirements of the advertisers, and Tim and Eric’s legendary, absurdist late ‘00s Absolut ad series were at the end of the day still Absolut ads.

So what we get is real folk art from a lost world. And the documentary, 20 years on, its cri de coeur.

In the Middle Kingdom, Part 2: Dragonfly Eyes

In spring of 2024, I was at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, deep in the heart of the sort of old Tokyo streets that remain sparse and ragged. It’s where I first saw Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes, or at least as much as I could manage in an unplanned visit. I’d later go home and watch the whole thing on Youtube. 

The premise is simple, almost a gimmick. The footage is culled from thousands of hours of CCTV footage from around China to assemble an otherwise fairly anodyne love story. But the plot is only the thin armature that holds it all together. The real joy of seeing it is a voyeuristic look into the lives of what is often regarded as a borderline hermit kingdom, integral to the global circulation of capital, but little-visited and little-known, particularly outside a few major metros – a glimpse of ordinary people at work, at the pharmacy, enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life.

 

And that’s what I thought of on the taxi in from the airport in Shanghai – my god, there’s a whole normal goddamn country here.

Which to many is going to be the biggest shock, given how much ink is dedicated to the mystery of China – whereas once Occidental writers once wrote about the inscrutable celestial mandarins drowning in the river trying to catch the moon, they now write about smart cities and social credit scores, and the messaging is just as vapid as it was 150 years ago. So there’s an anxiety of influence there that stalks me as I write – I want to distinguish that which is genuinely bizarre and unique about contemporary China, without falling into the lazy cliches that stalk virtually all writing about the country in the Anglosphere. Granted, that experience was of Shanghai, and while the valences differed in the gloomy industrial suburbs and sun-faded steppe towns, the principle was the same. The middle-aged man drinks his after-work beer and smokes his cigarette in the doorway to the apartment block, the teenage girls make little finger-hearts and pose for their selfies, the career woman frets over the texts from her side dude, the boys in soccer jerseys and the girls in pigtails go over their math homework and the clerk in the little corner store looks up from the game on his phone and sees he needs to put more Cokes in the fridge.

But part of the reason I’m starting with the bizarre normalcy of the Chinese streets is not just as a counter to the propagandistic messaging one sees across Western media, but because it is actually a difficult place to access. The visa process is an abject nightmare, time-consuming and onerous, and even the exemptions that are in place are arcane, with contradictory information online and poorly translated websites with jankety interfaces. Beyond that, everything is, naturally, mediated through apps, most of which are either impossible or exceptionally difficult for a foreigner to access. For example, WeChat, a standard platform, requires you to be verified by a WeChat user who has been using the app for 12 months, the Weixin pay platform within the app for 6 months, and has not verified any other first-time users within the past month. I didn’t get to use it. And that isn’t to even mention the fact that one is accessing one’s financial data within the People’s Republic is enough to trigger automatic blocks on your bank account, regardless of how many long-distance phone calls you make begging them to take note and being reminded that “[they] care about your security.” 

Which of course reflects a gatekeeping. The Chinese systems and the everyone-else systems are kept at a deliberate distance, like two species evolving on different sides of a broad river.

So what is on the other side? 

Once you crack the system, once you finally get the hang of it – it’s impossible not to be impressed. Procedures are coordinated, efficient, and inexpensive. You’re effortlessly jumping into prim little electric taxis that smell (nostalgically) of cigarettes and BO, driven by gruff uncles that hack up morning half-pack out the window between historic sites and antique restaurants. Despite what you may hear about gutter oil and plastic rice – jenkem for CNN viewers – I’m happy to report that the spiced lamb skewers were flavorful and the cherries tart and sweet.

The high-speed train system should be enough to blackpill any Westerner – I come from a country that can’t build a pissant metro without having to deal with armies of red-faced suburban homeowners and byzantine public-private partnerships, and it will take decades to build. The system in China, conversely, is consistently clean, efficient, and inexpensive to use, expensive to build, but designed with long-term benefits in mind, and to alleviate the many economic externalities caused by poor infrastructure – the paymasters within the state accept the loss leader, because they view this as an investment, which is a tough thing to imagine when you come from a society run by profiteers who don’t care about much of anything beyond their Q2 returns. And you have to think that maybe, unironically, these are Brautigan’s machines of loving grace. 

It felt a bit like I was walking in the shoes of those early 20th Century European intellectuals, looking at America with awe and horror. I am a representative of the falling world, here in the rising world, and it’s impossible to feel anything other than the sublime, fascination and unfamiliarity and admiration and fear in equal measure.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is often thought of as an anti-communist classic, and to be fair, Zamyatin was no fan of the USSR, despite his past as a Bolshevik revolutionary. But one thing the standard reading forgets is just how enraptured and expressionist Zamyatin’s descriptions are of what we would consider a dystopia. 

“Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral was being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying at its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight. And then to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom.”

The dragonfly’s eyes flicker in the distance. 

Objections here are pretty obvious. You’ve heard most of them, with varying levels of reliability – lack of free expression (which is often reframed as a point of pride, an antidote to “disorder”) to social credit (an almost completely ginned up story designed to stoke terror in the heart of the well-meaning Atlantic reader). And to be fair, living in a mass surveillance state fucking sucks, particularly one that well-oiled.

And it comes at you at inopportune moments – when you see the QR code on the apartment door, when you’re stopped and have your notebook rifled through, presumably in search of flyers about Jesus or something of that nature. When you realize that there is a contingency upon which the new China is being built. My delight in flânerie through the streets of Shanghai could be easily contrasted with the merciless checkpoints of Beijing. 

But if you’re reading this you probably know the extent to which you’re already under the microscope, at least to some extent, from both the private and public sectors. Patriot Act, built-in forensics in devices, biometrics, you know all of this already, and it’s best not to think about it, especially given the degree to which we seem to have all collectively given up hope in any kind of an alternative. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive, beautiful in their goals, seem almost as quaint as the Free Tibet concerts and Trotskyist reading groups of another era – quixotic missions for idealists who still, bless them, truly believe another world is possible.

Some asshole dork is probably ready to play the “nice whataboutism” Yu-Gi-Oh card, to which I say, fuck off, I’ll steal your Yu-Gi-Oh cards and trade them for an eighth of mids. I’m making a direct comparison here – the nature of the surveillance might differ, one might choose direct censorship over incentivized and nudged corralling of the human soul (and the direct censorship is to be fair probably worse), but the similarities should be, to any enthusiast for freedom, uncomfortable. 

And at least the Chinese provide treats. Try paying for a hotel or booking public transit stateside. And for a double contrast, compare the China of now with the China of generations past, even after Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. The Chinese must be the last people on earth who see life getting better and better, rather than a slow miserable death, if for no other reason than that they started from nothing.

I drift back to the West Lake in Hangzhou, where I started, to the old folks with their boiled peanuts and medlars. Had they been urban youths sent down to the country? Or had they been militant Red Guards? Or had they been the countless those in between? 

As for me, as much as I enjoy the peanuts and the medlars, I am still a product of a very different place or time – for the jolly, double-chinned crowd, this is the culmination of a long and hard life, a transcendent epoch of rest. As for me?

I still love cities at night – even if I am slowly aging out of the nightlife demographic – but as someone who was always a bit on the periphery, the being peripheral is no skin off my back. I swan through the streets of the French Concession in Shanghai, surrounded by people much prettier and more stylish than I, and they pay me no heed, as I pay them no heed. I’m happy to walk on this lovely spring night, a soft rain falling. 

I stop in at the posh wine bar, and I am left alone on the rooftop – the better-connected, the ones who know exactly which bottle to select to impress their clients or their attendant crowd of fawning girls draped in Alexander McQueen, they’re inside. I am here with the malfunctioning lights, but I don’t care, their cellar selection reflects the taste of the new China, and I have in front of me a glass of Charmes-Chambertin, and I am left to enjoy it in peace, each subtle aroma sending me to a place and time from my past – here, the smell of the incense in my dorm room, and there, the hippie grocery store in my hometown, and over there, the spice cabinet from my old rattrap apartment back in Seattle, living with two middle-aged gay addicts in an illegal sublet for 600 a month, and I was one of the last to experience that. I come from falling America, and I’m here in rising Asia. And I don’t even care about the rainfall all around me.

Only to walk through the slick streets, a little music playing from the intervening years, until I find myself under a parasol.