Goodbye, Nona Mecklenberg

Michelle Trachtenberg died last week – something that might not mean a lot to most people, but one of the first celebrities of my age cohort to die other than the obvious set of young overdoses and suicides. Her death was different – the death of someone, like myself, approaching middle age. Not that I was any particular fan, but I remembered her fondly as someone from my youth.

 The plaudits for her work were to be expected. She was much-remembered for her roles in Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, neither of which were particularly on my radar, and also for her child-star performance in Harriet the Spy, which I mostly remember for being a story about the world’s most endearingly awful and judgmental tween who goes on a rampage of emotional revenge seemingly designed to give the girls in her class a lifetime’s worth of eating disorders.

But I would always know her as Nona Mecklenberg.

 

Not necessarily the best-known reference – but Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete and Pete ran from 1993 to 1996. And few pieces of media have had as strong an effect on my outlook of the world.

What was it that made this show special among what I only later learned was a cult audience of bespectacled library girls and future wiseasses and class clowns? What did we all see in an otherwise little-known children’s show from the mid-‘90s? Why did it never get the branding push that accomplished other shows of the time on the same channel?

The premise is absurd from the beginning – two brothers, both named Pete – but this fact seems perfectly in tune with the setting, both pathologically normal (what name could be more normal than Pete?) and deeply surreal. The setting is Wellsville, State Unknown (the “Sideburn State,” per the license plates), but it’s strongly implied to be New Jersey, and the look and feel of the show is very much the look and feel of what journalist David Roth called the “old-growth suburbs” of North Jersey, hissing summer lawns and all.

 

 

But as David Lynch knew, that always hides deep weirdness. An episode of Pete and Pete feels like that childhood bike ride down an alley you’d never gone down, wondering what lurked inside, wondering if what your friend’s older brother told you was true.

What make the world of the show different from reality is that all of that playground lore is brought to the surface, front and center. Little Pete has naval tattoos. Their mom has a plate in her head that gets a frame in the intro credits. The mysterious, bizarre townsfolk are played by Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, Kate Pierson, Debbie Harry, LL Cool J, with dulcet Magnetic Fields instrumentals humming in the background during the tender scenes. This might seem all too familiar in a world full of obnoxiously self-aware ostensible children’s cartoons that seem to be designed just as much for adults – and which I would say radically fail as grownup entertainment, and are perhaps a bit too on-the-nose to function well as children’s entertainment as well – but in the ‘90s, this was revolutionary.

Which meant that unlike most children’s media of the time period, it actually struck me as honest. There were no moralistic fairytales here, no condescension. There was only the understanding that the world is a strange, magical, baffling, fascinating place, ruled by the cruel dictates of adults who seem to operate on their own twisted logic (q.v. Little Pete’s war against adult swim at the local pool, or his attempt to tunnel to freedom to escape being grounded all summer, or the International Adult Conspiracy’s attempt to banish local superhero Artie, the Strongest Man in the World, from Wellsville). But through the spirit of discovery, exploration, and embrace of the weird, these dictates could and should be subverted, even if there’s a recognition that the magic is fleeting. Mr. Tastee, the mysterious ice cream vendor, has a whole other life to live. Summer will always end, and it will be back to the drudgery of school life. Artie will eventually leave Wellsville. You can’t live in a dream-world forever, no matter how hard you try.

“It was the story of a superhero and a kid, who ruled at dodgeball, waltzed the lunar landscape, and beat up the Atlantic Ocean. Until one day, the kid finally learned all there was to learn from this friend, and it was time for the superhero to move on.”

 And as magical as the world of Pete and Pete is, there’s a darkness that lurks in the corners. That pay phone that rings for years straight is as feared by the adults as by the kids. The bullies and creeps weren’t just funny, they were often actually frightening, with the grin of James Rebhorn’s evil vinyl siding salesman character Mr. McFlemp being just as sinister as that of Bobby Peru or Leland Palmer.

 

It’s a darkness that extends to love and sex too. It wasn’t something that I registered as a small child, but there’s a whole episode in which Big Pete borrows petty thug Endless Mike Hellstrom’s vintage Ford Mustang to take his best friend Ellen to the drive-in, fogs the windows, throws the seats back and tries to make a move… because he feels that’s what he’s supposed to do. And of course he fucks up and he winds up hurting the person he cares the most about. It might be the most honest treatment of teenage romantic confusion I know of.

All of this is why it never became part of the ‘90s marketing machine, vicious teenagers with pit stains described as “glandular freaks” are less likely to sell sugary snacks than the Rugrats were able to.

Likewise, few of the show’s stars went on to do much afterwards. Both Petes had acting credits for years afterwards, but I doubt I’ve seen them in anything else. Michelle Trachtenberg was the only one who became anything resembling a household name, and how she, too, is gone.  

And so, Nona, I hope you’re frantically dancing to Luscious Jackson in a better place.

 

Sunday Didn't Mean Much

There’s something odd about the ways in which the Super Bowl is perceived as the transcendentally American entertainment (not gonna say “the big game” like a shill). For starters, it’s rare that it’s a particularly good game, although I can remember some beauties in recent memory (the nail-biting original Mahomes-Hurts face-off in 2023, the Patriots’ unreal second-half charge in 2017, the Seahawks’ tragic last-minute defeat in 2015), nor does it seem to meaningfully represent the best of what the sport has to offer. But that’s fine – not every game has to be good for me to watch, and even if the game sucks you can just talk shit with your buddies and indulge in greasy food and cheap beer, which is a central part of the enjoyment of any sporting event.

And this time around, even if the game sucked, at least the arrogant-ass Chiefs got bodied in their attempt to be America’s team.

But what is viewed as transcendental is not the game itself, but the part I hate, which is everything surrounding the game – the branding of every second (“now it’s time for the BUDWEISER play of the quarter!”), the genuflection to American militarism, the ads in which A-listers humiliate themselves to flog whatever crap Silicon Valley is turning out, the dorky halftime shows with medley performances by all our most inoffensive pop stars (even if the campy “salutes to _____” and performances by evangelical death cult spinoff Up with People of yesteryear were probably even worse).

And this extends to the responses thereto, the attempts to scry some kind of weltgeist from the associated detritus among the commentariat. Whether it’s Beyonce cosplaying as a Black Panther, the glut of ads for crypto scams, or Timberlake v. Janet’s nipple, there is a persistent if unacknowledged belief that any of this can be used as a prism through which to view the American experience, instead of what it actually is – a means of selling shit.

So I fully expected, given who the performers were, for American conservative pundits to do the online fuming that they like to do – yelling at the teevee really is their favorite activity, and mostly they seemed to just be grumpy about Styx or whoever not performing. But conversely:

“It was an intricately detailed work of performance art that spoke directly to so many different strands of American history.” – Collider

“Kendrick Lamar sent a coded message to Black America during Super Bowl. And we got it.” – The Root

“The performance’s political messages (like the moment where Lamar’s dancers formed a human U.S. flag) were subtle enough that some in MAGA-world found themselves debating over whether the show was even worth getting upset over.” – Rolling Stone

 

 

Really? You thought Samuel Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam constituted "coded" or "subtle" it any way? Or that anything this plain-faced can be subversive?

Because that which is obvious cannot be subversive. Even when a work stands in opposition to power, it can so quickly turn into a Medieval morality play. Think about two Ruben Ostlund films, The Square and Triangle of Sadness. The first was giddy and witty and entered its satirical targets like a well-pointed arrow. The second was giddy but only at its own cleverness, and failed to enter its satirical targets, merely slapping them with a plushie.

I mean, like all halftime shows, this one sucked, but for completely independent reasons. It was just kinda lame, in the exact same way almost any kind of institutional art is lame. Kendrick and SZA both can do better, and for two artists who have produced so much actually subtle, actually complex music over the years, this felt a spectacle as silly as Katy Perry dancing with cartoon sharks.

But to me, the commentary just seems so desperate – a search for green shoots at a really bleak and dusty point, looking for emotional security above all else, hoping that culture could wishcast politics into existence, and thereby provide a correction to one’s present emotional trajectory. Even if the comments themselves are imbecilic, the sentiment just bums me out. Poor bastards.

When all I feel I can say is “it’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? This performance included. Let’s make Georgian food for dinner tonight, yeah?”

And the khachapuri turned out great.

Bugman in a Termite Mound, or The Barcades Project

One of the best ways to learn about a cultural or political epoch is to look at its epithets. Back in the ‘60s, the standard term for a certain kind of paranoid and gin-blossomed right-wing freak was to call them a “Bircher.” By the time I was a political animal, that had turned into “teabagger,” and of course in both eras, the term “fascist” was pretty standard – a term completely delinked from historical fascism, but awfully easy to deploy against the usual array of cops and chamber of commerce scharführers.

The right, for their part, haven’t been big on novelty in their slurs. “Communist” of course was always a favorite, along with its derivatives – “red,” “pinko,” and so forth – but those had largely been subsumed by more self-identifying terms: “liberal,” “feminist,” (and at least at its origin points, “woke”) and so forth, with the pejorative indicated more by the tone than the terminology. I am deliberately leaving out some of the terms used in the American South – lest large black men materialize in my living room and kick my ass for using certain words without the necessary pass.

But in the post-4chan era, they’ve gotten a bit more creative. What’s off-pissing is that frankly some of them are actually pretty pointed insults. Things being “soy,” for instance – fuck yes, there are pictures of me with my neatly trimmed stubble, chambray shirt, and Japanese glasses in full soyface mode, although it was more likely to be over a bottle of vintage Burgundy or an industrial ruin than a Marvel movie poster or something made with bacon, no matter how epic.

However, the term du jour for a certain type of effete metropolitan male seems to be “bugman,” coinage of Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. Bronze Age Pervert, someone you probably don’t need to be aware of. He tries to do the Nietzschean bitter aphoristic philosophy thing, but comes off as an undergrad tryhard who keeps the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in an open tab. He also tries Nietzsche’s humor, and fails miserably. However, there’s a regrettable shortage of definitions in his Bronze Age Mindset, and all we get are allusions to the nefarious means by which bugkind seeks to overthrow noble souls.

So for a working definition, let’s go to the Substack of former writer of painfully unfunny British sitcoms (The IT Crowd, Black Books) turned professional transphobe Graham Linehan:

“On closer inspection of the day to day life of a bugman one finds at its core the implementation of social erosion, everything that is taken from its origin is likewise bastardized into a regressive, virtual, stir-crazy version of its former self: eSports, Fantasy Football, Copy ‘n Paste Vidya (à la Bethesda/Ubisoft), New Atheism, Beards-as-personality, etc. each of these characteristics is of course filtered through the latest piece of cutting-edge high-brand technology the bugman can afford. One may have noticed already that bugmen’s ‘personalities’ are nothing more than the accumulation and composition of various popular brand names, technologies, TV shows, bands etc. The bugman is entirely defined by that which they consume. Thus the bugmen easily assimilate into their own groups, for their archetypes and traits are based off material possessions, as such grouping is quick, painless and has the added benefit of instantaneous conversation: ‘Sweet mechanical keyboard dude!’”

It’s not 100 percent wrong. And in the critique of the late-capitalist subject… the parallels with, say, Mark Fisher are numerous, even if Fisher was a genuinely humanistic thinker and Linehan is a whiny tittybaby who happened to get something right. Although given the fact that Linehan is himself a chubby, Twitter-brained new atheist, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

(And in another point against his credibility, he used a picture of Owen Jones as a type example, and frankly it’s difficult for me to imagine Owen Jones ever saying “sweet mechanical keyboard” in between his principled coverage of Gaza)

But that is the rough assemblage of ideas that was on my mind when my office moved from a rather dowdy modernist office tower built at the height of Bangkok’s ‘90s irrational exuberance to a shiny mixed-use development on what for years been a vast concrete lot on some of Thailand’s most valuable property. You can still smell the fresh paint.

Anyone who’s been in a similar complex knows the drill. It’s deliberately confusing – in that same way Vegas casinos are – office blocks and condos unified with a network of interconnecting passages, with near-identical cafes, ramen shops, Instagrammable objects, and earth-tone boutiques with messages about sustainability and pictures of gently smiling cotton farmers (definitely not the Uighur ones). The network runs on facial recognition scans with omnipresent and means both subtle and unsubtle to keep out the poors. The view of one of inner Bangkok’s last remaining slums is covered with a statue that reminds me of Goatse (if you weren’t there for the Y2K shock internet, don’t look), only a few mid-rise government housing blocks peeking out over its prolapsed hole.

But saying “high-security postmodern complex suxxxxxx” is nothing new, nor is a discussion of its innate bugmannishness. We’ve all seen Fight Club. Or for that matter. The Lego Movie. By now it’s hack. But when I look down at the ugly corporate-minimalist sculpture dangling over the chain coffee shop, I cannot help but entertain ideas. Needless to say, everything is not awesome.

So what is far more interesting to me is not the fact that it sucks, but the ways in which this genre of non-place is perceived. Because architecture easily becomes a proxy for culture and politics more broadly – unlike the other arts, which are increasingly siloed off into specialized and inaccessible realms, architecture shoves itself in your face daily.

Dense, mixed-use, transit-accessible, sustainability-minded development is posited by self-styled “urbanists” as a solution to the woes of our current era, and there’s a truth there, and their hearts, at least, are in the right place. We just crossed 1.5 degrees Celsius of mean global temperature increase, our dependence on the automobile is slowly killing us, and North American cities in particular are seemingly designed to alienate and isolate. So why not build things that are readily accessible by metro system or other public transportation, that combine residences, office space, and retail, that get people out of their cars and hopefully sharing a coffee in a more welcoming and inclusive atmosphere?

To which the main riposte is always… well then why is it so shit? Whether it’s the ugly condo-over-barcade-and-vegan-noodle-bar developments with chilly concrete plazas that constitute dense infill across the United States, or the sort of Erewhon’d and Uniqlo’d complexes with an architectural idiom that builds on the worst ideas of Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid that have blossomed all over Rising Asia, the actual environment fails to live up to how it is marketed. In these ostensibly public spaces that are run purely for the benefit of the private sector, dependent on mass surveillance and creepy biometric data theft, rife with hostile design elements, community simply becomes a shared purchasing pattern. Sustainability is at best a means of getting a tax break, and is more likely just another branding element. Inclusivity is great as long as it sells more matcha lattes.

Furthermore, my particular complex is just so fucking jankety – how fragile-looking some of the fittings are, as slapdash as Ikea furniture, the persistent sense of the temporary, the way the QR code readers I have to use in lieu of giving them my facial data are unstable at best. Again, we should know how this ends. The story of how the nice tweedy middle-class British professionals went ape in High Rise was published in 1975. My god, the story of an attempt at a firmware update leading to mass chaos, R.U.R., was written in 1920. The fact that the term “robot” comes from a play about robot failure should have been a warning, shouldn’t it?

So the complex has become targets for traditionalists of one kind or another. Some of them are architectural traditionalists, of course, who want to return to golden-ratio classicism and Ionic orders, and who are mostly just harmless nostalgics.

Others are rather more sinister -- those who don’t want to return, they want to RETVRN. Those whose conservatism is an incoherent blend of 1950s suburban American dream, Victorian moralism, grandeur both Bayreuth operatic and classical Roman, and completely romantic and mythological conception of nation and volk that quickly reveals itself to be more a function of aesthetic desire than any kind of actual intellectual or political program. The lack of program is important here – that would require them to actually commit to the bit.

Consider Alamariu, whose gigglewanks about “xenoestrogens” and silly classical-hunk posturing that’s frankly one step away from full-on man-boy love have filtered down through the brain-rot of the discourse, particularly in its techie, Peter Thiel-affiliated corners, whose participants seem pretty terminally bugmale – far too chinless and Fortnite-brained to have a chance at Periclean heroism.

So the bugman’s termite mound is a product of the capitalist institutions, with the only major challenge to their hegemony being pure reaction – appropriate in an era in which the representatives of electoral politics in so many of the Occidental power centers have devolved into a bunch of impotent centrist dorks on one side and a group of hooting vandals on the other side. But regardless, the processes of wealth accumulation continue – more power is in the hands of a tiny brahmin class, protected by the surveillance state, while the rest of us burn in the trenches.

How hot that fire burns and how deep that trench is both vary.

As for this bug? He could use a whiskey.

A Subject/Object/Charlie Brown Christmas

 There’s nothing original or interesting about being a Christmas hater. Indeed, it’s just a seasonal riff on “that thing everyone likes, lemme tell you what, I think it BLOWS!” (OK, I kind of do that a lot).

 But I can’t say I’ve been much of a fan of Christmas ever since it stopped meaning Matchbox cars and Encyclopedia Brown books. It’s not too hard to figure out why – the crass commercialism, the religious simpering, counterpointed with Sunday-suit Southerners bemoaning the secular war on Christmas (in which I proudly believed myself to be at least a corporal), and of course the awful music. So I hid my head under the rocks, and around holiday time, if I was lucky, in response to Bob Geldof’s question, the answer was “no.”

However, no matter how bitter my experience with the holidays, I still always loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, if for no other reason than that Charlie Brown seemed to get it, and when he moped around Charles Schulz’s magical-realist version of snowbound Minnesota to Vince Guaraldi’s piano lines, it seemed deeply and truly real. Yes, Christmas is a pay grab, and his holiday blues are a frankly reasonable response.  His teacher wants him to read Dostoyevsky over Christmas break. Lucy offers him therapy for 5 cents, and of course she’s also the one who pulls away the football.

It’s now behind a paywall on Apple TV+. Fuck you.

Furthermore, even if I couldn’t stand Christmas music, even if I still feel a frisson of horror with the first department store carol of the season I hear, there were two songs that I could always rely on.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” – Joni Mitchell, “River,” 1971

“Charlie, if you wanna know the truth of it I don’t have a husband, he don’t play the trombone, I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Charlie, hey, I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day” – Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” 1978

 Because for most of my adult life that was my Christmas – in milder climates, away from the meter-high snowbanks and goose down coats and hot spiced beverages on abandoned train bridges and candlelit fairytale evenings of my youth. Trying to figure out what it was to live on my own terms, to the extent I could.

And every Christmas, I had to determine whether or not I’d be bowling alone.

But sometimes the stars align.

Two old friends – Jordan and Amanda, if you’re reading, I love both of you dearly – needed someone to housesit and dogsit on Christmas Eve, and they were kind enough to leave me a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a joint, 30 bucks for delivery Chinese, Almost Famous on VHS, and the company of their lovely if overactive husky in their house in North Seattle. Which would itself have been a lovely if anesthetized evening. Hold me closer Tiny Dancer.

But what made it truly special was the following night, when homeboy had to pick up a shift at a frankly sinister dive bar-slash-pizza place on Pike Street (any Seattleite should be able to figure out where I’m talking about). Black glass tables left over from the ‘70s, boxes of Franzia, burnt-out fairy lights, and a decidedly marginal customer base. It was the sort of place where I could and did take Jager bombs with the crust punk on one side of me and the philosophy professor reading Derrida in the original in the other, none of the three of us particularly liking either Jager or Red Bull, but all three of us enjoying the goofy ritual of it. And on that December 25th, it was full of the people I needed to be around.

It became obvious, as the Rainiers and the Seven-and-Sevens flowed. I met another guy with a passion for writing, who’d just gotten out of Snohomish County Jail for beating some dude into the hospital. A middle-aged woman in a white fur coat and a few solicitation charges kept buying me shots of Rumpleminze. It’s a story I tell to anyone in earshot around this time of year, the story of our one-night-only little Island of Misfit Toys, the Jews and the Indians and the disowned gays and, as it happened, a skinny and lost Midwesterner with literary pretensions, scarves, and a bad attitude, who felt, for the first time, like he’d finally found that milieu he’d come looking for.

Charlie Brown never got to grow up, or maybe he never had to He began life in the Truman administration and departed this planet along with Schulz himself, the man having left a missive typed out by Snoopy on top of the doghouse, in February of 2000, in the last few months of the end of history.

Maybe they would have all made it. Maybe Linus would have become a meek and mild liberal Lutheran pastor in the kindly and deeply vanilla Upper Midwest tradition. Maybe Lucy would have realized that she didn’t need to be a shit and gracefully aged into a delightfully cynical old bat who still leaves her husband on read just to fuck with him, but loves him to death all the same. Maybe Schroeder would have gotten into Juilliard and written an opera in between visits to Greenwich Village backrooms. Maybe Peppermint Patty would likewise have made it onto the women’s basketball team at the U of M, with Marcie pining for her down the hall. Maybe Pigpen would get the right meds. Maybe Charlie Brown would be sitting there across the bar, a little too serious, having finally gotten around to that copy of Crime and Punishment he’d had to read, which he was the only one in class to actually read, cigarette burns on his matching scarf, and maybe we’d talk for a bit about some random shit, and he’d be a little too serious and a little too intense and we’d go out to smoke a spliff in the sleet and he’d mention all the dumb crap he’d done as a kid just to get the attention of a little red-haired girl.

Or maybe not.

But there’s always hope.

Merry Christmas you fuckers.

Stop Recommending Me Books, Mindy Kaling

While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.

For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.

Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.

 

I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.

Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.

A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.

That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”

(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)

And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.

My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.

Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:

“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”

That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.

Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.

And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.

 

But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.

Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known. 

 

So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?

Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.

No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.

This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.

Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.

But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.

Get the fuck out.

A Letter from a Leftist to His Liberal Friends

Weren’t expecting that, were you? Neither was I.

This is one of those times when I feel obligated to write something up. Of course, there’s too much already – the world has been inundated with lameass think pieces for a long time, and this might be classed as one of them, but I’m taking the risk because it’s useful and perhaps even necessary to at least reflect on what one said at a certain time, and I happen to do my best writing in the public sphere – it keeps me honest.

(and by the way, if you do want a brilliantly reasoned think piece, here’s a good one by Branko Marcetic at Jacobin)

So, liberal friends, I am writing this because I like you. I share a great many of your values – I am horrified by inequality, keen to make America’s disastrous healthcare and education systems work. I am in favor of increased access to abortion, legal marijuana, LGBTQ rights, and all the rest. And indeed in Tim Walz, I saw one of the few American politicians I actually respect, and I hope he goes on to bigger and better things.

But where I probably depart from you is in the analysis, wherein I fundamentally believe that the coming shitshow is a symptom of capitalisms recent and old. I’m not going to go citing Marx and Gramsci and Adorno (that’s boring, isn’t it?). But they’re on my bookshelf, and their perceptions are infinitely more resonant to me than any of the weak tea offered by professional liberals, particularly at this point in late-stage capitalism. And to that end, let’s examine the reactions by a professional liberal and a democratic socialist, and compare and contrast.

I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here's the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars. – Kamala Harris, Howard University

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right. – Bernie Sanders, at home in Burlington

Which sounds like a more accurate read to you?

 So while I was surprised – I wasn’t stunned. And looking back, I’m deeply ashamed that I didn’t see Trump 2 (now with J.D. Vance, freshly back from his glow-up at the MAC counter) coming. Every single fucking mistake from the 2016 campaign was repeated. Celebrity support and good vibes in lieu of policy. An election treated like a coronation. A failure to stand for any meaningful position other than “not Trump,” and fail to differentiate the candidate from her predecessor. A complete dismissal of the entire left wing of the Democratic coalition. A courting of neoconservative hawks. When it comes to reproductive rights, while she correctly made that a highlight and while the Dems have been banking on that for a while, and while it is a popular position, let’s not pretend that that is the end of the conversation – for a lot of even sympathetic citizens, even a lot of women, there are other issues at play. And the result? She wound up whiffing this election to an opponent who was even less coherent than in his previous iterations.

Maybe you agree. Maybe you saw the weaknesses and were willing to elide them. Maybe you were hoping she would take bold economic-policy stands instead of trying to appeal to everyone in a way that was simultaneously milquetoast and sinister in its commitment to the establishment position. I was too.

Maybe you disagree – maybe you point out the many ways in which she favored expanded access to healthcare, increases to the child tax credit, relief for first-time homebuyers. And you’d be right. But were those policies really what she was placing front and center? And when you examine those policies, how many of them were broad and universal? This is a politician who has never seen a social program she didn’t want to means-test to death (see: her scattershot programs to appeal to black and Latino males, or her utterly bizarre student loan forgiveness scheme from the 2020 primaries). Maybe you could point out that Trump’s tax plan is fucking bonkers. That’s true – it’s fucking bonkers. But it’s something different. And in the doldrums of the Biden years, that is meaningful.

The result? People just didn’t show up. Let’s see, 2 million fewer R voters, 13 million fewer D voters. Turns out she did an awfully good job of alienating her own base, who just sat this one out.

That’ll happen when war criminals like Dick Cheney are trotted out as supporters, while failing to peel off those suburban Republicans that you were told were so important at Lincoln Project dinners. That’ll happen when ya gesture vaguely at the prospect of peace while green-lighting every weapons sale to facilitate every crime against humanity that Bibi et al. are committing in its vicinity.

So just as an example, I’m sure those Detroit Arabs will be thinking about Vice President Harris’ commitment to the power of listening while their cousins are being turned to slurry with missiles paid for with their own taxes.

And liberal friends, I don’t blame you for your take either. You wanted the best of humanity to shine through, for evil to be defeated. I wish I shared your optimism and idealism, even when I think it’s incorrect.

So I also don’t lay the blame at the feet of the non-voter who feels alienated from the two-party system, at the progressive who couldn’t bring herself to support a genocide, hell even the deluded dude who still thinks America can return to its 1950s industrial might, anyone who wasn’t convinced by K.H.’s weak pitch in our digitized Gilded Age.

Unfortunately, a quick search reveals the mass scolding that was already underway well before the election (look at the hate piled on Chappell Roan for failing to show right-think, for instance). Please, please don’t do that.

I am terrified that this might reflect something deeper among a slice of the blue-voting public. While liberals (correctly) identify Trump’s crude authoritarianism, I have a sneaking suspicion that many are frankly subject to an authoritarian personality themselves. There is a certain percentage of the voting bloc that genuinely hates the idea that anyone uneducated or somehow unqualified deserves a say in how their country is run, that functionally believes that an army of technocrats should take over, assuming of course that they have the proper socially progressive opinions. This prioritization of credentials and good behavior is nothing more than the liberal version of the conservative conflation of divine grace and financial success. Both are loathsome and anti-democratic attitudes. Both are widespread among the professional classes.

So who do I blame for the shitty, shitty four years to come? Duh -- Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (for failing to step down much sooner), everyone in their closest orbit whose sinecures are safe no matter what the outcome, and the coterie of public and private sector overlords past and present who brought forth the Kali Yuga in which we now find ourselves. Also of course the usual professional-conservative snakes, but I expect them to continue to be serpentine. My most immediate j’accuse goes to the Democratic establishment for failing to ratchet that support over 50 percent. Even if they got close.

Now you might point out that as a cishet white dude with an email job, it’s easier for me to take this attitude and have less of a visceral rage because I’m less directly in the line of fire than members of marginalized communities – and that’s a completely fair fucking point. But I still think my analysis applies. I don’t think it’s productive to place the onus on ordinary people, even if their opinions are vile (something I might struggle to actually do in my personal life) and even if they are sometimes deserving of that onus. And I think to do so is the discursive equivalent of a regressive sin tax.

You might also point out that as I life abroad, I will be shielded from a lot of the evil shit that will be done. That is also a completely fair fucking point. Yet for obvious reasons of both cultural and political imperialism, America’s problem is everyone’s problem. And to everyone who screams “I’m moving to Canada!” every four years, I regret to inform you that America’s long shadow will follow you wherever you go, especially if you’re the information-addicted type that you almost certainly are if you say this regularly (and let’s stop before we get into the fact that Canadian politics is a cabal of mining interests with an aggressively and systematically fucked housing market).

That missive from Saint Bernie doesn’t exactly end on a positive note:

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.

In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.

Stay tuned.

I will, in my commitments as an enfant de la patrie. Even if I’m a little too old to go full formez-[nos]-bataillons.

I will admit I don’t know what is to be done, but I’m going to do the only thing I know how to do (because let’s face it I’m shit at actual organizing) – doing my best to provide what funding I can, on my salary, for abortion pills and gender-affirming care in places where such things are hard to come by, by contributing to strike funds in critical labor actions, by finding means to help out the Palestinians whose babies are being butchered with the approbation of our empire. And to keep the lines of communication open, however shit gets fucked.

Among the Passport Bros

When one thinks of Bangkok expats, there’s a pretty standard image – the cadre of elderly creeps and potential 90 Day Fiance subjects. You don’t have much trouble conjuring that up, do you?

But for a long time, I’ve noticed a second, younger, less internationally renowned category. Rather than meeting women on the wrong side of 35 in neon minidresses at beer bars with Harley-Davidson signage and rawk-and-roll cover bands, they meet their partners free of charge and on the apps. Fewer Hawaiian shirts, more streetwear, or if there is a Hawaiian shirt, it’s very much of the Zoomer maximalist persuasion than the Saigon R&R variety.

For years, I’ve found them more moderately annoying than anything else. Some are socially awkward gamers, others have the douchey aspect of aspiring campus date rapists, and quite a few manage both. I knew that this was not a purely localized phenomenon – over the past several years, I’ve seen the prospering of a class of digital nomads in the throes of satyriasis emerge over the past several years, in Bali, in Chiang Mai, on the Iberian Coast, and in every other Coney Island of the mind that promises chill vibes. Wherever there are smash burgers, craft beer, and custom neon signs, they are sure not to be far behind.

But then on a rainy Saturday afternoon I discovered the term “passport bro.” And found their forums. Woof.

Think of it as the manosphere-ification of the sexpat phenomenon. A large number of (mostly) young-ish, extremely online men who had been posting misquotes of interviews with primatologists have decided to take their ideology out into the real world, in search of comely tradwives, their figures not deformed by the Five Guys diet. Being thoroughly online, they were unable to accept that they simply want someplace to park their peepee, and like to travel around, neither of which is objectionable in and of its own right, and so had to transform it into an identity tag. Furthermore, an awful lot of them give it a pseudo-political valence of standing against some form of “Western degeneracy.” Because nothing is less degenerate than booking a flight just to get laid.

As for how that manifests, its varies. Some of them seem dopey to the point of gee-golly, praising their inamoratas’ cooking and cleaning prowess, while others are more to the point (one highly upvoted commenter inquires as to which country has girls “most down to do butt stuff,” with remarkably sincere responses). In all cases, this is a phenomenon that could easily have been predicted, and when I first heard rumblings about incels “SEAmaxxing” in Southeast Asia, I was informed but not surprised.

There is also a racial dimension, of course, although it’s not necessarily the obvious one you might imagine. Because this is actually a pretty diverse demographic in my experience. Among the usual and expected crowd, you get an army of desperate dudes of East and South Asian descent, which upon reflection is rather unsurprising, given the common feelings of sexual and romantic devaluation among those populaces within the metropolitan core. And so they ask which countries are they less likely to be scoffed at in, and so off it is to Manila, where their passport holds more sway than their skin tone.

If I’m being empathetic, I could point out the many ways in which the Sexual Revolution has failed to live up to its promises, or if it has, they were very much the promises of a bourgeois realignment. The ways in which the apps have even further subjected dating to the cruel logic of the free market, the ways in which desire is constantly being redefined with a remarkable number of people having trouble catching up to how the process works, the ways in which gloomy economic horizons and broad-scale cultural pessimism have led to new varieties of romantic desperation, the ways in which social media and infinite free porn present a vicious hologram for the sexual desires of adolescents, the ways in which love is, in our reality, contra Lennon, something that can indeed be bought.

But that empathy fades with every Instagram reel of a sigma-coded influencer in some gray Slavic city or sun-dappled Colombian beach, every Youtube thumbnail with a shitty AI pic of a coy and demure Vietnamese maiden.

Whether I have met any self-described passport bros, I’m not sure – it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that people go around advertising. However, I live in fucking Bangkok – the type is everywhere, and I encounter them more often than I would like, and I have certainly spent time among them in practice.

When I meet a member of this approximate class at a party or event, they quite often assume that I am One of Them. Which to be fair is not unreasonable. I am an American dude living abroad in his 30s, and they are quite often also American dudes living abroad in their 30s, so it’s not difficult to imagine them projecting. To give an example, years ago, before such a term was ever coined, I ran into a young American at the club whom I knew but had never much cared for, who looked a bit like a white version of Yoshi and acted like Johnny Drama. I guess he’d struck out with the girl he was attempting to wrap his arms around, because before even saying hi, he slapped me on the shoulder and barked “bro, she’s not feeling me, go try your luck.” A bit like he was having trouble with a particularly tough GTA mission.

Then I have to then go out of my way to make it obvious that I am not on their team in any meaningful way, and if I am feeling drunk and ornery enough, I wind up mocking them until they leave me alone (something which often backfires, as there is a tendency to assume my actual contempt and allusions to their shriveled penises is really just friendly ballbusting among bros). I have a tendency to then feel terrible, feel like a shitty and judgmental person, before I look over to see them attempting to kino-escalate with a Singaporean girl too shy to push them away. I feel no happier having been correct.

But it is irrelevant I am not One of Them, I am, by default thought of as One of Them. Salt in my stubble, forearm tattoo, bourbon on the rocks in hand, and a certain psychogeography of the soul, and I know that there will be people who meet me – there have been people who have met me – who will logically apply their knowledge base of tropes and memes, and come to that conclusion.

I’ve never put much stock in the ideas of Freud and Jung – psychoanalysis was always a bit too disconnected from the ground, a bit too akin to religion in the ways it which it posits this detailed and almost mythological system of narratives and metaphors that it then uses as a read on the human condition as a whole. But damn, those narratives and metaphors can be compelling.

And the idea of the Shadow in the human psyche, there being this thing within you that the ego cannot reconcile, is to me the most compelling of those. The idea that there is this part of you that you try to tamp down that can still haunt you in moments of anguish, or what is worse, comes out of nowhere in the carefree reverie of an afternoon stuck inside.

On a bitter and overheated Sunday morning, with five hours of sleep, I might look at my face in the mirror with the same repulsion, along with the adipose tissue around my waist, the failures to meet my goals, a bit dehydrated, reaching for the half-empty bottle of sparkling water gone flat, the messages deliberately left unread.

And I have to wonder what's lurking behind my back.