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.