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.

Fine Dining Doesn’t Suck, But Instagram Does

Despite the gradual immiseration of American life over the past few decades, I think I can safely say that the food has gotten better – the idea of brioche was something that had to be introduced to me in freshman French, but now every godawful casual-dining restaurant puts its burgers on a brioche bun. Same goes for all of the post-Reformation countries that have historically had the shittiest food – the palate of the average Brit or Swede or Australian has expanded in kind over the same time period.

And yet we’re at something of an inflection point, as with so many other things in the consumer world. Instagram has provided the perfect venue at which to flex. You are living a healthier, more active, more aware lifestyle because you photographed your post-gym acai smoothie. You are a more sophisticated consumer because you photographed the duck leg confit with a red-wine reduction. Ad nauseam. Pun intended.

As much as it pains me to say it as a long-time fan, the specter of Anthony Bourdain seems to be a factor as well. His ethos, encouraging people to travel more widely, eat better, and listen to as many people as you can, is something I can universally recommend, and something I’ve done my best to live up to. And yet it seems that while people are doing the traveling and eating, they’re less keen on listening. I’ve seen a million lazy reposts of his quotes across social media, typically over a stylized picture of his craggy face staring out over a desert dune or in a cramped New York apartment, cigarette in hand. But I think this is the quote we should be reflecting upon a bit more…

“When and if the good guys win, will we—after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations, and insecurities of the middle class—have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap? More to the point, have I? Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?” – Anthony Bourdain, “Meat”

It is into this fractious landscape that I began my (very fun!) part-time gig in professional food writing, a mix of freelance assignments for hotels and restaurants and regular feature-writing contributions to a certain well-known restaurant guide… I’ll refrain from saying the name out loud, having vomited in my mouth a little when a group of fancypants visual artists went from completely disregarding me to suddenly being fascinated by me after the name drop.

And it is precisely those artists’ attitude that drives so much of food media nowadays, with Netflix food documentaries being particularly gross offenders. Jiro Dreams of Sushi was good fun and all, but the main emphasis there is not the excellence of the food – that’s something that you’re going to have to taste yourself, and few people outside of Japan have ever had sushi of anywhere near that caliber. No, the emphasis was the exclusivity, the opulence, the visual spectacle, and secondarily the sob story about Jiro’s shitty family (not much deeper or more meaningful than the average American Idol contestant tearing up about how much their mom sacrificed for them). In other words, everything I fucking hate. And the thing is, that’s the best of the genre.

Although the faux-populist opposite is just as bad. While it is objectively true that taste is subjective, to claim that this makes all opinions of taste valid is nothing more than anti-intellectualism transformed into an ideology. Lest one feel bad that one is not dining at Eleven Madison Park, we are reassured that actually, no, it’s OK, and yes whatever you’re eating merely by dint of its price point and convenience and your chronically anxious state is just fine! Are you enjoying yourself? Then it’s OK! Here’s a gif recipe of some nacho cheese atrocity. The “let people enjoy things” approach to criticism is a complete abjuration of craft in favor of the lowest common denominator – a reduction of the public to a kindergarten.

(btw I like Nacho Cheese Doritos as much as the next guy, but they should be recognized as what they are, which is to say not OK)

You can even double down on this… if you want to really dig in, as countless bloggers and video essayists, some of whom are actual grown adults, are wont to do, to say that eating well is ACTUALLY classist and ableist and fatphobic and colonialist, and didja think about that HUH? I think it goes without saying that I consider this to crypto-Protestant bullshit. If I’m being charitable and assuming that these are good-faith actors (which is by no means always true), I understand the desire to point out just how bareassed the emperor actually is, and I understand the desire to dismantle systems of oppression, but there’s nothing worth celebrating in the fact that most of the time we wind up sucking the tailpipe of consumer capitalism.

I think the reason why I found 2022’s The Menu to be one of the most annoying fucking films of all time is that it somehow manages to encompass all three of these perspectives. On the one hand we get the gorgeous farm-to-table island restaurant and beautifully plated dishes that, even when presented ironically, seem designed to whet the appetite, and on the other hand, we get about the most tired, overplayed, obvious social commentary there is, and the reassurance at the end that, no, actually, the burger that Anya Taylor-Joy munches on at the end is better than any of the fussy fine dining being eaten at this chef’s table of the damned.

Because here’s the thing, when it’s done right… fine dining is pure poetry. Sure, a lot of it is bullshit – I won’t name names, but let’s just say I have opinions about many of Bangkok’s best-known set-menu restaurants. But when it’s done well…

A few years ago, I finally got a chance to dine at Maison Rostang, a little bit off the Champs-Elysees. Dork that I am, I made an Excel sheet of Paris’ two and three Michelin star restaurants to determine where I wanted to have the fancy Parisian dinner I’d saved up for, and I wanted something full-bore, balls-to-the-wall classical French. Smoked eel wrapped with foie gras, roast pigeon, the most perfect chanterelles I’ve ever witnessed, wedges of cheeses that only have names in regional French patois washed down with vendange tardive Vouvray that tasted of apricots and morning dew.

Stopping myself here lest the descriptions be more befitting a Brazzers video.

Most days I’m happy with a simple buttondown shirt and my Uniqlo jeans and a nice homemade salad. But damn, sometimes I wanna slip on my linen blazer and fix up my hair and watch slivers of Alba truffle cascade over my plate. And no, I won’t be photographing it, as one should not photograph moments of spiritual ecstasy. To do so would be like taking a confession-booth selfie.

The Dostoyevsky Reader and the Protestants

As Ukrainian forces continue their campaign into the Kursk region of Russia, we’re starting to see the sort of video footage we saw in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – distraught Slavic girls weeping over the loss of their homes and villages, talking with special pain about barely getting their beloved pets out. And yet compared to their Ukrainian counterparts, these Russians are treated by the commentariat with rather less sympathy.

The top comment: “Welcome to your special military operation.” And if anything, the other comments were harsher.

Even as cynical a fuck as I can be, there seems to be something uniquely horrifying about gleefully cheering on the suffering of civilians in combat. It’s nothing new, but it remains awfully grim. But while the media has long assumed this kind of sadistic glee to be standard in the Global South, what I find particularly bleak here is that most of the enthusiastic rubberneckers here are from the heart of the metropolis of the Global North, and would likely describe themselves as broadly liberal in their outlook. So I have to wonder why that is.

I won’t try to draw a full genealogy of how liberal political theories and ethical systems emerged in sync with the Age of Reason, but tl;dr, ethics were no longer exclusively seen as being concomitant with personal virtue or divine grace. Rather, nifty new systems – consequentialism, Kantianism, and so forth – were presented (correctly in my book) as more reasonable and humane approaches, and became standard among the more liberal elements of society.

Yet a certain Puritanism remains, and I use this word very deliberately not in its usual sense (i.e. being a fucking buzzkill) but to mean a certain kind of Protestant attitude manifested in the various religious strands that draw their lineage to the writings of John Calvin. One in which, lacking the possibility of salvation through the institution of the Church, it ultimately fell on the individual to demonstrate their salvation or lack thereof, and among the New England Puritans and the Dutch Calvinists, this was manifested in both the form of a rigid theology and a full-throated enthusiasm for mercantile capitalism. The two go hand in hand – demonstrations of value on both the spiritual and material planes.

While not many people would call themselves Puritans or even Calvinists per se anymore, but the specter remains strong in the Anglosphere. You are either a good person who believes good things and whose works are by definition good works, given your moral virtue, or the opposite is true.

And so this girl becomes a proxy for the moral failings of her nation, rather than an individual suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict.

It’s not just her, either. It’s hard to ignore a larger-scale demonization not only of Russia’s illegal invasion, but of its people and history. Western symphony orchestras refuse to play the Russian classics, and Russian artists and filmmakers find their work so often no longer welcome in the NATO member states. A certain bitter irony, considering how many of these musicians, artists, and filmmakers have risked their livelihoods and even their lives in support of those very Enlightenment values of personal freedom, secular and egalitarian governance, and resistance to the authoritarian pall that has so long been over Russia. At least back during the Cold War, dissident Russian writers who made it stateside could count on the Western establishment to wax rhapsodic over Pushkin and Tchaikovsky while they feted them at Ford Foundation events. Now even the dissidents – who, in contemporary Russia, are all the only ones making decent art – are too often given the cold shoulder at best.

And this irony is doubled when you consider how many of those calls for the exclusion of Russian culture seem to be from my fellow Americans – where were the calls for the boycott of our culture during our pretty damn unspeakable and illegal invasion of Iraq, for instance, or any of the horrors of American empire that persist to this day?

This isn’t to say that a mass boycott of my own nation should have been done – it would have been moronic. Because people are not their nations. And especially in the sphere of art and culture, that is where we should find our solidarity and common humanity, rather than conflating people with the nations they happen to be citizens of. A liberty-cabbage attitude isn’t going to get us very far.

I say this particularly as someone who has always adored Russian art, and the many strange forms it has taken on the creepy and ragged edge of Europe, always peering into the core of Western civilization from just outside. In the early years of the 20^th Century, Scriabin, in his peculiar and dissonant compositions, sought to explore the secret mystical codes that undergirded human behavior. Across town, Malevich looked for forms that evaded representation and which captured pure feeling, and Vertov chopped and screwed the language of cinema just as Eisenstein was inventing it. 

But my first and greatest love is for Russian literature. Because what I have always adored is the transcendence and cruelty and absurdity and individuality and nuance and experimentation of it all, often in the same paragraph. Raskolnikov kills the old woman for barely any reason, because everything is awful and life sucks. Dead souls are sold on the steppe for crisp brand new rubles. How can one not gasp at an opening line like the following…

“Once upon a time in Russia, there really was a carefree, youthful generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea, and the sun, and they chose Pepsi.”

- Victor Pelevin, Generation Pi

Pelevin wrote those lines in the chaotic period around the breakup of the USSR, when the economy cratered under shock-therapy programs while Western talking heads still chirped on about freedom, when the authoritarian Old Guard effortlessly transitioned from devout communists to devout Orthodox conservatives, interest quietly accruing in Swiss bank accounts. What better to read in a time of hopelessness and weirdness and outright grifting?

In the mid-1980s, Paul Simon, despite the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, went to Johannesburg, fascinated by the cassettes he’d heard of black musicians in the townships. Rather than shutting out artists merely by dint of their nationality, he used his star power to champion the voices of those suffering under apartheid, listening to their songs and stories, discovering their unique musical idiom. And with them, he put out Graceland, which, while it’s easy to deride as your mother-in-law’s favorite album, remains one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the decade, and one of the few later albums by a ‘60s titan that is actually good. He chose not to excommunicate, but to engage.

I don’t have his connections, but I can engage. And what could give me greater pleasure, on this rainy night, than a little Shostakovich before bed?

In the Floating World

A few months ago, in Osaka, I explored the quiet local museum of ukiyo-e woodblocks in the heart of the entertainment quarter depicted by so many of those same prints. These depicted the so-called “floating world,” the society of courtesans, geisha, boozy rakes, louche actors, petty criminals, and profligate sons of the samurai class as it existed in the twilight years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, before the Tenpo Reforms of the 1840s largely put an end to the production of woodblock prints of the floating world, part of a larger-scale series of attempts to shore up the hermit kingdom and failures to resolve the contradictions of a feudalist society by restricting consumption and declaring war on what was perceived as the degeneracy of the nascent bourgeoisie. 

And upon my return to my equally louche tropical city, I once again found myself among a population not too different – decidedly spendy when it comes to food and drink and entertainment, artistic in ethos if not in production, with a significant number of moneyed people who are awfully bad at keeping their hands on their money and a significant number of less moneyed people who are awfully good at cadging their way through this particular iteration of café society – a population I’ve come to call the Negroni Caste, owing to the standard drink of choice.

Not that this is anything local or particular. The idea of a decadent and glittering society is pretty baked into the public consciousness, in whatever manifestation you can imagine – Weimar Berlin, ‘70s Downtown New York, Lost Generation Paris, Hollywood throughout its history, and all the rest. Where Christopher Isherwood was a camera with its shutter open, where Eve Babitz used to be charming. We’ve heard plenty of enchanting stories of coquettes and absinthe.

But even in those stories, you can find allusions to a different perspective on dissolute lifestyles and Dionysian pursuits. When Fritz Lang made Metropolis, he called his pleasuredome high above the slums “Yoshiwara” – an allusion I have no idea how many 1920s German filmgoers would have gotten, to the licensed pleasure quarter of Tokyo, in the old “low city” zone of Shitamachi along the Sumida River, where so many of those ukiyo-e are set.

 

 

Rather, the key is in the name. Floating. Not decrepit and corrupted, as in the writings of, say, Zola or Baudelaire, but simply floating there.

The term has different cadences in English and Japanese. In English, “floating world” sounds rather pleasant, a dreamy and serene land among the clouds. And yet within the Japanese and more specifically Buddhist context, it implies a fundamentally temporary and fleeting mode of existence, one stop on the great wheel of samsara. This can be something treasured for its transitory beauty, and it can be something illusory, something that ought not to be held onto or attached to, lest the suffering set in, the cherry blossoms falling on the path.

But while this concept may not have been fully metastasized into the Western (broadly speaking) context, how different, really, is the (originally) American cult of youth? In its more wholesome form, this would be the eternal manic grin of Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve, but it seems more frequent that eternal adolescence takes on a more grotesque form, the thing that has spent far too long in the liminal space.

When I was maybe 18 or 20, I spent a lot of time getting drunk and high. This, of course, is correct. It is known that American 18-20 year olds enjoy getting drunk and high. I’d seen the same dumb movies we all had, and recognized that these were to be the dedicated beer-bong years, with the assumption that at some point fairly soon, this would cease to be. The idealized line-graph of the classic male American dream would state that after the relatively brief secularized rumspringa known as “college,” one proceeds to seek out a picket-fence existence with the gal – whether as a loving father-knows-best or a neurasthenic Willy Loman.

It didn’t cease to be. When I look around me, what I see are people in their 30s, 40s, and hell, 50s, still living in the same way, which of course can quickly become a grotesque aspect – the lecherous and beer-bellied C-suite executive pawing at the intern freshly graduated from Michigan State, an elderly Madonna still trying to prance about like a Disney Channel starlet.

Part of me is tempted to say that this is part of a larger-scale liminalization, of an increasingly uncertain and precarious and frenetic world in which, with our planning capacities diminished and pessimism setting in, our behavior becomes increasingly adolescent, whether that’s through chemical recreation, various deeply unhealthy sexual and romantic patterns, or getting lost in the electronic mirror maze. Maybe this is just a stoner thought, but it suggests to me a psychic response among the educated and generally anxious classes. Either that or they frantically protect their status, barricaded into cultural or physical garrisons.

Which again takes us back to the river banks and alleys of Tokyo’s Shitamachi, where, in countless Japanese films and novels, the attitude towards life was also transitory. What you’ve got is here today, gone tomorrow. An attitude reflected in the gruff working-class accent of the neighborhoods lined with crushed wooden pallets and flowerpots, occupied by alley cats and daytime drunks, to be contrasted with the polished tones of the wealthy Yamanote districts further west.

It's a class distinction highlighted in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – the main character, the stoic toilet cleaner who seeks refuge in Lou Reed cassettes and Patricia Highsmith stories, also seeks refuge in his tiny tatami-mat apartment in a rundown Shitamachi neighborhood. We know little of his origins, but in the brief encounter with his elegant sister, we can assume he’s from wealthier Yamanote stock (can’t speak to his accent, my Japanese is nowhere near good enough), and he commutes every day to urbane and cosmopolitan Shibuya to clean its toilets.

The emotional climax of the film (this really doesn’t count as a spoiler) comes with him, isolated and inconsolable, with a pack of Peace cigarettes and a few cans of Strong Zero, the cheap canned shochu-and-mixer popular among drunk salarymen, along the banks of the Sumida River at night. Where he’s joined by one such salaryman, dying of cancer, sharing his cigs and cheap chuhai.

I had been there – definitely that exact spot, equally inconsolable in my mood. I recognize these places intimately – the bridge, the peculiar big concrete cone, the view of the neon-streaked Tokyo Skytree. On some chilly Novembery evening a long time ago, cold moonlight and the Asahi sign flickering in the murky water. I’m pretty sure I had a Strong Zero in my hand.

The moonlight too seemed to float.

Reunion

Am I the only one who's sick of the multiverse as a plot device?

I can’t speak to the actual physical concept of the multiverse. I don’t know enough about it, or enough about its viability versus that of the Copenhagen interpretation in explaining our world, I barely even know how to use these concepts correctly. And yet I’m sure that many of the screenwriters out there have even less of a grasp. But I get their perspective, truly, as hack writers – it’s an easy premise for them to play with, like Groundhog Day but with a veneer of scientific credibility. And, like Groundhog Day, it appeals to an inner desire we all have.

We want to know what the person did who had made the other decision. Somewhere you did it differently, and ideally did it right. You did get into Dartmouth, you did complete that touchdown pass junior year and a scout was in the audience, he finally proposed to you and you said yes.

And therefore, it was all I could think about when I walked through the streets of a West Coast city I used to call home, where I misspent my youth, and thought about that person I might be. And to find those little points at which my life and his life would have been one and the same.

What were they? Looking back, they dance across my visual cortex like the flashing images of a magic lantern.

In the South End, old wooden bungalows still sigh on overgrown lawns, threatening to be strangled by the blackberry bushes, stoops decorated with blue-robed virgins with arms outstretched and whimsical metal folk art and Tibetan prayer flags. They had once been the homes of union men and their families, airplane mechanics and longshoremen and shipyard welders. How many of them had stayed on? Their little bungalows, with their warm old wooden fixtures were selling for north of $750,000 now.

The slightly rundown streets of White Center still held their familiarity – the Salvadorean bakery, the pizza place, the bikini baristas in their little plywood shacks, the cardboard boxes of jackfruit outside the grocery stores with Khmer signage, the metal clang of machine shops, a woman smoking a cig and scrolling through her phone on the passenger side of a parked Ford Ranger outside. A blue-haired women in Marvel sweatpants and a mobility scooter rolls past, inclusive pride flag – one of many variations of the inclusive pride flag I was to see over the coming days, like those of marginally different statelets in the Holy Roman Empire – fluttering in the cool breeze.

Cresting a nearby hill, Mount Rainier stood there, as jawdropping as it was the day I first saw her, bright and distant in the sunlight, a nearer and somehow reassuring presence in the 10:00 p.m. twilight reflecting off the glaciers, lights on at the high school baseball stadium, teenagers in hoodies coming home late from band practice, squealing as they jumped on one another’s backs.

I stayed at the cheapest spot I could get that looked like it wouldn’t be a stop on a human trafficking circuit, which I remembered from years ago as douchey in a very specifically ugly, very specifically late ‘00s kind of way – a mix of hard-rawk grunge-era memorabilia, a logo that uses the Brazzers font, and once-sleek black and red furnishings just starting to show their wear and tear. The walls are thin, there’s a woman in Harry Potter pajama pants on the edge of tears in the lobby, but there is something about crumbling downtown hotels, those that have survived in any meaningful capacity, that still resonates with me. Some adolescent fantasy of hopeless mid-century adultery and highways as escape routes to the liberation of a coastal city, no matter how many times those themes have been retread.

The late sunsets are still fucking with me. I think it must still be early, we can’t have been drinking for long, my eyes and body to used to the steady diurnal cycles of the tropics. The wine is sneaking up on me – it’s a natural Austrian red served chilled, because this will be thought of as the era of the chilled natural Austrian red. The only time I can remember eating bacon ice cream was back in Obama’s first term, down the street from here, and I knew then that that time would be thought of as the era of bacon ice cream. Some of the same people were there that day as were here this evening. Everyone was prettier than I remembered.

In the market, the street preachers and the napping junkies and crowds of Asian tourists gathering around the original Starbucks were still there, and somehow I’m glad of it – I even recognized a homeless man from years earlier, actually looking a bit more trim and healthy.  The little shop where I had first haphazardly tried to write something daring and long-form was still there too, and I stopped in and drank tea and remembered what it was like to have a whole life of writing ahead of me. The overenthusiastic Millennial theater kids had grown up and were replaced with corseted femboys. The corseted femboys on both sides of the cashier’s counter talked about what time they would be at the party that night, the same way we had when we had stood on both sides of the cashier’s counter.

Bacon ice cream. Chilled natural Austrian red.

And that night, they went to their party. And I went and danced and sang with some of those people who were prettier than I remembered, as I celebrated the nuptials of two of the sweetest people I know, and they too were prettier than I remembered, as they had their first marital kiss on a boat with a gorgeous view of the skyline, and the rain turned to a perfect clear sunset after.

And then we danced and the Fernet flowed and we sang karaoke in the same Korean-style noraebang that we used to sneak liquor into in our early twenties. Coming back from the bathroom, I saw a solo couple through the slit in the door, his cock in her hand, and somehow I could only think… good for them.

The next morning, I drank the free coffee in the lobby, because of course they proudly advertise their complementary Stumptown. My old high school buddy picked me up and we walked around the Ballard Locks, and around my old neighborhood, and the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried. We still talked with the same dorky passion we did in high school, about satellite photography and cooking techniques, about the assorted insanities of the world we’d inherited. He didn’t have time to play music as much anymore, I didn’t have time to bake bread like I used to. In the evening, the lights of downtown seemed colder than ever. The cold light emanates forth from the not-quite-geodesic domes on Lenora Street, in what I had remembered as a neighborhood of old shipping warehouses just starting to be replaced with noodle bars and hot yoga studios, made all the more hideous by their being not quite geodesic. An architecture that feigns the organic. “Look, Daddy’s balls.” We bro-hug and I wave him goodnight. I do my best to turn my eyes away from the cold fluorescent lights above, the ugly glass-box bars with ESPN playing silently with closed captions, with business Americans getting schnockered on IPA.

And yet I couldn’t avoid them, at least not fully. I tried to give each of the devils their due. I tried to listen to and empathize with the loudmouthed tech bro, before he referred to his “vibe tribe” (I researched that to see if that was an actual thing, and it’s also the name of an Israeli psy-trance DJ, natch). I tried to smile and nod along to the conversation of a wealthy Harley-Davidson collector from the Midwest, before he began verging into QAnon territory and his wife pulled him back – “honey, not everyone believes the same things you do.” I couldn’t help but prod the wine bar day-drunk businesswoman as she talked about fucking her way around The Villages, Florida (yep, the giant retirement community) and loudly accusing me of being judgmental in my silence – a reminder that women are the only ones who still try to imitate the cast of Mad Men, that particular boys’ club having long devolved into a bunch of cargo-shorts douchebags, gamers, and Wall Street man-children. All three, really, seemed to be chasing a vision of America – a hippie utopia, a white picket fence and crewcut 1950s suburb, Don Draper in a suit – that had long since dissolved.

“The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

 

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it…

 

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.

 

All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

 

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

-- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, who himself abandoned his family and walked down the railroad track in the midst of a psychotic break, not long before penning those words.

But even in a world of grotesques you find that true beauty. You wind up moving past them, and in the dive bar with your old friend, seeing more people, all of them pretty in their own weird way, Italian and Filipino, Ethiopian and Lao, dancing over the sticky floors. You chase your dirt-cheap Rainier with Chartreuse Verte. Around the corner, there are brass bands playing and the local Bandidos chapter is parked out front, and they seem, strangely, to be vibing just like everyone else. You meet another writer, maybe a decade or so older, and she tells you about trying to express yourself in the fundamentally uncaring world in which we find ourselves.

And in this moment, there we were. Me and my other self. Our paths met, crossed.

Before diverging in new directions again.

And not long after I poured the last of my American change in a coffee stand tip cup at Seatac. And I was back over the ocean again, neatly tucked into the path that I had chosen.

Being a Socialist Sucks, I Do It Anyway

Really, the title says it all. That’s my for-sale-baby-shoes-never-worn for life. But if you have similar desire to elaborate a catechism of masochism, in a manner inarguably said better by people cleverer than myself (and yeah, after I started this and before I finished it, I read Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag, shrill and smug as she is, she is also far more articulate than I am), read on.

So why am I this way?

To go back to the beginning, it was sometime as a teenager that I first had to confront the American political spectrum in any real way, with the beginner’s mind of a young person who has to begin to negotiate their place in the world. But it was hard not to feel alienated (pretty normal, that). Not only was the reprehensible Bush II in the White House, the Democrats seemed like pussies at best, coconspirators at worst. Even when Jon Stewart functioned as the lone voice in the wilderness against the editorial boards of the NYT, WaPo, and so forth in his steadfast opposition to the Iraq catastrophe, he just seemed so damn smug about it (although now that 15+ years have passed, I’ll give him credit for calling his series on Iraq “Mess o’ Potamia,” yeah that’s clever).

So I foolishly – since I knew I didn’t much care for Republicans or Democrats – thought of myself as a “centrist” of some kind. Both parties, despite whatever the ideological differences they may have, primarily consist of dipshits. I despise, and continue to despise, the conservative values of allegiance to nation, religion, and tradition, and I despise, and continue to despise, the American liberal use of guilt as an organizing principle. In my defense, I was like 15, and given the alienation of political news in America from concrete or material concerns, I barely thought about policy, as the news media had lulled me, into focusing on superficial cultural signifiers in lieu of analysis. And as I was disgusted by the era in which I found myself, I found myself likewise disgusted by the neocons and neolibs.

Dissatisfied, I cobbled together what I could. After all, humans are bricoleurs, and in particular teenagers. And about all the things, human are the most bricoleur about their politics, regardless of the labels they assign themselves. Which in my case was some combination of New Deal and Great Society social democracy, the legacy of the 19^th Century prairie populists and IWW, and more pertinently, Dead Kennedys and Rage Against the Machine lyrics.

It was only when I got out of my little yellow-dog Democrat town that I realized my ideas could be better understood not as centrism at all, but as socialism, or even (gasp!) communism. So, being a dork, I read and read. I read the people I continue to look back to, Adorno, Benjamin, Naomi Klein, big Karl M himself, and countless others on the way. I read, I argued, I tried to figure out my position in the world and on the world, beginning with the simple proposition that political democracy was only a first step, economic democracy would be second. But I knew even then that I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Because, well, one thing you learn early on is that socialists have a tendency to lose, and the finer the socialist, the more likely the loss. To find the truly noble spirits, you have to look to Salvador Allende, offing himself in Santiago to avoid capture by Pinochet’s men, to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg gunned down by German cavalrymen, to Fred Hampton shot in his sleep by the Chicago PD, to Jacopo Arbenz in lonely exile after the CIA organized his ouster, stalked by spies, forcibly separated from his family, until his own lonely death. And even the quiet reformers, the European socialists who pushed forward the meteoric rise in the average standard of living across Western Europe in the wake of World War II, all I had to do was pick up the newspaper to look at how their victories were even more quietly being reversed.

But in the darkness, one’s eyes are keen for a glimmer of light.

And in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, as I saw myself become yet another precarious subject tossed about on the waves, I saw points of light come and go. I saw the Occupy movement rise spontaneously and then fall just as spontaneously – despite the admittedly real attempts at sabotage, crackdown, and infiltration, law enforcement could safely bet that our own foolish horizontal organizing pattern would be our downfall. I watched with shock and delight as the 2016 Bernie campaign picked up massive momentum across the post-industrial parts of America, only to be ratfucked hard by the Democratic establishment who didn’t want anything to interfere with the coronation of Hillary Regina (whoops). I was really ready to reload for the 2020 Bernie campaign, after four years of idiot rule, my attitude more militant than ever… only to see the same pattern repeat itself, with my side being radically unprepared to handle an unfair playing field. I was delighted to see righteous anger in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd (which while not being socialist protests, did highlight broader themes of injustice), only to see cops play the crybully card and emerge even better-funded.

And then as the pandemic continued, as our leaders shock-doctrined their way into even greater wealth, as ordinary people further barricaded their mind palaces of one kind or another -- whether that’s QAnon shit, or vampire’s-castle radlib tone policing, or zero COVID paranoia, or any other kind of flagellating attempt at answers at a time when all hope is extinguished.

We failed. The horror continues unabated.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch the sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We all had the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

And I, too, retreated. Not that I was ever a capital-A activist, but I was an enthusiastic participant, one with actual political hopes that are now pretty much dead. I was inside for a while, and then I wasn’t. My sense of hope, however flickering, never really returned.

My material circumstances have become less precarious, and I’ve settled into a placid bohemianism (none of my post-2008 alley-scrounged mattresses). I may not have gone full white picket fence, but I am approaching what the French have called “bobo” status for decades, a term which was once fine, but was then ruined by the criminally smooth-brained David Brooks. But suffice it to say that the volumes of Marx on my bookshelf abut my wine collection.

An old friend who once vomited in my face once had a better word for it, stilyagi status -- A reference to the Moscow youth toward the end of Stalin’s reign who cultivated a vaguely “American” aesthetic sense. No matter how much Westerners like to gush about the political subversion and transgression of countercultures, they pretty much all constitute a capitulation. It’s been a long time since anyone went from abjuring culottes to chopping off Louis XVI’s ugly head.

But – and I don’t know what sickness this is – I can’t bring myself to truly not care. I still thrill at every successful unionization drive and successful insurgent leftist political campaign in the Global South, I still feel the need to tend to my library of Frankfurt School thinkers, to seek consolation there, and pray that somehow a path forward remains. In my slightly pathetic way, I still have a vague hope that truth can still equal beauty.