In the Habsburg Lands

A face followed me through the lands of Central Europe, the rosy-cheeked visage of Empress Elisabeth, better-known by her grotesquely cutesy German diminutive, “Sisi.” I saw her image everywhere, rosy-cheeked and half-smiling, dressed in a silver tulle gown with elaborate pins in her braided hair. She was, in Europe in the 19^th Century, the Diana of her time, charming the glittering social life of the European capitals with her legendary beauty and cannily maneuvering her way through society and court politics.

I'm afraid I didn't see the appeal – maybe it's just modern standards but I saw an awfully normal-looking woman obsessed with the maintenance of her girlish waist, her personality so wrapped up in her appearance that she would not permit herself to be photographed later in life, married off to the decidedly schlubby Emperor Franz Josef I, heir to the throne of the Habsburgs, those Targaryens of the Alps, and she watched their inbred children play cowboys and Indians in their sailor suits in the Schonbrunn Palace. She would eventually be assassinated by an idiotically grinning Italian anarchist as the contradictions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire built, until a fateful day in Sarajevo involving her fail-nephew and a Serbian bullet, and eventually the empire's death in the negotiation rooms of Saint-Germain and Trianon.

But no matter – her face followed me everywhere through the Habsburg Lands, reduced to an icon, in the classical sense. An object rather than a human.

One of many objects of abject horror, at that. The horror is found in the twee little wooden houses with giant crucifixes on the side, in all the choirs of chubby middle aged men singing hunting lieder in Tyrolean caps, in magic flutes and Lippizaner stallions and giggly rococo architecture and tales of courtly love, all the tourist traps mit schlag.

 

And yet it was impossible for me not to adore the peculiar artistic expressions of the horror burbled up in those twilight years of empire that Franz Josef and Sisi presided over and those following uncertain years before the Anschluss, the invasion of the Sudeten, and the Arrow Cross regime finally put an end to the entrancing decadence. I was far more interested in metamorphoses and trials, a dream story playing out on the streets of Vienna that would unfortunately be remembered in the way it inspired Kubrick's final belly flop, in Venuses in furs on remote country estates, in Zweig's post-office girls and the snows of Gregor von Rezzori's yesteryear. In the poses of Egon Schiele's contorted subjects. I have little use for Mozart – I'll take Mahler, thank you very much.

Maybe it's because I see the reflection of then in now.

I followed the rivers, the Adige and the Inn and the Danube and the Vltava. I arrived via Padua, where Giotto and Galileo called the modern world forth, and where I drank the little cups of espresso topped with mint foam in the cafe where the Revolutions of 1848 were fomented, where Joyce wrote about Ireland from afar, through Verona, Trento, and the Brenner Pass, under the clear white cliffs of the Dolomites.

Like countless youths on their wandervogel in these parts many years before, and whose tracks I often very deliberately followed, complete with the shelters they built in the last few glorious years of Red Vienna, I took to the mountains, ready for cool clean air and pokey country train rides and hearty pension breakfasts and peaks to ascend. Each day I chose a path, with little plan, on my map of the Hohe Tauern region, and set off, finding the best ways to ford streams and scramble over boulders. There were waterfalls to walk alongside, cow skulls nailed above the door of each high meadow alm, there was sun glittering off the glaciers, there was the distant view to the fairytale schloss perched on the mountainside where, in a more sublime era, Aristotle Onassis and the Shah of Shahs had listened to chamber orchestras and tucked into truffled quails, and down below, there was the little alley where the brilliant Anton Webern had gone out for a late night smoke break only to get blasted by a trigger-happy US Army cook. I started each day with unpronunceable whole grain breads and local cheeses and rowan berry conserves prepared by a tubby hausfrau who didn't speak a world of English, and I ended each day with generous pours of Oktoberfest beer and Grüner Veltliner and plum schnapps alongside kingly portions of trout and venison to get me ready for my next day with 30 kilometers or so of hiking, 2000+ meters of elevation change.

Yet I couldn't lose myself to the reverie. Each glacier I traipsed over was dead, a rump-end bit of filthy ice in the cirque of a long valley, piles of gravel inhospitable to life. The mood wasn't helped by the Euroshits in cashmere sweaters in their Audis at the base of the mountain, on a day trip from Zell am See.

Less Zweig's world of yesterday, more the modern Austria. Of the piano teacher that Elfriede Jelinek wrote about, the losers and corrections and woodcutters of Thomas Bernhard. And ergo the playing of funny games seemed a reasonable response.

So onwards to the old capital of Mitteleuropa culture, the city of Metternich's congress under gloomy skies. I sat in the dining car staring out, Ethan Hawke not meeting his Julie Delpy, to arrive in a brooding city of gray and beige stone, tourists drinking spritzes and pretending to be warm in the outdoor cafes under lurid neon. I choose a promising spot – a self-styled “American” bar, from a time when such a distinction was meaningful, with a sign saying “no sightseeing.” This should be good.

And it was. I spent the next 36 hours in a whirlwind, the kind that should not be described lest it fall apart in memory. A Schiele self-portrait and a Schiele beauty, on canvas and off. Hunters in the snow. Minerals in the wunderkammer. I'll leave it there.

Only to be followed by the sense of desolation that follows true happiness. It was then that I saw Emperor Franz Josef's shitter. Apropos.

 

Northward, then, through the Czech lands, which bore a shocking visual similarity – not even a similarity, a clone – with the rolling hills of Eastern Iowa where so many Czech farmers wound up, right down to the Harvestore silos. And onto Prague, where I was greeted on Wilsonova by an aging platinum blonde taking a smoke break and staring down the world with utter contempt outside the sort of “gentlemen's club” that caters to Brits that caption their photos “What an absolute legend!” She was already wearing her PVC thigh-high boots at 4 in the afternoon, made all the more incongruous by her coffee-stained pink hoodie.

But what could be a better city to arrive at in a bitter mood on a fall afternoon, with its leering Art Nouveau signage for casinos and cheap hotels, signs reading “EROTIC CITY” flickering in the rain, foxlike girls walking swiftly past and meth-addled and toothless gutter punks smoking and bullshitting outside dispensaries, statuary of blackened saints and gilded trumpeters on the bridges over the Moldau, the darkness made all the more glaring by the aggressive attempts at selling happiness to the tourist hordes, ice bars with robot servers, chanting Hare Krishnas (didn't know they still existed), self-conscious naughtiness, street magicians with curled mustaches, half-price specials on Becherovka shots, electro-swing covers of Macklemore, strip clubs catering to groups of young Arab men in matching black t-shirts and tight fades, all the invocations to drink and fuck and spend. I drank. I didn't fuck. I spent more than I should have.

And I took a broken-down train with workingmen drinking plastic two liter bottles of Staropramen at 8 in the morning to the mysterious little town of Terezin, in the swamplands along the Elbe, where the ambitious Gavrilo Princip breathed his last inside the star fortress built for the protection of Habsburg Bohemia, and where thousands of ghettoized Jews from around the Reich were sent to look serviceable for when the Red Cross came around to make sure everything was above board (the Red Cross seemed to think so). Their children's colored-pencil drawings of princesses and football games hang in what was once the camp school, children who thought that as uncomfortable as this was, they would some day return to their homes in Augsburg and Krakow.

Say what you want about there being no atheists in the foxholes, I have never in my life been more certain in my refusal to believe in a just and kindly god.

Their spirits followed me down the Danube to Budapest, where it was impossible not to see the return of the fascist impulse, not least in Orban's Hungary, in a city where life continued more or less as normal, even as things got darker. Not least in the makeshift memorial to the murdered partisans outside the hideous authorized neo-neoclassical war memorial. And not least in the long trains of flatbed cars with camo olive-drab troop trucks on the back en route to Kherson and points east. And I stayed in what had once been the Jewish quarter, and what still – somehow – kind of was. A neighborhood of narrow, hemmed-in streets with unpainted tenements and passing drunks and graffiti'd alleys, an Old World equivalent to the Lower East Side of New York (at least as it once was) in more than a few ways.

Sure, I could be writing about the splendid Baroque streets, the Buda Castle – Empress Sisi rearing her head again – ancient hot springs, but what would be the point? After a while in Europe, the ostensible wonders blur together. Distinguishing between them would be a chore.

I finished my last night in the heart of the Jewish Quarter at one of the famed ruin bars that rose up in the abandoned houses of Budapest after the wall fell in '89, when rock music was still considered subversive, when a squat looked like a squat and not like a fashion campaign trying to look like a squat. But I was – finally – happy.

And for the first time I set down my notebook and just soaked it all in to the best of my ability. Sure I felt a little bit too old to be there (in just a few hours I will no longer be a coveted 18-35 male), but hey, the vibe was good, the beer was good, Phoebe Bridgers was playing on the soundsystem well past the distortion point, and if the world is burning, I might as well dance through it.

And if she's reading this – to a certain mermaid a little off the Stephansplatz, I'm terribly glad you were there to dance with me.

The Most Latrine Republic

Venice is, arguably, the most beautiful city in the world. You don't need me to tell you that. It's also a tourist-infested, hideously expensive, and frequently reeking dump, and you probably don't need me to tell you that either.

This is compounded by the fact that virtually every Venetian I encountered was a dick. I don't blame them, entirely. All of those awkward hordes of Brits, Americans, French, Chinese, and Germans wear you every down, every neurotic food phobia – “como se dice 'vegan options'?” – every demand for snappier customer service, every slackjawked gawker getting in your way when you're just trying to pick your kids up from school, it takes its toll.

But my god, those infinite tangled alleys, the weight of centuries, the tiny standing-room only enotecas, the elegant interplay of land and water...

And so my mood in La Serenissima oscillated accordingly, between rapt enthusiasm and wonder and absolute dejected cynicism, from the moment I arrived as a Marco-Polo-in-reverse on the fast train from Milan.

I could admire the splendid beauty of Saint Mark's, beneath its Baroque clock with Zodiac symbols and its intricate pattern of gold stars on a royal blue background, watched over by the severe and imperious winged lion that stares across the city from infinite bas reliefs, its snarl as cruel as the statue of the Assyrian demon in the opening sequence from The Exorcist, a symbol of a conception of the world constructed on wholly different terms... only to be brought crashing back to reality as I lined up to enter the basilica, only to realize one could enter a QR code to pay double the price for the priority queue – tiered-service neoliberalism married to an institution that would rather spend its bucks sheltering sex offenders rather than restoring the masterworks that their faith supposedly built.

Similarly, on the other side of the Grand Canal, I traipsed through the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, admiring the lovingly collected works of Magritte and Kandinsky and Joseph Cornell and Duchamp and my beloved Di Chirico, as the autumn light danced through the cool white hallways, as I idly wondered whether I would be finishing the day and pairing my evening cicchetti with an Aperol spritz or a lush, apricot-scented glass of Lugana, reminded of every thing I love about visiting Italy, only to run afoul of a horsefaced and posh Brit sneering before Max Ernst – and even, God help her, Di Chirico's La Torre Rosso – whining “oh no, I don't like this a-tall...,” wondering why the fuck she would even come at all, this updated E.M. Forster character with her potbellied and Tory-voiced husband muttering about “shithole countries” on the way out, and further wondering why the fuck I didn't keep my earbuds in.

The Biennale was on, and being a good pilgrim, I made my way there on my knees, only to find the whole thing presented via the worst sort of mushmouthed academic jargon commonplace in the art world, pioneered by hucksters like Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, and Luce Irigaray. Doubly depressing was the fact that the main exhibition's focus on female surrealists had taken their frequently militant socialist politics and stripped them away, replacing them with a vague witchiness and an even vaguer anticolonialism. And so all these brave women who in many cases sacrificed so much for their commitment to truth and solidarity were dragooned into service as handmaidens of late-stage capitalism – poor Cecilia Vicuña stuffed into a pussy hat.

But no matter, I loved the art, and the Venice Biennale most notably features pavilions from various countries competing for the big prize, and so it becomes a more bohemian version of Epcot, and I mean that in the best of ways. Let's take a global tour... 

Denmark – Horrifyingly real sculptures of eviscerated centaurs, slashed apart and noosed, amid the wreckage of the pastoral farmstead. The sort of thing that gets right under your skin. Is it any wonder this comes from the same country as Lars von Trier? The hell is going on in Denmark? 

 

Romania – Video of people having sex, gay men with “Elfriede Jelinek” written across their arms (hell yeah), a severely disabled man lain down and fucked by a curvy blonde in thoroughly kinky dungeon sex. Weirdly hot. 

Japan – Artful arrangements of ethereal light, because what could be more simple and elegant and jawdroppingly gorgeous? 

US – It's very funny to me that the State Department is going out of its way to lampshade its support for black feminist art, because, well, I think we can safely say that many feminists of African origin in the Global South have a few words with regard to the US State Department. 

Germany – Mostly empty, but the building itself is partially taken apart to reveal how it was constructed under fascist regimes, and it's as intellectually rigorous and abstract and stern-faced as I would hope. 

UK – Painful attempt at fun. Lots of women making music, and videos of them making music in Abbey Road Studio, when I'd rather just listen to the music. Even Brits can make good music. 

France – Actual fun, because French people are far more capable of having fun. An absolute junk-drawer wonderland of cast-off artifacts from the Algerian and French mid-century, welcoming enough that people were actually sitting around and talking and chilling and laughing, because after that much po-faced bullshit, sometimes you just want a glass of wine and a couch. 

Australia – Confusing imagery on loop I tried to figure out. Then I read the artist's statement, saying it was supposed to be confusing imagery. Mission accomplished, mate. 

Spain – Literally nothing there. Supposed to be a commentary? Apparently? 

Canada – Mentioned revolution in the title. The sample image they used was – I swear to God I'm not making this up – a Stanley Cup riot. 

Egypt – Uteruses that look like Kirby. 

Russia – (missing entry)

Writing that cheered me up. I hope it cheered you up too.

And all that stupidity, all that backlog of grievances, it quickly fades when you actually get to your second Aperol spritz, and you walk around Venice at sunset, feeling it a little, enjoying the long shadows falling over the lagoon. Sure, there's a tubby middle-aged American couple in matching Pittsburgh sports hoodies (Steelers for him, Pirates for her), wifey with a mobility cane for her rotundness, right in front of you blocking the view, but unironically bless their hearts for actually making it this far from Western PA. I smile briefly, and turn up The Psychedelic Furs as loud as they will go as the sun slowly sinks over the Lido. And if that doesn't appeal, I don't know what's wrong with you.

There is a melancholy in my last night in Venice – the kind that comes at the end of any visit to any place, even if it's at the beginning of a trip. And part of that is knowing that this is the last time I'll be in this place for a long time. Maybe forever.

Maybe I'll die before I get another sunset over the Lido. Maybe that final acqua alta will come and swallow this most vulnerable of cities whole.

But for now I have this. And that is enough.

The Horror of Positive Thinking

 A few weeks ago, one of the leading lights of the American left, Barbara Ehrenreich, died of cancer. She would have preferred that wording – “died of cancer,” I suspect, and not the euphemistic “passed away,” as she was a bitter opponent of all forms of bullshit, particularly those delivered with sanctimony. She's probably best known for her masterful journalism about life at minimum wage in Nickel and Dimed, but real heads will also know she coined the term “professional managerial class,” or about the brief fracas after she said about Marie Kondo's heavily accented TV English: 

“It’s OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.” 

… precipitating a histrionic response by a purple-haired chick with a mermaid emoji in her name, who then gave us one of the world's silliest copypastas (sing it with me!):

“You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the intersectionality of the multiplicity of your offenses.” 

But to me, the thing that Barbara Ehrenreich did that resonated the most was not her Wigan Pier-style reportage, it was her writing about the ways in which the American ideology of positivity damages the soul and reflects an atomized society.

To sum up, Ehrenreich got diagnosed with breast cancer, a particularly cruel twist considering that she didn't have any of the major risk factors. However, instead of empathy with suffering, what Ehrenreich found, over and over again, was an attempt to turn rain into liquid sunshine. She was repulsed by the way she wasn't suffering, she was “fighting,” she wasn't a victim, she was a “survivor,” all of which at the end of the day made her feel lonelier, more isolated, and more shushed, discouraged even from feeling panic and grief at the very real chance of her own imminent mortality. It didn't help that with her particular diagnosis of breast cancer, the pink-ribbon capitalists were among the people she had most vigorously criticized.

This is something I'd suspected for a long time, wet blanket that I am. My 7th grade science teacher liked to remind us moody tweens that a frown required us to work more muscles than a smile. I cannot think of a more crystal-clear example of sunny idiocy.

Of course, back then, I didn't know why I felt the way I did. I just knew that something about my teacher's comment seemed very fundamentally wrong-headed.

Yet the examples hit like a barrage, again and again, throughout my adolescence and afterwards. George W. Bush's premature-cumshot mission accomplished? The runaway success of The Secret and the revival of “positive thinking,” more or less a glorification of how four year olds see the world? The 2010s influencers preaching positivity and wellness against a millennial-pink and sage-green background? They all seemed to be indicators of that same sunny idiocy I encountered back in the piss-reek corridors of my town's middle school.

It wasn't just that it was cringe (although cringe it was). But as Ehrenreich elucidated, there really is a dark side to all that positivity – it does preclude empathy, it does gloss over actual problems that may exist in the world and with oneself. And this in turn makes it the handmaiden of a social doctrine whereby every problem one has is one's own fault, whereby any misery is just laziness, an ideology that is, like so many others throughout the Anglo-American world, the descendant of some of the worst parts of Protestantism.

I'm glad the term “toxic positivity” has gained some traction over the past year or two, as shit has seemed more fucked. Because facing down the twists and turns of a global pandemic, the inevitable threat of climate change, spiraling wealth inequality, revanchist nationalism, and other assorted general bad vibes, how can anyone not be experiencing some kind of angst?

And in those moments, if you're anything like me, you don't want someone to say you're looking at the world with tired eyes, or that you can start by going vegan and not using plastic straws, or – and this is truly some hellworld shit – that you need to start practicing mindfulness and (that sickliest of words) gratitude. You want someone to pass you the joint and simply say “I feel you, man.”

Which is what I got when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's books and essays. And to you, dear reader, no matter where you are – I feel you, man.

Hail Satan

Yeah, I clickbaited. Click my bait, bitches.

I've seen a sort of revival of sorts, over the past few months, and particularly in the light of the Dobbs decision and the takeover of the American court system by glazed-eyed and cross-clutching dipshits, of the Internet atheism of my teenage years. All those words I hadn't seen in any meaningful way since then – “sky daddy,” “fundie,” and all the rest – have come back, and by golly, we're just one rage comic away from a Flying Spaghetti Monster and it's 2006 all over again. It was a simpler time. The transcendental evil was still Dick Cheney, and Kanye was still dope, when a great many of my high school classmates could still see their penises.

But the thing is, I hated that shit back then. It's only with the revival of Christian nationalist nonsense of the sort I thought had been left behind in the Dubya years that the thought has crossed my head, again, that organized religion is a pox upon the planet.

Unlike many who think this, I never had any kind of grand epistemic break with God. I was fortunate enough to have been raised in a household where the desert faiths that informed what we loosely call “Western civilization” had largely been left behind, leaving only a body of literature, art, music, and architecture that could and should be appreciated on its own merit, absent any faith. I was the product of a socially Christian father who didn't believe in much of anything, and a mother who had fully turned her back on an upbringing rooted in the frigid and haunted form of Catholicism that thrived on the banks of the Moselle before being exported to the Kansas prairie. So I was pretty much left to figure out what faith meant to me, personally, and the whole god-or-gods thing never made much sense. My faith in Santa Claus lasted much longer – at least he provided evidence.

The main religious influences on me in my childhood were the rites and prayers of my still deeply Catholic extended family, which never made any more sense to me than Egyptian or Greek myth, and those stories were way, way cooler. After all, how could the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross compare to a jackel-headed god of the dead, or to the celestial Days of Our Lives playing out among the pantheon of Mount Olympus? Furthermore, the religious beliefs of my classmates, many of whose parents had instilled in them the full-bore Satanic Panic of the late '80s and early '90s, seemed downright creepy, as if El Diablo could be summoned by a game of D&D.

I did my best to respect other faiths – growing up in Middle America, where the vast majority around me were Catholics or Protestants of a predominantly Lutheran flavor, I certainly saw plenty of decent Christians around, even if Christianity writ large seemed remarkably indecent. And of course I knew that despite the Falwells, Netanyahus, and Khomeinis of the world, there were plenty of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who wanted nothing to do with their weaponized bullshit. And those who were informed by their faith to do good works and advocate for a more just and peaceful world.

Which is a big reason why the fedora atheists of the late oughties did nothing for me. Richard Dawkins' evangelism on the subject just seemed like an earnest effort to kill everyone's buzz, Steven Pinker is/was the smuggest man on the planet (and I'll bet he was even smugger on his trips to Epstein's island), Christopher Hitchens was a master rhetorician whose distaste for religion overcame his erstwhile left politics, leading him to Bush and Blair's field of rakes in Iraq, and Sam Harris revealed himself to be very, very, very dumb, whose books – even then – felt like they were written by a smart 8th grader.

Which is to say nothing of any of their army of interlocutors and stans.

A remarkable number of online atheists of the era discovered that they hated feminists just as much as Jesus freaks, and were shockingly willing to get into bed with drooling Christian nationalists, given their shared revulsion at not just Islamist militancy, but ordinary Muslims. Only a handful of the professional le skeptics and le rationalists of the era managed to escape this idiocy, and the few I can think of were all associated with The Young Turks to some degree. This handful – Ana Kasparian and Kyle Kulinski coming immediately to mind – truly had a commitment to the higher virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity (as opposed to just dunking on slackjawed yokels), and this manifested itself in a commitment to democratic socialist politics.

I'd like to think that I've matured concordantly. As I've said a million times before, the oughties were a particularly bovine time. Maybe it's because I was a snotty smartypants teenager at the time, with a more or less universal contempt for mainstream culture, but solidarity seemed like a waste of time when compared to reading Foucault and doing all the drugs. My copout may not have been Dawkins, but it absolutely was Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil saying “if God had chosen to write the Bible in Greek, why did he choose to do it so poorly?” Just as edgelord, but the hipster version. The Pitchfork Festival version as opposed to the Comic-Con version. I was probably a dick – cue cloying reality TV voice – but I just need you to like, respect my jourrrrrrrrrrrrrney.

The wave of course receded. I grew up, and for a time, the Christian right became less of a threat compared with the numerous other stupidities.

Which brings us to now.

So I have to ask. How many adamant new atheists I see cropping up were cognizant humans in the original wave, and how many are simply teenagers? How many fellow oldheads are out there, still somehow immature? How many are still meme'ing on r/atheism like it's 2007?

My stance is the same, assholes gonna asshole, no matter what. I'm sure that dude who stabbed Salman Rushdie would have had no trouble finding some other god than Allah to glom onto.

Because the root of the problem is, I maintain, the authoritarian personality, the personality that commits to a higher figure and will do anything to defend its honor, submissive to those in higher positions but dictatorial towards those in lower positions – whether that is the yahoo with a Don't Tread on Me flag back home, or the sage and peaceful Buddhists who feel at their duty to participate in the genocide of Rohingya next door in Myanmar.

But there is a flipside for religion for me, one I find truly appealing. The idea of faith not as a submission, but as a painful struggle. When I read the mythologies of the world's religion, what appeals to me is the Jewish prophets who screamed at and cursed out God, or the long dark night of the soul of Saint John of the Cross fleeing the Inquisitors. It is the gloomy Paul Tillich, standing in the ruins of his native Germany after the Second World War, pointing out that to ask whether God exists is an absurdity – a question meaningless to God, who is beyond such trite distinctions. The gentle and loving god of the Precious Moments coloring books my grandmother tried to give me as a small child never appealed to me. The idea of an unknowable other, a hope beyond all hopes... well, that I can relate to.

However, what I don't have is faith. All I have is that grand agnostic question mark.

The only thing I know is what I oppose, which is that very same authoritarian attitude, whether it clothes itself in the language of nation or religion or whatever. And I know what the appropriate response to the authoritarian personality is at all times: to raise my middle finger and tell all y'all to suck my motherfucking dick.

In Dark Times

There's something reassuring about all things teleological. Sure, we'd like to there's the tidy ending. Not necessarily Cinderella and Prince Charming living happily ever after, but we'd like to think that even after Rick convinces Ilsa that she can only be happy if she gets on that plane, he can still turn to Louis and tell him that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship.

And yet paradoxically, the teleology doesn't have to be positive to be appealing. Hell, there's something more appealing, in our time, to a more fatally pessimistic mode of thinking. The firm belief that apocalypse is inevitable, or civil war, or some other catastrophe. The belief that we are coming to an end of some kind, whether it is the redemptive, millenarian, phoenix-from-the-ashes kind, or a final nail, an endpoint for humanity – the conclusion that a species unfortunate enough to attain consciousness will inevitably self-destruct.

Apocalypse is – so the think pieces in the Atlantic tell me – a deeply seductive thought process, and one to which I've always been prey. Perhaps this planet, it always seemed to me, deserved a mercy killing.

It's a pretty typically teenage, typically edgelord way of evaluating the world, and in the angst of adolescence, against the background of Iraq and the Patriot Act and the rising seas, apocalypse presented itself as the only logical conclusion. This thought pattern was reinforced by the way in which I saw the general populace, rightly or wrongly, as optimistic on the balance. And so to think the opposite is to imply that one has access to a sort of divine gnosis, a realization that you see the world how it really is. Wake up, sheeple, and all that. I read Nietzsche. I pored through the various 9/11 and JFK conspiracies. I ate magic mushrooms and watched televangelists in rathole apartments, burrito wrappers fallen behind the radiator, because at the end of the day, we're ALL fucking hallucinating, aren't we, man? 

Yet it seems that this strain of thought has become more and more widespread, even among the ostensibly adult among us. Find the pattern of your choosing, erect your own mind palace – and since the Internet has become all-pervasive, more and more blueprints for individual mind palaces have become accessible. Boom, you're one of the few whose third eye is on its way to opening.

And naturally this extends to apocalypse.

This kind of nihilism on principle is generally though of as something that ought be put away along with the other childish things. It is expected that one grows older, one grows wiser. One gets some actual skin in the game, learns to love, raises and protects children, and then it's not a mercy killing anymore. It would mean the death of the creatures you brought into this world, whose cribs you look down on in your darker moments and in whom you see light, whom you want nothing more than to protect, mind, body, and soul. And so it is a thought that must be banished. Life must go on, because it simply must. Sure, plenty of people operate from a default cynicism, but when I talk to be-child'd friends who have that same default cynicism, a lot of them have taken a sort of Pascal's Wager or William James will-to-believe approach. Even if this is not my natural cosmology, I choose to believe it.

One is an asshole if one cites the problems with both Pascal's and William James' theories in these situations, so since I'm not in one of those situations, I can air a simple version now. Both nihilism and anti-nihilism are, of course, irrational positions, which does not mean they are bad, but simply that they are not rational. Rather, they are articles of faith, sets of axioms that one uses to frame and interpret everything else.

It would be the height of arrogance to assume I'm somehow exempt, a 2014-era Youtuber presuming to be an infinitely and supremely rational individual thinker. So I have to ask what my articles of faith are, what axioms I use. I am another nightcrawler struggling in the polystyrene cup, fighting in the mud and shit and praying that I'm not the next one on the fishhook. Just like you.

And so if I take everything I see into consideration, the only thing I can anticipate – to the extent I can anticipate anything in this tesseract – is a long trudge towards oblivion, no totalizing wars, no grand epistemic shifts, just everything slowly, almost imperceptibly falling apart, the pain and insecurity of previous eras reintroduced, without the Medieval sense of community and purpose, or the Enlightenment sense that things must get better, to palliate the suffering and horror. Destruction as a slow loss of radio signal, without the ever-so-satisfying clarity and certainty of Gehenna.

The sense is omnipresent. The other day I saw two girls of maybe seven or eight, running along the street in front of their mothers, giggling hand in hand and I suddenly felt awful for them, and for what future lay ahead of them.

The only thing that remains is hope, which is in and of itself irrational too.

That's why it's always been the hero of fairytales, from the last creature in Pandora's box to the Disney canon, hasn't it? It's almost an overarching truly irrational and truly universal thing. In one part of the world it's a hope of liberation from being bounded to the endless entropy of the world, in another the promise of undying love. Even Emily Dickinson found it in her morbid heart to pinch its cheek and call it a “thing with feathers.”

Am I the only who's a bit bummed that there's a clinical Adult Hope Scale?

Like so many psychological tests, it's a bullet-point list of statements, each of which one is supposed to agree or disagree with on a sliding scale, and the clinician is supposed to tally up the scores in a particular manner. It's not hard to predict what's on there.

• I energetically pursue my goals

• My past experiences have prepared me well for my future

But notice the trick? The minimum score (0) would be a confident disagreement with all statements, while a maximum (64) would be a confident agreement. A middling “kinda sucks” would be right in the middle, even if that might seem just as painful, a condemnation to eternally kinda sucking.

Never mind the fact that this purely focuses on personal perspective, and more strangely goal-setting. Never mind that one having not done something in the past does not necessarily dictate their future outlook. Never mind that there might be very real problems of poverty, war, environmental destruction, and legitimate terror.

Is there anything more of a bummer than being told about how dark it is before the sun rises, how everything happens for a reason?

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

- Anne Sexton, with whom I have a parasocial relationship, Cinderella

Because to me the truest of hope is that which is fundamentally irrational. That which only exists as a vague and barely held notion, one that you try not to interrogate too much for fear that it might disappear. Not a light at the end of the tunnel. Not a rainbow shown to Noah to indicate his covenant. No. It is the flicker of a face in the crowd, half-seen, on the long subway ride home.

Hideous Interviews With Men in Briefs

When one self-describes as an “introvert,” certain assumptions are made, both by people who identify as such and people who do not. It seems to me most people who call themselves introverts are just assholes hiding behind the language of clinical psychology, but I'd like to think I'm a true introvert – someone who gets their energy from being alone, and someone for whom a weekend cheek-by-jowl with another human, even one I love, is a strain, despite the fact that I like spending time with those around me.

And when I go out into the world, it's far less draining to talk to those who don't know me, to those who don't have any expectations. I don't know whether it's latent charisma or, more likely, the relative social isolation of the past couple years that has made people more talkative around me over the past couple of years. To meet the myriad weirdos of the public sphere – there are basically no stakes. As the teenage-boy fantasy movie I saw like 10 times put it, single-serving friends. They can be saintly and sweethearted. They can be absolute cunts. Sometimes they buy me drinks, not necessarily with the intention of boning me down (those that wish to bone me down, I'm leaving out of this brief musing). Sometimes they buy me drinks because it makes me more obligated to listen to their bullshit. Regardless, I walk away from the situation, to be forgotten by the parties in question in a matter of days.

So let this be a compendium of sorts, with the caveat that it's mostly going to be the gloomier of these myriad weirdos – it's much less interesting to talk about the kind, friendly, wholly ordinary people, or the simply boring people, or even the majority of the cruel and ignorant, who are simply cruel and ignorant, and about whom that's about all there is to say. But if David Foster Wallace took the diseased strains of the human ego and turned it into something both bitterly real and empathetic in his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, then these are my hideous interviews with men in briefs.

Case No. 1:

He, in theory, knows at least some of the same people I do, and he seems several years older than me. At first, the chat is pleasant. It seems we share similar taste in wine and movies, and he seems to fall into one of the most universal categories – a good dude. And yet as the evening continues, I can see him starting to crumble a bit, he starts throwing out phrases like “everyone says I'm an asshole,” and I'm not sure if this is typical Northern European self-deprecation, or whether he is admitting the fact that he is an asshole, or an asshole with a persecution complex who finds other people's interpretation of their asshole behavior to be evidence of their interlocutors' stupidity, and I have to wonder whether or not I should vacate the premises. I slowly sidle away, talking to someone else, until he mutters something a little too loudly to not be noticed, a little too softly to not be audible over the soundsystem, before going back to frowning into his old fashioned. What was it that he muttered? Was it that he felt slighted in some way? Did he feel the world's opinion of him was confirmed? Was this more on the evidence pile? And in my bitter moments, am I any fucking better?

Case No. 2:

He's a tourist here, but a regular tourist – we get them a lot in this part of the world, people for whom Thailand is the standard escape. Many are retirees looking to get a bit of sunshine before returning to higher latitudes, many are the standard sex tourists, a remarkably high number are various flavors of queer people from various countries who enjoy being able to publicly show affection without fear of state-sanctioned violence, and some are a bit cagier in their reasoning. This man is one of them. He's in his fifties, with the muscled-running-to-fat look of aging athletes. I should have known he would start making political points with me, to which I responded as I normally do – state my position, point out why I believe what I do, and push back as appropriate. Of course, he was a Tory, which is to be expected, and pivoted to a different subject the minute that a counter-argument was presented and contradicting himself often enough. And of course he talked about how glad he was we could have a “civil discussion,” and more or less sucked his own dick talking about how civil he was being. I would have left earlier, but the edibles were kicking in and it was raining out. But the more he talked, the more he mentioned his boyhood as the son of an English schoolmaster, I started to feel a bit bad. I imagined a childhood of Protestant morals, in which athletic prowess and high test scores as a child and financial success as an adult had long since become stand-ins for any kind of divine grace, in which law and order had substituted for righteous justice. The jowly middle-class product of a childhood of gray meat and caning. I used to have to listen to The Smiths and read Philip Larkin to encounter this sort of personality.

Case No. 3:

He invites me over for a drink, with a very uniquely Israeli sort of enthusiasm, asking me for advice on writing. I try my best to offer a few succinct pointers, but he's not having it, demanding more, and in exchange he promises me he can teach me how to get any girl I want. I hadn't heard that particular line in a while. It turns out he's in the porn industry, and he's more or less exactly how I imagine an Israeli pornographer to be – someone who's 50 and still seems pretty into hookers, molly, and trance music. He is perplexed as to why I cannot recommend a preferred bordelle.

Case No. 4:

He is a small Thai man of indeterminate age – definitely over 30, but could be anywhere between there and 60, although context clues suggest an age around 40. He's been at some event, and is moderately shitfaced, and strikes up a conversation about cocktails with me – I am, as always, happy to discuss my passion for the Angel Face, the Last Word, and all those other concoctions that conjure up lost worlds in my mind, but he's more focused on a perceived exclusivity. Unfortunately, he claims to know my boss – not my actual boss, but one of the top partners. He points out that whenever he goes to New York, he stays with a friend on Park Avenue. “You've got money too, I know” he says with a smile, as if that's true, and as if that's supposed to be a compliment, a recognition that we can look down on the plebs together. It's a reminder that in this part of the world, the elites make no attempts to humanize their image. There's no Bill Gates proudly driving a Subaru, no Mark Zuckerberg handing out grilled cheese sandwiches at Burning Man. There is only the man with tobacco-stained teeth showing off his skrilla (and god help me, I just looked up how to spell “skrilla,” because it occurs to me I've never actually heard that word written down). I politely decline a night of clubbing with him. On a Sunday.

And what sticks out about all of these cases is the way in which they reflect my own particular failures – the misanthrope, the self-righteous grandstander, the nihilistic sensualist, the endless consumer. And that in and of itself could constitute a whole set of other failures – the allure of fatalism, a difficulty to self-forgive, and a dreadful terror at the thought that destiny might be real.

I would say it sounds pompous if I quote Hermann Hesse, but fuck it, let's go: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.” – Hermann Hesse, Demian

There but for the grace of god, go I, I think. Maybe you would think you go too.

I try my best to find the wounded heart – the logic that leads these people to where they were, and it's not hard to identify the lines of environment and nation and religion and history, of upbringing and inputs, of the infinitely complex contours of the human mind. And you have to wonder, could they have turned out any different? Could any of us? 

A moment of terror that passed the other day: at lunchtime, I see an man of maybe 80 or 85 shuffling down Silom Road with a walker – he looks exhausted, you can almost feel him squinting through his sunglasses against the glaring midday tropical sun. About my height, dressed not too differently from me. And with the same fucking tattoo in the same fucking place.

I move past, my heart racing, I look back, my elderly doppelganger walking away from me, and I look in the mirrored window of an office tower. Exhaustion on my face. The image of the city reflected and distorted behind me.

The Post-Alito Online Liberal

Of course it happened. Of course in the wake of Justice Alito's memo regarding his plan to eviscerate reproductive rights in America, I made the mistake of looking at social media. And of course what I saw was an army of liberals screeching at anyone who didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 – you know the type, all the “you did this” and what not. I would put up some screenshots here, but they are kind of self-evident.

Because if there's one thing that Democrats should be doing going into a midterm election, it's blaming individuals rather than actually examining and going after systems of power.

Unfortunately, in contemporary American liberalism, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Having given up hope of any form of solidarity or collective action, having reduced every behavior to the level of the atomized individual whose personal moral value is, in Protestant fashion, to be weighed, in perfect lockstep with the neoliberal forces submitting all human life to the cruel logic of market capitalism – save for a few bare, viciously means-tested remaining fragments of the mid-century welfare state – the only thing left to do is to turn to individual actors, and to blame, hector, nag, and whine.

Of course this is amplified by the Internet in all the worst possible ways – all the armchair Ukraine experts and Kremlinologists on Twitter and Reddit have transformed into constitutional-law scholars who are fully able to ascertain the impact of the memo they read half an article about on Politico before rage-skimming on the Loving and Griswold decisions.

So I will take this opportunity to provide a corrective, and, being a good leftist who, as the late great Michael Brooks put it, seeks to be ruthless with systems and kind to people, I will direct my line of questioning at the structures and the persons who hold high ranks within them.

How many of the people who stayed home in the 2016 election in vital swing states were those much-feared but few-in-number Bernie bros who couldn't plug their nose, and how many were people disengaged from the political system after the losses of good union jobs and the destruction of communities in the wake of the free trade programs that the Democrats enthusiastically endorsed?

How many people didn't vote, and don't generally vote, because they suffered under Bill Clinton and Joe Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, people who overwhelmingly come from poor backgrounds, who are predominantly black and brown, whose family members were forced into a carceral-industrial system propagated by both parties, whose very voting rights were in many cases stripped away, and as for the remainder, how many of them realized that they and people like them were going to be fucked no matter what the electoral process was?

How many people had their brains permanently broken by the right-wing media that emerged like mushrooms after the rain in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act, and have emerged thinking that anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell is taking part in a child grooming cult, permanently alienated from reasonable discourse?

How many laws weren't passed to help enshrine abortion rights, instead resting upon a Supreme Court precedent that even the center-left's yass-qween champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a dangerous overreliance, especially at a time when 80 fucking percent of Americans are in favor of at least some access to abortion. 

Simply, how many were just checked out because they had never, in their lives, seen any meaningful response to their abject misery, administration after administration?

And really, you're yelling at us jaded leftists?

By the way, I did pinch my nose. I did vote contra Trump, twice. But I won't judge people for not doing so, because a big part of what it is to be a socialist is to recognize that our political system is broken.

To the social media ninnies, I feel you too. You're at the bargaining stage of grief. All of that being said, while I won't judge individuals for their political action or inaction in a complex environment, I will judge individuals for actively being dicks. So fuck you for that. But let's move on.

Once I helped a nice young woman get an abortion once (none of my DNA involved, by the way). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find a way to buy some pills for some nice ladies in Texas to terminate their pregnancies, and I encourage you to do the same. And if you want to do some deeper questioning, come and join. We on the populist left are more than happy to welcome fellow travelers.

The Island of Serendipity

There is a fable, most likely over 1000 years old, that goes like this. To teach his sons the value of practical experience beyond their ivory-tower education, the King of Serendib sent his three sons overseas, to the Sassanid Empire. They came to the traces of a missing camel – lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying honey on one side and butter on the other. When Shah Bahram V heard about their claims, he immediately accused them of theft. In their defense, the three princes demonstrated thusly: only three hoofprints in the sand indicate a leg being dragged, the grass was eaten on the side of the road where it wasn't as green as the other, demonstrating a blindness in one eye, clumps of grass the size of a camel's tooth remained, showing one missing, and flies were drawn to the honey spilled on one side of the road, and ants to the butter spilled on the other.

To the Enlightenment philosophes, this was a perfect example of the triumph of reason, of the power of inference. And yet their homeland – Serendib – gave rise to another idea, the idea of serendipity, something completely determined by accident, by fate.

Serendib was what the ancient Persians called an island off the south tip of India.

And after that, it was Ceylon, a name that conjures up images of the twilight years of the Raj, sighing tea planters and pith helmets and cricket whites.

And since then it has been Sri Lanka. And what is in that name?

To those of us living in the post-Internet age, it is a name that evokes elephants and glittering beaches, perfumed jungles, travelers with mandala tattoos looking for enlightenment and cheap beer. Yet for decades before, the name “Sri Lanka” conjured up a sequence of horrors, purges and inter-ethnic violence, machete hacks and suicide bombings at crowded railway stations, panic in the stifling tropical humidity, weeping mothers and bloodied headscarves and crowds of men chanting slogans.

Where does the truth lie?

What I can only say is what Sri Lanka was for me, from the moment I arrived at Bandaranaike International Airport to the moment I departed from it.

It started with that standard third-world cab ride into the city, the first encounters with the heat, with the local accent, then passing houses in rural clearings, nighttime palm fronds, Honda motorbikes illuminated by insect-swarmed fluorescent lights, railroad tracks with barking dogs, tiny mobile phone shops with pictures of local celebrities, all with vaguely Europeanized features, promoting the various local 4G networks, billboards in English for housing developments aimed squarely at the anglophone elite, embassies behind heavily guarded perimeter walls. The forms repeat themselves from country to country. It is only when you emerge from the taxi that the subtle contours of locality emerge.

One comes to understand a country not through its monuments and landscapes, but its incidentals. To get a beer to enjoy before bed in my hotel room, I have to go to a “wine shop” with the vibes of a methadone clinic and wait in line with a couple dozen other exclusively male and restless-looking customers, before a cashier in a banker's cage hands me a bottle of Lion Lager from the fridge. To get around, I take a tuktuk plastered with slogans, from anodyne self-help – “don't be a worrier, be a warrior” – to confusing manifestations of global phenomena – the bizarrely common “Red Indian,” and here I was thinking I was in feather-not-dot country – to the WTF – a naked woman and the caption “The unknown. Who know this?”

But the incidentals were accompanied by moments of absolute loveliness.

There were the long strolls around the lake at Kandy, a city supposedly brought into glory by the Buddha's tooth in the central reliquary of the Sri Dalada Maligawa, and up into the hills, to be followed by a drink at the antique bar at the Queen's Hotel where Lord Mountbatten acted out his role as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and it's hard not to imagine the place full of David Niven types with pencil-thin mustaches, sipping pink gins and smoking Dunhills as they gesture towards detailed relief maps of parched Burmese hills – you see their forms like ghosts in the hazy orange sunset, floating between the bougainvillea blossoms. There was the long hike up to the top of the sacred rock of Sigiriya, wondering how humans could have possibly thought to built something like this in such an improbable and difficult location. There was the sheer joy of staring out at a landscape of layered mountains and cloud forests and plantations of tea, cinnamon, and cardamom as I sipped my masala chai and samosas, leaning back in my slow-moving train carriage. There were the long happy swims in the turquoise seas of the south coast, where I ate freakishly large crustaceans, and chatted with whoever came by, a surfer on a trip around the world, a few local longhairs with their arms around tatted-up British PAWGs, while I sat with my notebook and my arrack drink and my shirt buttoned down, trying my best to channel some combination of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Mitchum, and Miki Dora, and in all likelihood failing miserably. And I walked the cobblestone streets of Galle, the city on a little peninsula littered with the ruins and remnants of a dozen or more empires, where couples posed for pre-wedding photos, where schoolboys ran along the seawalls that futilely held back the waves of the Arabian Sea. The end of the earth – because from here there was nothing, all the way to Antarctica.

My reception among the locals was largely positive, and it always warmed up as soon as I said I lived in Thailand. This had the function of identifying me as a fellow tropical – someone who could cope with the heat and crowding, who could appreciate the spicy food, i.e. not a total Western dumbfuck. This carried more currency than I would have suspected, and it was only later that I realized what it actually was – a recognition that I also recognized the neocolonial fuckedness of things in countries below 25 degrees of latitude.

Because the fuckedness was everywhere. It was in the power cuts that beleaguered my stay – first eight hours a day, then ten, then twelve. In the food that, while tasty, so largely consisted of colossal portions of starch and fat, with minimal protein, bombarded with spice to make it flavorful. In the metal detectors and bag searches at the entrance to every shopping mall, and the abundance of armed guards in the most innocuous of locations. In the way that conversations with locals largely began with their disgust with the government of the Rajapaksas, a family that currently occupies the positions of president, prime minister, and nine cabinet-level ministers, whose abysmal mismanagement, including a harebrained attempt to make all farming organic, has led to food price shocks, a full-on Chinese debt trap leading to a loss of control over the Port of Colombo, and the increasing likelihood of the velvet glove of the IMF disguising an iron fist of austerity, which, when combined with global fuel-price spikes, has led to a country doing its cooking by candlelight.

As we wait for a generator to hum to life, a couple waiters at a nice seafood restaurant bum a smoke off a Russian tourist. They don't smoke with him, but pocket the cigarettes. That's not a good sign.

Which again leads me to flashbacks of those earlier images – of bombed libraries and targeted assassinations, of invocations to the serene Buddha, to peace being upon the prophet Mohammed, to the infinite beatitudes of Ganesh and Parvati in the name of Kalashnikov fire and the burning of corrugated-aluminum shacks.

Along with the cardamom plantations, seawalls, and gentle surf lapping at my bare feet.

One's experience of a place, as a tourist, consists of glimpses, ephemera, hazy memories triggered by smell and sound, the vague reminiscences when you look at the little lacquered box you bought at a faraway market.

And accordingly, each of these things is a trace. A clump of grass with a tooth-sized piece left intact, honey and butter spilled on the sides of the road. Dogs howling in the darkness as we wait for the lights to turn back on, the long views across the verdant mountains as I take a sip of soursop tea. The camel itself is much more elusive.

Under Stalin's Mustache

To most of the world, the Republic of Georgia is a cipher, a nation not easily found on a map, with a population so small it's eclipsed, in the international imagination, by a subnational division, and I would routinely have to tell people that I wasn't going to the Georgia that's home to Gucci Mane and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And when clarifications were made, that no, I was not going to be within firing range of the rockets landing on Kherson and Kharkiv. That I was instead going to a little nation neither truly European nor truly Middle Eastern, pinched between the old Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires, about which I knew awfully little, about which most people know awfully little.

And thus it was that I found myself, two long flights later, traveling abroad for the first time since the pandemic, walking the snowy streets of Tbilisi, trying to figure out the pay-to-ride elevator and dysfunctional locks in the commie block where I was staying, riding terrifyingly deep metro lines built to withstand Los Alamos-designed bombs, walking past the sad and ancient men selling off the military regalia of a country that no longer exists, with proud emblems of wheat sheaves, on blankets and park benches, to hapless tourists like myself.

Like many countries, it was not an easy place to get around. Buses were often unmarked minivans, touted by men shouting many-consonanted names – Mtskheta! Mtskheta! Sighnaghi! Sighnaghi! – and one wondered, as one got in, whether human trafficking was in the offing. Yet I made it through, despite an avalanche blocking one of my major objectives, despite the wild dogs that surrounded me on a snowy mountain. I rode funicular railways and I got rides in falling-apart Ladas from thick-necked, possibly drunk taxi drivers who chain-smoked skinny cigarettes as they wildly accelerated down country lanes.

And when I settled down, I walked for many happy hours among tumbledown walls and vines hanging from ornate balconies, past castle walls and art nouveau theaters and Brezhnev-era mosaics of men in fur hats drinking from rams' horns and plaques indicating the long-forgotten violinists who had lived in each residence. In the town of Gori, I visited the little house where an ambitious shoemaker's son with a thick mustache and a memorable attitude about the death of one man versus the death of a million, taking the requisite selfie with the man himself. In Tbilisi I went every day to the metro station at what was once called Lenin Square, and before that, Beria Square (gulp). I entered basilicas thick with incense where babushkas wept before icons of golden saints and where priests sang incantations in a guttural language as they blessed babies by holding them before images of Saint Nino and Queen Tamar.

And I step out into the street and see the evening passeggiata, the street cellists and the booksellers and the hookahs and ballerinas and the slender form of the old synagogue against the March sky, an old woman with darkly penciled eyebrows yelling and shrugging out a second floor balcony.

Because Georgia is one of those rare places that, at least to my eyes, there is still a sense of what was once called the exotic. It is found in the cuisine, soups of chicken and marigolds, giant flatbreads stuffed with cheese for a dollar a piece, veal offal sausages, lamb and green plum stew, charred skewers of trout, soup dumplings filled with assorted meats. And of course I spent my evenings sampling the infinitude of Georgian wines, made in the same fashion, skins and seeds and all, in a clay-pot qvivri in the same fashion since the time of the Egyptians. There was the dry and pomegranate-scented Saperavi, and its variants, the velvety and sweet Kindzmarauli, and my favorite, the oak-finished and pinot-like Mukuzani. Each session was to be followed by a shot of chacha, the indigenous grappa fashioned from pomace or peaches or persimmons, to be accompanied by a little plate of walnuts, before my stumble home through steep streets. 

I sat with my glass of wine, and I talked with whoever came through. The war was on, and as in most of the world, blue-and-yellow flags were on display, although for Georgians, it seemed a bit personal. It was only in 2008 that Putin's army was here too. But strangely, most of the people I encountered were not Georgians, but indeed Russians – Russians who had semi-permanently settled in Tbilisi, given the ease of visa access and the fact that most Georgians speak Russian, as well as the more recent arrivals, programmers and graphic designers who were watching their country crumble, fleeing a regime that crushes dissident behavior with ruthless efficiency and also fleeing the sanctions that, if anything, encourage a gaudy and grotesque nationalism and isolationism, and which mostly serve to punish ordinary people. “I no longer have a country,” a woman tells me, “nor do my children.” I went to a jazz bar to watch performances by men who were old enough to remember a time and a place where playing jazz had still been a revolutionary activity.

Georgia's most internationally famous artist was the deliberately primitivist Niko Pirosmani, but I truly fell in love with the paintings of Shalva Kikodze. His work is deliberately dreamlike, somehow utterly 20^th Century modernist and deeply primeval at the same time, brimming with joy and terribly melancholy.

 

And I think the reason the Kikodze paintings resonated so much is that this felt, more than any other place I've been, like the last old-world country, a glittering little fragment of a more romantic era. A remnant world that is still out there. If you go looking for it. And if you're lucky enough to find it.

The Fable of Jonah Peretti

It's an inevitable product of aging that one starts to wonder what the representative cultural products of the present era will be, what will be remembered, what will be reflected upon. And when thinking about the 2010s, I'm sure I'll be suspected to some nostalgia film in 10 years in which the bride and groom dance to Happy or Blurred Lines or Get Lucky at a wedding.

And few organizations captured the ethos of this time more accurately than Buzzfeed, to the point where it became almost a shorthand for the preciousness and stupidity of the decade. And a brief glance at it, as of a recent date, revealed itself to be the same sort of bullshit they've always done, to the point where it's almost a portal to 10 years ago. "This Couple Had a Sensory Friendly Wedding and I Could Almost Cry at How Beautiful It Is." "33 Products That Work So Well You'll Be Taking (sic) About Them All Year." You know. Clickbait bullshit for people who want to have weddings at Disneyland. Barf. Pass. You'd have thought we'd have moved past this sort of thing in an era where the problems of the world have become that much sharper.

But what is fascinating to me is the story of its origins and of its founder, Jonah Peretti, who, aside from being the dude with the most white-California of all possible names, had a decidedly strange arc, one that reflects the shifting priorities of a century.

Like so many Gen-X'ers, he came of age in the heady days of critical theory, in which American theorists willfully misinterpreted their French masters to make correlations between particle physics and Lacanian psychoanalysis (which another Gen-X'er theorist, Joe Rogan, would later extend to a connection to his DMT trip in the desert), and he even published a piece heavily informed by the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in one of the at the time very au-courant, pre-Sokal Affair journals that adopted a purely "cultural" anticapitalism at the end of history, Negations.

To wit:

"My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities." 

A sensory friendly wedding. Almost crying at how beautiful it is.

Several years later on his bildung, Herr Peretti entered a room with a former follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh named Arianna Huffington and a plucky young Brentwood posh lad with a passion for uppers and thinly veiled fascism named Andrew Breitbart to start a certain news aggregator site that would come to be known for its quippy responses to the foibles of the Bush Regime.

And from that particular smug vomitorium came the worst of the American political culture that has dominated discourse within my own country, and owing to cultural imperialism, the world at large ever since. It's been a while since I'd even thought about HuffPo, but it laid the template for Breitbart and Buzzfeed, and Internet discourse more broadly.

The thesis was set forth in the "Breitbart Doctrine," that politics lies downstream from culture. Despite the right-wing origins, this is a sensibility that has come to dominate both liberal and conservative approaches to ideology. And it reflects the fact that both Perretti and Breitbart -- as representatives of a certain generation and a certain upper middle-class caste -- drank from the same streams, those of cultural studies, in which the legitimate insights of Western Marxism and the mid-20th Century "cultural turn" were placed in the service of late-stage capitalism.

A brief overview: the dissident Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci came to realize that a major part of what kept people in a state of false consciousness was "cultural hegemony," whereby the institution and powers that be insinuated a deep-seated ideology of which the subject is not even aware, which is normalized as common sense. But Gramsci and the Frankfurt School philosophers further north sought to articulate a truly emancipatory path for human development beyond the failures of capitalism and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But when this program is applied without a strong critique of capitalism, the end result is disastrous.

Peretti and Buzzfeed largely mirrored the tone of the Obama years. The voice the editorial board championed was cheery, triumphant, inclusive, effusive. For a reference point, think about Parks and Recreation. Sure, all is far from well in Pawnee, Indiana, but Leslie Knope and Co. want to do their best to put people on the right path. Things were going to get better. And the vibe of Buzzfeed matched this, hoping that by giving people the right culture, they would give them the right politics. Never mind the economic recovery that wasn't.

Well, let's see how that turned out.

Meanwhile, Breitbart and friends, funded by an increasingly cantankerous right, managed to capitalize, conversely, on a visceral disgust, which is of course a much more powerful emotion. The 2016 election demonstrated that the culture that the liberals had tried to foster had failed to produce a downstream politics of any meaning, given that the political message was essentially "cheer up and be grateful, we've got it covered." To which the right responded by producing rage responses, which helped, in its way, to pave the way to a rage-response presidency.

What you see are two attempts at placing culture downstream from politics. In the first, a kindly, liberal culture fails to produce a kindly, liberal politics. In the second, a negation of culture feeds into a political worldview based entirely around antipathy. To put it in less academic terms, it's the Wario version. Wantonio Gramsci.

Something tells me that this color-inverted Gramsci will be less likely to be a friendly and rather goofy opponent in tennis- and kart racing-themed games.

Perhaps it should be no surprise, as well, that Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in a mass purge of actual news in 2019, followed by another 47 without warning -- most of them unionized -- in 2021, via a virtual meeting using the insanely on-brand password "spr!ngish3r3."

What I am reminded of, more than anything else, are the haunting lines at the beginning of one of the masterworks of cultural theory, Theodor Adorno's 1951 text Minima Moralia. Subtitled "notes on a damaged life," Adorno, in these strange little micro-essays, traces the ways in which all hope had been extinguished, made impossible in the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, made all the more personal to Adorno through his own exile, through the ways in which his closest of friends were subject to expulsion at best, gas chambers at worst.

"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that since time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."

And I see the sighs of this long-dead German reflected in this engine of meaningless content. In the horror of the screen glowing in the dark.

Liminal Spaces

 It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the rush towards the modern -- there will always be the lure of the lost. There will be vampires' lairs and Gothic castles, there will be Roman ruins romantically crumbling, there will be stone idols with jeweled eyes in perfumed jungles, there will be Addams Family-style Victorian houses gnawed at by a century and a half's termites, there will be petroglyphs carved into desert rock, depicting the creation myths of indigenous societies long-since extirpated. All of the Ozymandian reminders of the things that once were.

But what happens when those things are not the remnants of long-lost civilizations, but the remnants of something familiar? What if, instead, of widows' walks and parapets and flying buttresses, we have industrial carpet, fluorescent lights, a world fully delineated by economic feasibility studies, electrical diagrams, environmental impact assessment reports, legal due diligence, linear programming charts?

It's something that's long since bothered me, ever since the first time I remember seeing a fully modernist building abandoned -- I was 12 or 13, and I wondered what could have happened. And there was something far more sinister about that bit of 1950s postwar optimism left to rot, covered in a mix of anarchy symbols counter-argued with swastikas, than anything that Piranesi or Poe could have ever dreamed up.

Which is perhaps why the Internet phenomenon of the liminal space has drawn me in.

Some reflect the machinations of commerce:

 

And others a mirror-maze reflection of the domestic:

 

 

And with all, a terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness:

 

In his 1909 text Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep described the liminal state as a particular moment within the rite, in which the subject of the ritual has passed through symbolic death but has yet to pass through symbolic rebirth, via a treacherous in-between space in which actions and words must be highly scripted to ensure safe passage.

A memory: a summer program for gifted elementary school students at the one high school in my hometown, empty for the summer save for a few of us little nerds and some assorted burnouts, several years older, roped into summer school (it was the late '90s -- they were still all about the flannel, as I recall), complaining about how bad their munchies were. Empty corridors. The sound of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" on the local rock station reverberating from a janitor's distant boombox. The endless rows of lockers painted in primary colors, the sheen of distant fluorescent light on industrial tile floor was to be expected. But the darkened halls of the newer wing of the school, painted with the more abstract murals of art students -- those seemed to possess a stillness and a darkness that was beyond terrifying. 

Another: it's winter. I'm in a building in our little downtown that had once been a department store, split up before I was born into an assortment of small businesses and a few apartments, a little bookshop, a hairdresser, a deli, and most attractive to me, a store selling baseball cards and collectibles. I remember the walk-up with its smell of carpet long since left to mold, even over the long Upper Midwest winter still somehow moist, mixed with a bit of cleaning fluid and the oily fryer-grease smell left on dry December days when all other smells are purged from the air, the ancient windows shivering in their frames in the gales that blew down from Alberta. I walk into an empty unit, the door left open. Maybe it had been an office, maybe a dwelling. Detritus had been left there from a previous tenant, or maybe just some other wanderer like myself. A crushed up Whopper wrapper, a trade paperback with a spiderwebbed spine, the corpses of last summer's yellow-jackets facing heavenward, never swept away. With chipped electrical outlets and broken thermostats, cheap off-yellow paint on the wall, industrial carpeting curling at the corners, it was someplace in between use and disuse, between past and present. 

What was it that I experienced as a child? And what is it that is making its way around the Internet?

Perhaps -- and this is a first thought -- it is something that speaks to the human psyche itself, a discomfort with the in-between places, something that finds a comfortable analogy in the discomforts of the uncanny valley. And that very uncanniness is overlaid onto the banality and familiarity of these scenes. The once familiar -- something that we walk past every day, and are more than happy to ignore -- is caught in still frame. And when you look at it in focus, you realize on some level that you're not supposed to focus. That these are places designed to be functional and at least a little bit invisible. By being rendered from the functional into the aesthetic, their in-betweenness becomes more glaring, and all the more compelling.

And there is a social level as well. These places are the detritus of advanced industrial society, a society in which market logic triumphs above all else. The Soviet cartoons of piggish Western industrialists in Monopoly-man outfits with dollar signs for eyes got it wrong -- the purest elucidation of American industrial capitalism is, au contraire, a Comfort Inn just outside Peoria. And to see that representation of the animal spirits of some long-forgotten entrepreneur transformed into something naked and shivering reveals the disconnect between the material and the image, everything laid bare.

Or perhaps -- on the opposite end of the spectrum -- it's more personal, something ensconced deep within memory. Perhaps it's the memory of the alley you always avoided on the walk home from a school as a kid, with its trail of trash leading out of the dumpster, crumpling in the autumn rain. The time you woke up in the middle of the night and snuck down to the den and caught a viewing of The Shining on cable, the repeated carpet patterns and the domestic lighting mirroring your own environs, seeing yourself in the child pedaling his Big Wheel through empty corridors. The cold light of a gas station on a family road trip, a pockmarked cashier ringing up full tanks of premium unleaded and cans of Skoal, the way he snarled "you gonna buy something?" as you wondered whether or not to pocket a Snickers, as if he could read your young mind. The way you clung to your mother in a parking garage in early winter, unseen enemies lurking behind every Cutlass Ciera and Caprice Classic.

Regardless, the result is the same as the Gothic ruins that inspired the imaginations of the romantics -- what once was has become, in some way, no longer.