A Memoriam to Pitchfork

 The process of media consolidation has been such a grim march since before I was born that I normally hardly pay attention. Oh, Publication X is ceasing. Well I guess that’s rough.

But today’s announcement that Pitchfork was being folded into GQ was a stab to the heart.

Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Pitchfork regularly – as I’ve discussed previously, it’s been circling the drain for a while. The site has over the past few years veered in an obnoxiously poptimist direction, favoring rhapsodic nonsense about a perfectly forgettable Ice Spice song rather than anything even remotely countercultural or in-depth, with even most of the indie they championed being remarkably inoffensive – I like Big Thief as much as the next guy, but they’re hardly leading a musical revolution. And yet it was still a devoted music website (i.e. not an app), a place where actual journalists were paid to actually write about music, without a video autoplay coming up every five seconds, without much-touted Spotify exclusives, without the morass of branded content.

This is where I should also point that it’s a bit suss, to say the least, that this happened a month after Pitchfork’s union successfully negotiated zero layoffs.

But once upon a time Pitchfork was vital. OK, sure, it was easy to make fun of. The painfully earnest reviews of indie music were often silly and overwrought, but it was, for those of us who grew up far from urban centers, a way to learn about the wider, weirder world of music beyond the top 40 at a time when radio airplay was still functioning as a cultural arbiter in piggly-eyed Middle America (hard to imagine in the era of Spotify I know) Along with the much-missed Tiny Mix Tapes, the website that single-handedly turned me onto so much incredible noise rock, it was an open invitation, with its year-end lists and decade retrospectives and its annual music festival that I attended every year for their first few years. Their long-form journalism was often brilliant, frequently heartbreaking, and always thought-provoking, and these articles introduced me to ‘90s Chicago post-rock, afrobeat from Fela Kuti forwards, and countless other veins of music I would have never known. Shoegaze seemed less a genre than an ideology. And in the same way I read and read so as to know the world, I listened and listened so as to know the world.

I’ll just leave this forgotten beauty here: https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/6411-resonant-frequency-39

And in my dorm room I would restlessly search for Mediafire and Megadownload .zip copies of these albums. I would pore through the mildewy reek of the music library of our little college radio station where I was paid a pitiful stipend as station librarian. I would find Youtube clips consisting of scratchy transfers of old 7” Cherry Red singles paired with highly pixelated album art. I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor’s F#A# (infinity) on my Discman in winter fields. I would see shows in dank and grimy venues with only a handful of other weirdos present. The Robot Ate Me tackled me to the ground and may have dry-humped me as he sang on top of my pinned-down body.

Right now, I’m sitting at home, marinating pork shoulder in papaya and spices, to sear and then deglaze with Viognier. I long ago traded in my band t-shirts bought at sweaty shows and beat-up Chuck Taylors and Chrome seatbelt bag for linen shirts and Clark’s suede and a nice leather satchel bought at a Budapest haberdasher, and I’ve gone from couch stays in scrofulous shared houses to bitching about the Keurig selection in boutique hotels.

But I’m listening to those albums that meant so much to me at one time. The self-titled Beach House album, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Asobi Seksu’s Citrus, Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Albums that once seemed to hold the key to something, in the lingering waft of Nag Champa and shitty Iowa schwag at 17 years old, when some part of me fully believed that the only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes, and then they buried her alive one evening in 1945.

And so the final burial of Pitchfork is another reminder of the general enshittification processes. All those feisty independent journalistic outlets and blogs that shaped my perspective have been outmoded by the algorithm, the treasure hunt has been replaced by the hopeless scroll.

This sucks. I hate it here.

At best, the better of those articles will remain floating in the floating world, ghosts to be found by people much younger than myself – a bit like the odd old issues of magazines from other eras you’d find lying around. Because ghosts are often so much more reassuring than the present.

Spanish, Flew

 I flew to Spain. Not because I had any grand desire. I had a week to kill and there was a cheap flight in, a cheap flight out. I knew I liked Spanish things – El Greco and Velazquez, Bunuel and Almodovar. I was in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was surrounded by Satmar Jewish women in identical sheitel wigs with babies, by goyische women in identical Patagonia fleeces with corgis and miniature poodles. I saw Woody Allen and Sun-Yi Previn looking more miserable than I, hailing a taxi outside the Kurlansky Gallery in Chelsea, and they had a miniature poodle too. And then I flew to Spain.

The outer suburbs of the city by the sea are filled with sad-eyed heroines I know from Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Hable con Ella, the prostitute dancing on the mattress and drinking cheap tinto in Biutiful, the immigrant children poking their heads out from screenless open windows above.

Of course, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I hated Barcelona at first sight. I had the misfortune to have booked a room near La Rambla, a place which, like the Old Town of Prague or the inner canals of Amsterdam, was clearly once gorgeous and now caters to the shittiest and lairiest of tourists from Great Brexit, made all the worse by it being a Barca/Real game day. Overpriced reheated tapas and streetside bars offering the ubiquitous pornstar martini (a drink that I can only imagine tasting good after the second line of molly), bachelor parties with the whole gang of lads wearing t-shirts with graphics of stick figures of brides and grooms and the phrase UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT underneath, drink specials in David Guetta-blasting nightclubs and weed vapes and sex museums, a supposed Southern naughtiness to counteract a supposed Northern primness, revealing the actual Southern desire to milk the tourist dollar and the actual Northern desire to self-obliterate. The Southerners succeed in this respect, they leave with a tidy stack. The Northerners wake up with splitting hangovers, hacking coughs, hotel rooms spread with latex and handcuffs, and just as much misery.

It is gorgeous. Which in the age of Instagram is a curse, and Barcelona’s own Antonio Gaudi has the misfortune to be the most Instagrammable architect. In much the same way that increasing access to information leads to greater stratification in terms of consumer goods – demand shoots up for every quality piece of cookware, for instance, promoted by culinary influencers – social media has created a stratification of locations, with the Barcelonas and Lisbons and Tbilisis of the world playing host to rapacious Airbnb owners and braying digital nomads. To visit Sagrada Familia you need to buy tickets a week in advance. And download the fucking app.

But as I move further away from La Rambla and the more conspicuous Gaudi buildings, my heart grows with each glass of Monastrell and Penedes, every Miro painting, every braised pig’s trotter and screamingly fresh razor clam. And when I reach the Parc de la Ciutadella, my heart absolutely sings, elderly couples, families with kids, groups of Goth teens smoking weed, African migrants, solo readers, people engaging in more or less every musical and athletic pursuit imaginable, all united in their desire to enjoy a perfect sunny afternoon surrounded by cypresses and Canarian palms and bitter-orange trees and Catalan tilework, without being charged for the right to do so – something akin to what I imagine my ideal society to look like. The sort of thing Orwell might have written an homage to.

Yet this the landscape of the charming Mediterranean fringe. The innermost country is an arid, sandstone land punctuated with olives and grapevines, distant views to the snow-capped Pyrenees over the barren, chalky soil, a landscape closer to the harsh scrublands of, say, Eastern New Mexico than lush, decadent Mediterranean fantasy, cruel and wind-whipped, the sort of place where windmills could readily turn into enemies, where Torquemada’s ghost is not far behind, leaving a whiff of burned flesh in his wake.

And at its heart is a city few people could say much about. Because what do you actually know about Madrid as a place? Its sights, its architecture, its local culture, its music scene, its gastronomy? Probably not much at all. I know I didn’t.

After breezy, Mediterranean Barcelona, Madrid was freezing cold and consistently raining – a rarity for this semi-desert city. The mist gathered in the Gran Via and the Plaza del Sol, Madrilenas shivering in their skimpy tulle-and-lace Halloween costumes, the lights of taxis flashing in the drizzle, with neon advertisements on glorious art-deco skyscrapers, posters for Spanish-language stage interpretations of Hollywood cinema (Legally Blonde becomes Rubia Legal), and one could be forgiven for thinking not that they are in Castile but Times Square.

I was there with a primary purpose, to see the wonders of the Prado. To see the greatest manifestation of that semi-arid land, the haunted and contorted saints painted most famously by El Greco, less famously by Jusepe de Ribera, deathly pale bodies in the darkness of Spain during its ostensible Golden Age, failing to rise to the light of heaven.

And when I saw the singular, dark room, the dead-end gallery of Goya’s Pinturas Negras, how could I do anything but scream? Sure, we all know about Saturn eating his children – but that is perhaps the least horrifying… this is Goya’s index of every senseless stupidity, cruelty, and violence inflicted upon the world, every gathered mob, every sickly midnight cackle. And at the end of the room, there is a painting of a single dog, barely peeking through the distorted charcoal gray and burnished gold background, eyes straining to find some kind of hope in the sheer misery. And devoid of any context, it breaks your fucking heart. 

And then to step out into the streets, to the palaces and cathedrals built from the corpses of the massacred natives of Mexico and Mindanao.

The so-called leyenda negra, the myth of Spain’s uniquely rapacious and perverse colonial history, is often dismissed nowadays by modern historians as a product of the quivering and prim Protestant imagination, an attempt to rationalize the colonial projects of more northerly countries as civilizing missions, while condemning the Spanish Empire as a den of iniquity. But that is to ignore the fact that during its largely hegemonic period, the conquests and tortures carried on, and woe to any Navajo or Mapuche who stood in their way.

And it’s hard not to see that legacy percolate down through every Opus Dei self-mortification and Francoist lockstep that was to follow.

But the thing about darkness is that it has a way of preserving things forgotten, and it even allows a few flowers to bloom.

The rain fell heavy as I made my way through darkened streets, to the old sherry bar where the Amontillado and Palo Cortado were poured from heavy oak barrels, faded posters of the World Sherry Festival 1977 or whatever, cheeses and sausages dangling from the wall to be sliced into hearty drinking snacks by the aging punk bartenders, my bill written in chalk on the marred wooden counter. And I felt for an hour or so, like I was in the last real place on earth.

I flew in from New York, where I encountered the horror and ugliness of contemporary power in every repulsive luxury design condo, every Succession extra jogging along the High Line, every once-proud warehouse turned into co-working space for those who would better serve the world as nourishing cadavers, agents of the powers that be.

I flew out from Madrid, where I saw the million flowers that grow from the ashes of the old powers that were.

The Remnants of Iowa, or Iowa, a Remnant

One does, periodically, have to go back home, doesn’t one?

The pandemic was over, I guess. I popped a 15 mg edible right before passport control, put on Avatar: The Way of Water, had a rough encounter with a loud fellow Amurrican on an escalator at the Doha Airport (him: “SERIOUSLY?! Well, FINE, go ahead, SPEED RACER!”) and flew over two oceans to O’Hare (more ugly upper middle class Americans in golf apparel, do these fuckers reproduce by mitosis?), wondering why the hell I was in transit, to arrive on someplace that seemed as familiar as a much-loved hoodie and as remote as the surface of the moon.

I sit, on a beautiful and perfect Middle American autumn day, on the patio, with my iced jasmine tea. I’d probably sat at this table before, how could I not have? Back when sitting at a vaguely trendy café was still a complete novelty in this part of the world, and back when this very same iced jasmine tea – cold and unsweetened and smelling more like perfume than anything I was ever expected to drink -- seemed like a portal to something I could barely conceive of, but something which seemed important.

"I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and, somehow . . . of the future."

– Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster.

Memories of memories – that’s what your hometown is, right?

I look over at the couple next to me – a time warp, the two of them. A girl with blonde braids and oughties Paris Hilton-style oversized sunglasses, a guy still looking like Chuck Klosterman wearing a cringe ironic graphic tee. And with that sip of jasmine tea, with the sun filtering through the cedars, golden retrievers playing in the fallen leaves, it was as if the weird times had never happened. The world, here, at least for the moment, and for many moments over the course of the next week, seemed fully a place where the weird times had never happened, an eternally sincere 2014, an outlier in a world far scarier, in which pessimism had long since been superseded by nihilism.

And my god is that hookah bar left over from the mid-‘00s still open?!

Even if I’m just a little too irony-poisoned and a little too insincere for this particular world, I appreciate the diorama. The sign reads “spice up your hair, pumpkin,” presented without comment.

So I walked and walked, biked and biked. I drank local gin and met strangers, people I probably would have wound up being friends with if I’d stayed around this part of the world, autodidacts and grad-school dropouts, snarky young farmers with excellent taste in whiskey and sad-eyed small town queer artists. A bartender saluting my taste in ordering a Last Word, instead of groaning about me taking up part of the world’s dwindling Chartreuse stock. I smoked far too much weed with good people in a house I once trick-or-treated at and watched the latest Maison Margiela runway and bummed an American Spirit on the porch and felt the presence of myself on another timeline, his aura overlapping mine.

But the more I walked, the darker I felt the aura to be. The Marine Corps recruitment center in the same strip mall as the Gamestop and the donut shop, across the street from the tobacconist loudly advertising kratom -- all of the supposed antidotes to the creeping misery.

And perhaps that single windswept strip mall, where I had once rented Poltergeist movies and bought Sour Patch Kids, was the skeleton key. After that, the more apparent the fundamental rot became.

It became apparent in the newly empty lots of the streets I had once walked, wastelands of cracked asphalt and crabgrass, the blank storefronts, the increasingly peeling paint, the usual Spirit Halloween dead mall, the gas station where I had once bought countless bottles of Sobe on summer nights, now feeling like a trap house, the chattering meth-teeth, the all the manifestations of the slow, general immiseration of the American populace over the past few decades. Even the solitary sneaker in the parking lot of the pharmacy seemed a horrifying portent.

To be accompanied conversely, of course, by the polyp-like clusters of HOA cul-de-sacs and Chevy Tahoes on the margins in what had once been field and pasture, where there had once been a darkness on the edge of town that had felt so comforting, distant lights flickering from town on one side, infinite fallow fields and thin strands of hickory and red oak beyond.

Enough to make me call into question the reliquary quality I had once seen. Because even if it’s there, it’s not my reliquary.

And that is why it’s a memory of a memory. The memory itself is gone. Somewhere that aura remains.

We Lost

 The other day, I was sitting and reminiscing with an old high school friend passing through town at a lovely old Teochew restaurant in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Somewhere in between bites of crispy duck, we were talking about our childhood – the first ever generation of children to have an online presence and to discover a great many things we probably shouldn’t have – and our youthful passion for the preservation of a free and open internet when we reached college age, our long stoned conversations about open-source principles and our contempt for the corporate overlords and their stooges at the FCC. And I asked him, now that he is fully ensconced in the world of political media… we lost, didn’t we?

“Oh we fucking lost. A long time ago.”

I do my best, I really do. I use a good VPN to keep myself safe, I avoid the more atrocious branded-content machines, and I take immense pride in the way in which I have truly baffled most of the major algorithms through my stochastic behavior – according to various apps, I am interested in real estate investment in Ottawa, gay wedding venues in Florida, dating for senior citizens, Fortnite strategy, and “Afrocentric facts” about how actually it was black people who built the Mayan pyramids.

But the future keeps trying to catch up with me.

This week Youtube decided it wasn’t OK with me using an adblocker. An increasingly common and thoroughly annoying phenomenon, made all the worst by the cloying Joss Whedon humor it’s often delivered with… you know the kind… “We need to talk about your adblocker,” almost as bad as the push notifications with emojis in them.

Funny, I’m old enough now to remember when Youtube launched in my teens, when the very same aforementioned friend recommended it to me, possibly over AIM (also for those old enough to remember). And it seemed, in its early days, to be a prime example of the Wild West internet, with a charmingly slapdash digital folk-art quality and a shockingly good pre-Spotify library of musical rarities. But as we all know, those days are long over, and if you’re unfortunate enough to open Youtube in incognito mode, you’ll see a horrifying ocean of shocked-face thumbnails and gratuitous exclamation marks. This, too, is a prime example of where we are now.

You see where we are in the endless sponsored content that fills your social media scroll, all stock photography and stock audio, the AI-generated, SEO-friendly sludge of Google search results, the lootboxes in your video games, the endless recycled memes and Reddit comments. Once upon a time you bought music or movies, or more likely downloaded them – now you license them. And through your data, you yourself are licensed, a state of serfdom even more poorly remunerated than the gig economy.

I haven’t read Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book, Techno-Feudalism, yet, but I’ve seen enough recent interviews with him to get the gist of it. His thesis is that capitalism has indeed been superseded (I’ll need to take a closer look on that contentious contention), and not by anything more humane. Rather than Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of capitalism silting up into a corporatist/socialist state through a combination of liberal democratic politics and pressure by the intellectual classes, we get an environment in which, facing finite resources and an increasingly immobile consumer base with minimal disposable income, creative destruction creatively destroys itself. The entrepreneur devolves into little more than a charlatan, the robber baron becomes the robber king, and public intellectuals reduce to neoliberal troubadours, culture-war mudslingers, and hermetic, Jesuitical artists who make claims to radicalism despite their work only seeking to assuage the tastemaker class.

Our new masters seem remarkably incapable of enjoying themselves. Owing to my sneering IDGAF attitude, ability to navigate an omakase course, and habit of hanging out at nice cocktail bars, a number of the elites of our new Gilded Age have assumed that I am one of them, and that I for some reason give a shit about their status. It reeks of insecurity, and at times, when I'm empathetic, I can see into their past, to the socially awkward nerd before he was a startup founder, to the shy, chubby girl before she was a wellness influencer, to countless grand-bourgeois childhoods and emotionally distant parents, to countless generations of Old World repulsiveness that came before, to the desperate panic to justify their own existence.

But it's a flashing moment, and then they go back to braying about which Ivy League college they went to 25 years before, or how much their vacation home cost, and then I start going back to debating whether or not to advise them to kill themselves – and that's the sign for me to get a taxi home and block their number.

I am tempted to say that my meanderings are the early warning signs of kids-these-days syndrome, that I’m just a grump, but it seems that said kids these days are just as bummed out about the present-day internet as I am. Possibly even moreso. And I don’t know what trajectory we’re on, and neither do they.

In 24 hours or so, I am getting on a commercial flight over the Middle East – not intentional, of course, given the current wave of atrocities, but such is life. And somehow that induces far less anxiety than the future writ large.

The Courts of Bangkok

 Over the past 20 years or so, the term “Mid-Century Modern” has made its way first, from an outre hipster preference, or what would get called an “aesthetic” nowadays, to a standard term within the layman’s design discussion, to its final form, something dangerously close to being turned into mere cliché (let’s call this process “steampunking”).

A certain irony, given the degree to which the principles of mid-century design were quickly disparaged after the peak years of the design idiom.

Cultural liberals would evoke mid-century modernism as the aesthetic representation of the horrors of Stepford-wivery, of Levittown’s postwar American garishness, of the final victory of mass production over the natural world, of the arrogance of better living through chemistry, of the last dying gasp of the hegemonic straight white male patriarch.

Conversely, conservatives would seek a return to more conservative form, to flowery Laura Ashley living room sets, to the first suburban McMansions with their fanlights and cathedral ceilings and other echoings of previous eras (funny how the conservatives were OK with this form of postmodernism), mewling equivalents to a doddering old ham declaring that it was morning in America.

Now, I’ll always argue that an aesthetic principle can, to a certain extent, be decoupled from its point of origin (certified author-killer up in here), but it’s hard when looking at mid-century modern furniture, architecture, and product design not to be enraptured to a certain degree by this past moment of unbridled optimism, when the future still seemed shiny.

I started with a metal desk and a manual typewriter purchased at a school auction when I was a teenager, and now I have the whole package.

For the past several years, I have woken up every morning to my teak parquet floor, to high clerestory windows. To the sun slanting in through those windows, and through the screen patio door, designed to let just the right amount of sunlight in but to not overheat, with high ceilings to cool the air, a building truly constructed with the monsoon climate in mind. I can step out onto my cool tile patio, with the wicker cage around the hanging light, palms and bougainvilleas whispering outside, something of a vision of a jet-age tropical paradise, Viewfinder slides of the lands of stone idols and bronze Buddhas and drooping serapes in the high-modern decades between the signing of the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri and the appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the Federal Reserve.

I can hear the opening chords of a Joni Mitchell song as I pour my French press, leftover charcuterie and dry Riesling in the fridge, with no comment as to why the Cathay Pacific stewardesses at the party last night were sniffling so much after coming back from the bathroom.

But what I am living in is a remnant of a remnant.

My apartment is what is known as a “court” in this town, a term widely applied to the apartment buildings of the 1960s and 1970s built as Bangkok transformed from a raggedy and malarial third-world outpost to an international city, as Yankee GIs did their resting and relaxing (and a whole lot else), as Thais in pursuit of the good life for the first time turned their eyes more towards Los Angeles than Hong Kong. And I live in one such building.

 

 

They’re disappearing, slowly. Torn down to make room for higher buildings in the city’s most expensive districts, left to rot. Hell, they already ripped out the tennis court and put in a KFC.

And yet this translates into a sort of Gothic splendor.

What portent is there in the rotting concrete beams? In the members of the old and well-connected family who live in the houses along the perimeter of the property, dying off one by one? In the relief sculpture of the mermaids by the pool, cracking, House of Usher-style before falling apart completely, only to be followed by the papaya tree that crashed into the pool the next day?

More than a few people have commented on the similarity of my court to that portrayed in the (mediocre) BBC miniseries The Serpent, about the life of Charles Sobhraj, the bastard son of a Saigon whore, a teenage petty criminal turned hanger-on of the glittering Parisian high society of the Gainsbourg/Bardot era, before becoming a sort of Charles Manson of Southeast Asia, carrying out the murders of backpackers on Ngam Du Phli Road – what was then the backpacker ghetto, and coincidentally where I first stayed – with the help of a ragtag band of deluded Western hippie girls. His actual killings took place at a court called Kanit House, once one of several in the neighborhood, just across the street from my own court, torn down sometime in the 1990s.

The series was filmed, too, in an old court in seedy Sukhumvit Soi 4, likewise about to be demolished at time of filming.

You still see the concrete panels tumbling, woodwork ripped out, ready for the new “smart building” office complexes and condos designed for Chinese and Saudi money launderers.

I too am waiting for a deal to be finalized, for another bit of Bangkok during the era when the country was thought of as a critical domino, when Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn and his men slithered through the city at the behest of Kissinger and McNamara and all the rest. When real money first flowed into this town en masse, accompanied by Chinook helicopters, and the crisis of modernity suddenly arrived, optimism and terror intertwined.

Once again, we look backwards to remember what forwards was supposed to look like.

Walking With Sebald

When I read Carole Angier's recent biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself, he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the time and the place that take center stage.

Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...” online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight, thought.

It seemed inevitable, given my trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the girl down the block.

The plot, such as it is, is impossibly simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history, particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the story of human civilization.

Which made perfect sense for a grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's ghost became more apparent.

Consider:

Late last year I was walking outside the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s panelak apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the Elbe.

And yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.

I stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the Moldau.

This would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that night in my hotel room in Prague.

And that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of intense physical distress, the hospital stay in The Rings of Saturn, the sudden attack of blindness in Vertigo. Is it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens?

So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?

Invisible Enemies

Todd Field's Tar had the extreme misfortune to be cast as a culture-war movie. In the opinion of both the smug, legacy conservative media (or what is left of it), and the equally smug, culturally liberal media (what is often described as “left” in a world in which leftist hope has been abandoned), Lydia Tar was a misunderstood brain-genius who gets cancel culture'd, a lesbian who metoo'd other lesbians, a waking meme who totally wrecked that SJW in her lecture (the number of quotation marks attached to these terms will vary depending on one's political tendencies). Richard Brody at the New Yorker, whose dumb, contrarian takes on film (and to be fair, whose occasional incisive and cutting contrarian takes on film) have become a staple, was one such commentator. Even Eileen Jones at Jacobin, whose opinions I make a point to listen to, seems to have missed the point entirely.

What defines Lydia Tar, more than almost anything else, is her absolute lack of connection, despite appearances to the contrary. Sure, she's got that CV rapturously listed off by Adam Gopnik at the beginning, basking in the spotlight, but what we see throughout the rest of the film is a person who treats her partner like garbage, treats her child as little more than an addendum, treats lovers as cast-offs, treats other members of the music community as little more than chess pieces to be moved, and has a shall we say tenuous relationship with truth.

But let's take a look at that most chatterable of scenes, Tar v. “BIPOC pangender” student. I don't want to dissect it in detail – plenty of ink on that already, plenty of mostly dumb videos on Youtube by armchair film critics on the same subject – but I do want to call attention to the way in which the argument is, at the end of the day, not so much an argument as a stemwinding piece of oratory by Lydia Tar, barely punctuated by the objections of the whimpering and stimming undergrad. I get it, dialogue in films is not supposed to actually sound like real life... but the tone here is so polished as to make it seem imaginary.

And so it put me in mind of the arguments one has in one's head in the shower, or moodily waiting in line, or waiting to fall asleep. The invisible enemies we fight.

It's a tendency I've mostly beaten, albeit a very natural tendency when one's mind is drifting – to conjure up these invisible enemies for invisible argument, which end, naturally, in one's own invisible victory. In other words, the cartoon trope of the black-eyed kid kicking a can and muttering to himself as he walks down the street, vowing to one day stand up to the schoolyard bully.

I used to think I was alone in this – that this was the product of my uniquely chaotic and drooling mind. But that, as with all forms of self-loathing, is an act of utter and complete narcissism. Which, given the very narcissistic nature of an imaginary fight one wins, makes this a case of reflections falling in love with reflections falling in love with reflections, an infinite regress of the self.

And like its kindred infinite regresses of the self, I can't help but suspect that this is a phenomenon greatly amplified by the internet age – in a world of forums and tweets, the invisible enemies suddenly render themselves visible while bowling alone. Especially in an era of unprecedented spatial isolation in the more developed world, one can pick one's own enemy. Or a whole suite of enemies, a Scorpion for every Subzero.

To continue the theme of narcissism, I must come to the conclusion that many people have projected their own invisible arguments onto me. I assume I've been the problematic straight white guy, the stoopid lib'rul, the postmodern neo-whatever, the punchable face, the general imbecile.

And therefore, we ourselves have the capacity to be an invisible enemy. Even if we accept the fact that most of these projections are entirely dependent on undeserved preconceptions, I must conclude that at least some are accurate. And, second therefore, I have to wonder how many people peg me for the bastard I really am.

Do I have any choice or agency as to how I am interpreted?

As my steps fall, I have to wonder what ghostly forms I leave in my wake.