jujedispatch

[jujedispatch]

End of Tumblr

There comes a point in the life of an internet project where we lose momentum, where we coast past the sweet spot of pure and exhilarating writing and begin to devolve into apologies, false starts, reaffirmations of the original manifesto, and benign neglect. That’s where we’ve found ourselves for the last few years here.  It’s not that the fun stopped, it’s just time to figure out a better balance between what’s good for you, my readers, and what I want to be doing.

I remember the thrill that writing for the internet had back when I was in high school. I cringe at the immaturity of those old pieces, but what gets forgotten is how joyous it was to stay up late scribbling into the digital void, racing the cursor against drowsiness. I think a lot of this had to do with the anonymity of the process, the magic potential of developing a readership without stooping to figure out distribution or promotion, being discovered solely via the strength of the writing. But the most important thing was the idea of a readership, or rather the presence of the imaginary implied reader on the other end. That someone might actually encounter, parse, and form an opinion on a piece was the greatest part of the excitement—stuff that stays put on the hard drive has no potential to communicate, to be read, and therefore can never be as exciting to produce.

But a lone Blogger account does not a big splash make; thus the seduction of Tumblr. Here we had community, reblogs, likes! And beyond these social network affectations I had readers: y’all. Moving to Tumblr was a symbolic way for me to acknowledge that throwing writing anonymously into the depths of the internet is just about as effective as keeping it unpublished. I wanted to make it easier to get my stuff out to the people, to share and share alike through those aforementioned affectations, perhaps to even label something with a hashtag. But Tumblr has never really been a place for egregiously long blocks of text. I’ve always felt bad about dropping something longer than the length of your computer screen into the pipeline of infinite photos and gifs, and as the broader community shifted to focus on images and short posts my stuff felt more and more like the weird experimental track at the end of the album.

I wrote some short things. It was an interesting exercise. But at what point does it make sense to let the platform dictate what you write? As fun as it was to court the instant validation of likes, Tumblr doesn’t seem like the right internet space for the long-form rambling that I gravitate towards—it’s not worth the pressure to curtail the writing to fit the interface, nor the temporal challenge of a post getting lost among all these other folks jockeying for position in your feed as time goes by. Besides, the whole reason I work on these random little pieces instead of doing my real writing is to have the space to go down the mental rabbit holes, to think like a feral academic and have fun with the digressions. I’d like to share these with you, but I don’t think that this is a good place for both of us. I want a space where you can stop by (if you’d like) and spend some time with my stuff when you feel like it, and where I can run wild with the length and post as sporadically as I want.

So we’re moving back to Blogger (yes, it still exists!)—come check us out every now and then at The Feral Imaginary. Maybe I’ll use this space to let everyone know when something new is going up over there, but I suspect that this is the end of the line for this particular corner of the internet. Until next time, onwards my friends.

[jujedispatch]

It is summer and I am in Oregon. I spend my days playing with the house cat and checking out more and more books from the library, in between bouts of tennis. I think I’ve spent more money on beer these past few months than since I turned twenty-one, and I’ve got a comedic little paunch to show for it. Never got around to brushing up on my Spanish by reading the Latin American Boom with a Spanish-English dictionary. Abandoned the project of baking bread every weekend in favor of excursions and not overheating the house.

And I’ve been wrestling with a few writing-type things, aside from all of this “me, me, me.” I’m trying to raise the level of polish on the things that I put up here, so like everything else it’s been taking forever. But even if I haven’t churned out any pamphlets or written a quietly well-crafted sleeper novel, it’s been nice to have the time to think about what makes good writing. I’m realizing that it’s important to find ways to share these pieces that I want to write, because they’re not doing me any good when I piss them out snarling and can’t bring myself to edit them or, worse, when I never get around to thinking them through and putting fingers to keys. If this is the sort of thing that I care about producing, then I need to be better about using this site to regularly share work that I am proud of, hopefully creating a cycle of dutifully ethical work and mildly relieving publication. [As an aside, we need to find a better word than “blog” or “Tumblr” to describe amateur Internet shingles such as this, one that doesn’t sound like a guttural cri de revulsion.]

So, naturally, we begin with yet another “I should be posting more” spontaneous unedited essay. But in a strange way, these are the lifeblood of personal internet projects, trite as they may seem. Because it’s this sort of reflexive expression of guilt and good intentions that allows you, dear reader, to see the individual behind the whirlwind of ideas and semi-professionalism. I’m just a guy trying to write good things and feeling very confused by how to do that without using a hashtag. Or something like that-- selfishly, I needed to break the ice. I’ll post this, enjoy a mild dopamine rush, and then go play more tennis and forget about it until later tonight, when, perhaps, I’ll put down my book and open up one of the dozen partially edited Word docs I have on the go, and try to get the cycle going again.

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Nobody ever told me that it would be this hard to be a sports fan. Becoming a fan was pretty easy: I was living in the East Bay, the Warriors went on a playoff run, all of my kids and friends were stoked, so I sat down and learned all of the players’ names and personalities and shouted mean things at Matthew Dellavedova. And when basketball started up again this year, boom! I was a fan. It certainly didn’t hurt that the Warriors were winning everything, nor that they represented a link to my halcyon early twenties kicking around Oakland and Berkeley. But I was in it for the guyzos; I actually want an Iguodala jersey because of I care about his persona and history and abilities.

And as the man says, there was great rejoicing. It was so easy to mock the sportsball in the before-times, to laud the athleticism with which the one gentleman forcibly placed the sphere through the desired locus of victory-pointage, in spite of determined efforts by the other hand-flailing gentleman. I suppose I should apologize for those years of snark-- I get it now, guys. I see why everyone is so happy about sports. (It’s like I’ve finally understood romantic comedies, or mainstream country.)

But now I see the flip side of the coin stuck in the shit that hit the fan on the dark underbelly of the other shoe dropping: we’re losing. I’ve never cared so much about a sports team to wake up grouchy because they didn’t win. Perhaps this was the wrong team in the wrong season to learn how to be a properly balanced fan, but something tells me it’ll never be easy. Because I’m not really interested in the winning exclusively-- I’d be a Globetrotters fan then-- but in the players. I want them to be happy by triumphing in a righteous struggle, so that I can feel some sort of happiness transference, like it was partially my belief that willed them to victory. If I step back from the grouchfest, there’s actually something pretty cool going on between the players and the fans and the other players and the other fans, like a roiling cloud of emotions and desires that seems to exert some kind of voodoo effect on Klay Thompson waking up from his slumber and destroying everyone. (I don’t pretend to get it, I’m new at this.) They fellas are well compensated, but they do it because we care, and we care because we see that they’re not just out there to jog around and get a paycheck. We all feel really deeply about this, and right now it’s breaking my unscarred heart to see us on the brink of defeat.

The only thing to do, I guess, is to keep caring. I suppose that’s obvious to y’all seasoned sports enthusiasts, but for those of us still trying to figure it out a posteriori, it’s important to keep in mind, because it cuts all of this tension about winning with some perspective. I’m in it for the players; I’m forcing myself on a sports commentary break today because I can’t stand hearing the internet say bad things about my dudes anymore. And I know that if they lose, they’re going to need some psychological hugs from knowing that total strangers like me still care about them and are excited to see them play this silly/wonderful/stressful/joyous game again next year. So I’m going to force myself to finish out this series for the guyzos. I’ll be sad if we lose, but this is what caring is all about: quixotic faith in the abilities of your chosen professional athletes to overcome the other guys and their own quixotic fans. Being grouchy for a few days (I hopefully won’t have to tell myself) is my share of the burden I committed to in the instant that my brain learned to identify Mo Speights on the court. Look out internet, I’m a fan now.

(But because I still don’t fully understand the rules, and thus am removed from the constraints of reality to a certain extent, I’ll leave you with this closing thought: if, IF the Warriors are absolutely fated to lose to OKC, I desperately want them to play the last game like the dramatic culminating game in a slobs vs. snobs comedy from the eighties, concluding with literally everyone down to Steve Kerr finding their counterpart on the Thunder, kicking them in the balls, and sprinting out of the arena cackling, a la Meatballs. Bad sportsmanship? Perhaps. Immoral moral victory for those of us not emotionally prepared to acknowledge Russel Westbrook’s domination? I postulate, you decide.)

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Guys, I don’t want to come here and be a climate scold today. We’re all just trying our best to live and be happy within an imperfect social system that runs on a substance that threatens to destabilize the biological underpinnings of the system through making the weather freak out. There are more immediate things to worry about (work, relationships, Trump), so to refuse to go for a hike because it involves driving to get there (or something) seems like a fast track to misery and existential paralysis.

But I am totally disgusted by this article on how to fly sustainably from the Times. I can’t even find the right adjective to describe the kind of wrong that it is to spin guilt about a real problem into base platitudes and self-congratulation. We’re all doing our best, I’m sure, to negotiate our global environmental responsibilities with the fantastic promises of global travel. But passing off reusable water bottles as a way to feel better about recreational jet fuel combustion is not okay.

Yes, I’m tired of being made to feel guilty about things; when the internet jumped down Calvin Trillin’s throat for that silly poem he wrote about the one-upsmanship of finding new Chinese regional cuisines I was actually livid, shouting at my computer to leave the man alone. But guilt seems to be the only reasonable reaction for citizens of a society that directly benefits from the factors driving this amorphous apocalyptic event. Flight angst hits home for me, because I’ve been flying up and down the coast all year for a long-distance relationship. We’re trying desperately to push our visits as far apart as we can stand it, but it still feels like a band-aid on a flesh wound. We want to be a part of the world by doing these graduate programs, so we can learn stuff to contribute to society. But how do we balance that concept of good with the knowledge that our voluntary lifestyle choice is raising our personal contributions towards global warming to an unacceptable level? And then what do we even do when an article comes along saying that it’s okay to do 36 hours in Thailand if you eat local while you’re there?

I recognize that I’ve cursed myself by thinking too much about these systems, by spending too much time imagining and feeling the aggregate ecological damage that my flights, my car trips, my plastic wrap at the supermarket all contribute to. But I also can’t help but feel a Cassandra thing going on here, that if the Times didn’t run away from guilt and encouraged more people to accurately see the impact of their aggregate minor actions we might be able to mitigate the future impacts of climate change. Because the other problem is that the threat of global warming seems both immanent and ethereal, in that we sweat out the individual heat waves but read apocalyptic visions from scientists in the op-eds. We’re stuck between “too late” and “not my fault,” and it’s a bad place to be in terms of feeling like there’s anything we can do to fix the problem.

My brother and I came up with the idea of a fine-tuned carbon budget calculator: if the NSF or someone figured out a series of personal targets for individual carbon emission caps, and provided a fine-grained calculator to help people make a rough projection of how much carbon they will emit in a year, and then kept track of it to see how close to the limit they’re getting, we might be able to encourage more responsible behavior, as if someone really wanted to take a long flight they could cut back on European wine or something. More personally, I could figure out what I need to do or stop doing in my personal life in order to offset all of the short flights I’m taking. Or, if that seems like too much work, we could actually pass a flat-rate carbon tax and let the invisible hand swat punks down. It wouldn’t change the self-congratulatory behavior of people who could still afford the tickets (and would probably be hell on my relationship), but it would be a major step in hitting carbon targets.

As I was putting this together, I had to stop and chuckle, because what if we were wrong? What if it’s not actually carbon emissions heating the planet, but people being jerks, or long blog posts? And that seems like the crux to me-- we’re worried because we can see the science, and it’s telling us that we need to make our lives a whole lot harder in a hurry, voluntarily. It’s the sort of knowledge that should be inspiring guilt and anxiety, and we should be talking about this without feeling like killjoys. Then we could parse it all out and actually do something constructive, like think about why we want to travel, or if it’s really worth going to grad school in a different state from your partner. We’re on the cusp of a really interesting moment, where our entire culture will need to shift its infrastructure for living and values of acceptable environmental use of the world, and people are still trying to duck the whole problem by absolving guilt. I’d say that it’s hard not to feel like the world is going to get the apocalypse it deserves, except for the projections noting that the brunt of the impact will fall away from the countries doing the bulk of the impacting. It might just be that it’s time to be mad as hell, but I have no idea how to build a realist coalition of environmentalists to educate and legislate our way out of this mess. Is it a breach in personal freedoms to try to change people’s values in order to prevent a potential crisis? How can we help individuals figure out what small actions will have a meaningful aggregate impact without smugness, self-righteousness, or complacency with the status quo?

[jujedispatch]

There are certain words and terms that I’m pretty sure I’m a sucker for, and “summer nights” is way up there on the list. And it’s hard to put it into raw words-- part of it has to do with this brass band version of “Sexual Healing” that I’m digging on right now, after a big day of butte-top rose and writing about emotional relationships with the land. There’s nothing more that I want to be than done right now, and the promise of a sultry junebuggy summer night, dark like wet velvet and with cold citrus drinks and garlicky food on a grill and yes, something like this track playing on some speakers with proper bass will get the job done. That’s my vision right now: backyard patio, twinkle lights, barbecue smoldering, these drums (oh to play the snare like a second-line drummer), tuba thumping, and goodness me I miss playing bari sax, with that growl like Shere Khan as voiced by George Sanders. Summer night is the promise and illusion that everything will be put behind us soon enough, that we’ll live in a season of perpetual warmth and universal shirking of responsibilities to talk about goofy stuff. It’s hedonism in its most charmingly human form, real and raucous and joyous and a little bit on edge as we all know that it’s a temporary thing, but for the night before things get hot again and we have to get back to year-round drudgery we can play and blow that tuba and forget. Summer nights are the fuzz and crackle that skips in the record, bringing us out of the groove for a moment of low-fidelity atmospheric crackle. I love the imperfection of that sound, of the repetitive transitory joy of the barbecue, of the desire to remake Marvin Gaye with an eight-part horn section. Sometimes we should forget our purposes while not forgetting that we’re choosing to forget. It’s coming soon. I can’t wait.

[jujedispatch]

So here’s a not-too-silly idea: wouldn’t it be great if instead of getting two or three big ol’ newspapers, of which maybe 20% of the content is interesting to us, we instead subscribed to four or five smaller papers, of which up to 90% of the content was fascinating?

I think through this every Sunday-- in a world of bounteous, luxurious access to information, it becomes a silly neurotic problem to feel guilty that one doesn’t want to read the majority of the paper. Yeah, it’s kind of a waste to get Style, Sports, and Business, and while Arts, Travel, Books and the rest are interesting sometimes, I usually get better info on that stuff elsewhere... and then there are the days when the op-eds are meh, or the news is too damn depressing, and then why am I paying a small fortune for the privilege of recycling this paper every week?

It’s all part of the game of subscribing to major papers. There’s going to be something for everyone, and I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of anything that they love just so I can get more Sam Sifton writing about feasts. But think about the NY Times vs. the New Yorker, for example. I’m happy to read most of every issue of that magazine, even if it’s a year old, because I like their editorial interests. Of course, that’s partially subjective, and partially a function of publishing deathless long-form journalism instead of more perishable news and opinions. But what if we were able to take that editorial specificity and apply it to our newspapers?

I’m imagining a misinterpretation of the European newspaper scene, where I hear there are different political angles in the major papers and specific sports journals and things like that. I think it would be super-cool to have something that’s roughly the size of a single section of a traditional newspaper with some damned good writing in it. We could have twenty or so different options, each with a specific sort of idiosyncratic focus and vibe, that might potentially replicate or expand on the functions of an individual section from a general paper. The content could veer away from the illusion of journalistic objectivity and into cultural observation and commentary and fair storytelling, with transparency and stuff like that. Different papers could experiment visually in their design, playing with the potential of the page and delighting those of us who love print artifacts. And, because there’s way too much to read already, this could just be a weekly thing, where the daily papers cover the nuts and bolts of the news and these supplemental editions enhance and enrich our print lives.

The major papers could even get a cut of the action if they worked as incubators, dividing up the territory: they could handle distribution, say, or spin off certain sections into print independence. I wouldn’t want to lose any of the serendipity of discovering something unexpected in a large general-interest paper, but this could be a way to enhance niche coverage for special interests while cutting back on some of the stuff that general readers might not care about. I would hate to lose the major papers and have print culture devolve into special-interest publications only, and I worry a little bit about nobody subscribing to the op-ed paper if it gets spun out on its own (or whatever else gets supported indirectly by general revenue). But I think that a change in our reading culture could be kind of nice. I’d love to live in a world with leaner daily papers, or a digital edition that facilitates serendipity more than clickable headlines, and a sort of massive unbundling of the Sunday paper. But without hurting anything that’s already in place, the addition of a few weekly Sunday papers with a larger proportion of interesting articles (for interested readers) would be enriching. More opportunities for writers to get published, interesting variations on print objects, a diversity of voices and perspectives... what’s not to love?

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I just had the weirdest experience, which is going to require a little explanation: while I’m on the grad school grind, I’m living at home, which has the distinct benefit of living with my parents’ dogs. They’re wonderful creatures, but they’re totally xenophobic. A guy’s about to come by and do some work in the backyard, so I went and got out the construction worker headphones/ear protection things (we keep two pairs of these suckers around the house) so that the impending bark-isode doesn’t add to my aggregate hearing loss from past bark-isodes. And I’m making eggs while all of this is going on, so I’ve got these -30 db. headphones on and I’m getting ready to flip my eggs, which is a science that I consider myself to have perfected-- lots of butter, cast iron, let it get just hot enough, crack and sizzle, then when the white has set use the thin-bladed metal spatula (the best spatula I’ve ever owned, technically a “fish turner”, pick one up and see) to gently lift and scrape and chisel under the crispy fried side of the egg, a delicate and finesse-oriented operation, like peeling stickers off soft-skinned fruit without tearing the skin. But the thing is, with the headphones on, I coudn’t hear the sound of the spatula on the pan, and all of a sudden it was like I was making eggs left-handed (right-handed for you lefties, something equally difficult for you ambidexties?) because, it turns out, I’ve been partially using the sound of the fried egg releasing from the pan to judge whether or not it’s sticking, and thus to modulate my chiseling force. And I thought I was a G because I was judging by the resistance through the thin spatula-- secret dimensions to my egg game abundant.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll do it blindfolded.

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I’ve been meaning to write about curation for a while, so spontaneously deciding to dash off some thoughts on this hallowed theme after a few drinks, while beached whale status trying to digest dinner, seems somehow sacrilegious. Or perfect. Either way, I’m listening to this running Spotify playlist that I have, where I essentially stick random stuff that I hear on the radio or through the Discover Weekly playlist (which is hilarious, because its algorithm is in a perpetual freakout due to the conflicting tastes of My Esteemed Girlfriend and I, who share the account), and this playlist is perhaps the thematic opposite of what’s going on in my iTunes, namely (he looks at his calendar as if it’ll help him count back through the years) TWELVE YEARS of attempts at establishing a music library and contingent identity of listening practices. Jeez.

It’s a weird concept, but basically every year or so I skim through my iTunes and take stock of the music that I own: what am I listening to now? What have I forgotten? What should I really give a second chance to? What did I try desperately to like in high school that was actually not great to begin with? The questions are largely academic-- there’s no need (was there ever?) to delete a file off the infinite expanse of my hard drive. But there was never a need, either, to organize by genre, anguishing about the distinction between Rock and Classic Rock, the artificiality of Alternative, and (more applicably) the extreme necessity of getting rid of terrible neo-liberal World while trying to group thematically without delving into the micro-nationalisms of Ghanaian, Cuban, Colombian, etc.

All of which is to say, I spend too much time organizing digital files. It makes me feel good, though, in a way that’s kind of representative of my various degrees of awareness as to what I’m listening to. Music libraries are different from book libraries, where I won’t give something away unless I don’t like it (and I’ll get really possessive about the individual physical copies of the books), or from wardrobes, where I’ll refuse to chuck a shirt unless it’s falling to shreds (unless, again, I don’t like it, in which case adios). My actual collection of CDs and LPs barely approximates the various albums friends have lent me to rip, burned mixes, mp3s I’ve bought, even titles that I’ve lent out that (gasp!) never made it home. The digital library, the true music library, lives and breathes. iTunes gathers data between hard drive crashes; I put together playlists; history is born.

And, most importantly, I curate the selection. It feels silly as all get out in these Spotify days (RIP Rdio) to think about the music that resides in digitized copies on my hard drive as being somehow distinct from the rest of the music that I have daily access to, but the process of curation represents a degree of investment in my listening practice. The presence of those files represents interest and involvement: I try to buy albums that I care about enough to be included in the library, which makes library-status a marker of self-reflexive prestige. Those songs also tie back into my personal history, from that first evening in 9th grade when I decided to digitize my CD wallet and select titles from the family music collection, and therefore form a base stable of classic tracks to anchor playlists and evening cooking sessions. But most importantly, the process of constantly weeding through the files to figure out what’s headed for the “Deletion?” and “For Further Study” playlists brings me back into contact with the thing-ness of the music. It’s a constant finger on the pulse of the evolution of my personal taste, and it makes aware of the continuous interplay between trends, ingrained tastes, and sentimental oddities.

So yeah, it’s silly. I love that I’ve made the leap into Spotify co-ownership-- it’s been great for exploring albums that I’m thinking of buying, for listening to one-time radio tracks, and other exploratory things. But it isn’t the same. I still have a mental partition between the green circle and what’s now the white circle with the wild purple note in it. The latter is home base, where the real music lives, that I’ll turn to when I need to ground myself or when I’m cooking or on a long car ride. Spotify (or Tidal or whatever streaming service) represents discovery and possibility, but the core library is a lifelong project, a crystallized manifestation of a lifetime of tastes and influences. It’s a collection, a practice, an archive, and a philosophy all in one. I will continue to procrastinate by assessing the state of the library in spite of the ease of streaming, or the potential satisfaction of knowing exactly what trash I listened to senior year. Some day, I look forward to sharing the library with my kids. We’ll scroll through the genres (all rock grouped into one, funk finally separated from classic soul thanks to the impending neo-funk revival), and they’ll ask “Daddy, who was T.I.?” And I’ll say, “ ‘What You Know’ was a seminal late-night driving anthem from 2006... but what the hell is the rest of King doing on here?” May the circle be unbroken.

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There’s a great xkcd that deals with the inexorability of time, and I usually find myself in agreement-- there’s something strangely comforting about knowing that, based on our place within the laws of physics, our perception of time will always proceed at the same steady crawl. But that doesn’t make the experience of being stuck on the slow train any easier for us, not when we’re nostalgia-tripping or desperately waiting for the future (or bemoaning wasted time in this one life of ours to live, but that’s real and deep and a conversation for another time).

Now that I’m in grad school, I feel like my time-perceiving receptors have been thrown all out of whack, because so much of this process is shifted out of the register of time in real life. I used to feel pretty in touch with the world’s working rhythm-- each day was a unit and cycle to get through, leading up to the Glorious Weekend, in a steady progression to major Anticipated Events (vacations, special events, last days of work). And so the world turned pleasantly, pleasantly I say, because it felt very right, like time and my life were advancing in a one-to-one ratio, with a clear sense of things having been done with an appropriate amount of effort for how long it took to see results. It was no natural agrarian rhythm, of course, but it still seemed like as much of a natural system as we can hope to get without abandoning modern society.

But this grad school grind is weird. The work exists on a much longer scale of time, where the work is slower and deeper and the goals seem impossibly far away. It’s like the focus has shifted to a sense of daily achievement and weekly down-time to the indefinite future: conferences, dissertations, the job market, a slow current of work that looks like it’s always going to look forward to what’s next, to furthering that rascally scholarly dialogue. And while a lot of academia feels like a long con-- I read books and talk about them to contribute to society in a roundabout way that involves lots of seminar discussions?-- this part seems both dangerous and universal. Surely we’ve all ended up stuck in a place where we’re so focused on the seemingly-unattainable future that time becomes a burden. I worry about what that’s doing to us. Because this is about more than stopping to smell the roses; if we’re being pushed inexorably forward through time, then we should always be smelling figurative roses. Sometimes the roses may suck when you’re putting out fires, sometimes the roses may be boring in the DMV line, but if we forget that all time is equally fleeting, and that we’re not feeling it now because we’re mentally off in future time, then aren’t we missing out on something essential?

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It’s really hard to write about what music feels like. The closest I’ve ever seen it is James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”-- totally nails the emotive spirit of a jazz combo while managing to weave the instrumental “dialogue” into a narrative analogy, earning many, many points-- but I’ve yet to read a piece of music criticism that gets into this concept of the felt experience of a song or album. I could just be reading the wrong stuff (Geoff Dyer comes close in his NYRB Ornette Coleman tribute), but it seems like the best music pieces seem to offer a general description of the sounds an artist goes for, with lots of context about methodology and biography and influence (Hilton Als on Madlib, Jeff Weiss on everything). It’s great, don’t get me wrong-- artistic method being almost as mysterious as music itself, but easier to describe-- and yet...

Of course, this could be a classic Juje non-issue issue. What I’m responding to is tone, and that’s totally subjective. We don’t really have the same stable of sense descriptors for the thump of a funk bassline or the warm honey of a solid horn section (y’all should see me working real hard to even nail down these general tone ideas) in the same way that a food writer can mix and match the four our five or seven or howevermany basic flavors to get us excited about a food we’ve never tried. Attempts at nailing down tone empirically (it’s a Hammond B3 played through a vintage Leslie off an original pressing) lose the magic; getting lyrical, though, can end up sounding like high-school poetry on acid (orchestral strings like harmonious bees reverberating through blue crystal cathedrals on a bright winter’s morning...).

To be sure, this slipperiness is part of the whole appeal. Now that I’m reading super-dense things for a living, I can’t listen to music in the background anymore, so I’ve become much more intentional and greedy about my music consumption: headphones, whole albums, new stuff, good stuff. It’s the perfect antidote, actually, to all this verbal abstraction that I live in, and I kind of want to find a way to share that with everyone. After all, isn’t the goal of good criticism not to critique, but to enhance and recommend, to take one person’s crazy idea and communicate it? I basically want to philosophize about what happens when different tracks create by hijacking the visual-verbal world with sweet sounds, but without cheapening exactly that indescribable aspect. It might not be possible. That’s probably okay. But I’m going to keep working at this, because it’s impossible not to be fascinated by something so indescribable and yet so essential. Here’s to you, tone. Play it on out.

[jujedispatch]

I’ve been fussing all morning about hipsters, so I’m going to see if I can do this in one big paragraph instead of a rant: I was told some time ago that it’s pointless to be grouchy about those damn hipsters because, on some level, we’re all hipsters. But one of my colleagues recently pointed out that we’re also all not hipsters; when you break it down, it’s just a label lacking in specificity that falls apart when applied to individuals or small groups. I think that the ur-hipster, the straw figure that haunts the anxieties of a leftist imagination, is as mythical as it is reviled-- there are jerks everywhere, but is there really a jerk so totally focused on crafting an exterior persona out of obscure cultural touchstones as to create an identity? I think not. Such an entity is like something out of the weirdest comic book ever, a shadow being formed by dark parasitic force from global artifacts for the express purpose of... what? Does the straw hipster want anything? It seems that the problem is social, a desire to be seen as cool through the use of objects and attitudes. But what lies beneath the pastiche? This is what I fear when I think of myself as labeled hipster: the nothingness. The concept of a dominant subculture that exists to be hip ruins the emotional connection I feel to cultural artifacts (totally leaving aside the specter of appropriation). There is nothing wrong with being cool, with getting in to non-normative things. But a man’s gotta have a code; coolness should be felt internally. Which is me looping back to say that the term hipster may be doing more harm than any mythical hipster could do, because of the negative concepts we (I) imagine it stands for. We can’t say for sure that people are doing things just to be seen doing them, we don’t know what they’re feeling on the inside, what attachments and motivations are working in the brain chemistry soup. The real thing to latch on to is the danger we feel about the prospect of a world in which nobody actually likes anything for itself anymore, the emptiness of aspects of culture where we feel we have to act in a hipster way, the reasons why we want to dig through the archives to look for new-historical ideas. Hipsters aren’t the problem because they don’t exist; we’ve got to think of ways to exorcise their specter instead.

[jujedispatch]

Things are difficult. Physical things-- this isn’t a veiled complaint session. This is just me trying to work through why I’ve wasted close to two hours over the past week nesting into visual subcultures while coveting objects that I certainly don’t need (jackets and glassware, mostly). The internet is a terrible, terrible place, round CLXVIII.

I think it’s definitely because the world is made up of things-- as my esteemed mother put it a few weeks ago, “why do objects have to be so physical?” It’s tough, because things break, get lost, get dirty, inspire envy, cost too much, take up space, are heavy, don’t fit, and so on and so forth. (This may seem like it’s going to be one of those hyper-obvious posts, but bear with me.) But it’s actually kind of great, because things also have the capacity to continue to surprise us-- if it was all imaginary or otherwise internal, we’d have to do some pretty intense mental acrobatics to keep it fresh. But with things, you can pull a domestic Ansel Adams and spend the afternoon watching the changing lighting conditions on your ceiling fan, or dig up an old box of stuff and traipse down good old memory lane. The flip side is that we may hyper-fixate on that mental/physical divide and scour the internet for a jacket that we know must exist somewhere, but maybe there’s something more going on there. Maybe we’re looking for a thing that will enable us to interact with the world in a very specific way that we can’t pin down yet, like scrolling Netflix looking for a movie that fits an impossible mood.

I got on the Kondo wagon for a bit while I did some new year’s cleaning-- folded my shirts so I can see all of them, thought a lot about joy-bringing, continued to roll socks into balls because that’s the only fun part about folding socks-- but I realized that it was more important for me to keep stuff that I was still engaged with than de-clutter. Part of it is residual American pragmatism-- “the holes in that shirt aren’t that big, you can get another few months out of it”-- but part of it is also the relationship with the object. More than a sentimental nostalgia, it’s the promise of future uses of a thing, of paths yet un-interacted with, that make it worth the closet real estate. Because why cut off the history with an object if there’s still more of the story to tell, more of the world to see it with?

[jujedispatch]

There’s that awkward moment when you want to write something, but you instead go back and read all of the things that you already wrote, and start thinking about effective structures of Tumblr posting, and then everything gets self-conscious and terrible so you drop your half-baked plans to share object theory or what you’ve been cooking or a manifesto for new musical genres and talk about the weather instead.

We’re back to fog and grossness today, but yesterday was blue-skied and balmy and fresh-smelling, and as I was sitting on a bench pretending to get reading done it hit me that nice weather in January here in LA feels like late spring in the Berkshires, or a February heat wave in the Bay Area. That is to say, it promises summer almost on a biochemical level: I swear I got an endorphin rush just by staring at trees in the late-afternoon sunlight, thinking of backyards and grilling and outdoor concerts. Could be all the Emerson I’ve been messing around with, but the experience was, dare I say, transcendent? (60% effort.)

This is dangerous, though. One of my favorite parts of the academic institution is that moment in late spring when the promise of summer becomes tangible and everyone’s motivation goes out the door. I think of it as the great narcotizing effect of impending vacation, and if you’ve ever spent time on a school campus in June, you’ll know what I mean. But this is January. We’ve got things to do. Am I doomed to spend the rest of the semester building up the promise of an impossibly chill summer?

As the great Orville Richard Burrell once said, “Life is one big party while you’re still young.” But who, indeed, will have my back when it’s all done? Which is to say, screw it. Summer is but an arbitrary state of mind, a luxury brought upon by echoes of agrarian rhythms in our social infrastructure (working during summer makes summer not feel like summer, summer summer summer). My friends, we can have our summer whenever we damn well please, or really whenever the weather is kind. Once this marine layer burns off, my theory and I are headed for a lawn chair and a cold beer. It’s my little way of showing the nation my appreciation.

(I promise more coherence in the future. It’s summer, after all.)

[jujedispatch]

I don’t know if this is a real problem (meaning a problem that other people experience, too), or a personal neurosis, but: every now and then, particularly when I’m about to start working again, but don’t have anything seriously important to do, I feel a need to read articles. Good articles. There’s a magic sweet spot that scratches the itch, typically an internet piece that takes two to three full-screen scrolls (about five minutes of reading) that’s not explicitly about politics or world problems. Cultural commentary is good, food articles are better. (The best is stuff about crazy patterns of animal husbandry practiced in societies that I’ve never heard of, and is predictably rare.)

But when you’re as provincial as I am on the internet, eventually you’ll run out of sources on a given midmorning; by afternoon the mood turns to panic as you cycle through the same five websites over and over again. Which is why I heartily endorse two features from Roads & Kingdoms: breakfast and 5 o’clock somewhere. The pieces are short enough that you can read a couple at a time, or a whole chunk if you’re seriously procrastinating. There’s a lot to catch up on, so we have the illusion of the infinite scroll. And it’s either about breakfast foods or drinking, which are two of the best things to do with your digestive tract!

Which is all a lead-in to say that this morning, as I’m eating my breakfast while reading about how other folks do their breakfasts, I started to take great comfort in what we could call the essential decency of the human palate: the fact that all these sentient bags of meat around the world are taking time out from the serious business of propagating the species to try and manipulate some organic compounds in a pan (or pot or on a griddle) for maximum deliciousness. It’s like a massively abstracted way of seeing the role that the little people play in the course of history-- plebeians screwing around in between being used as pawns in some project of civilization and realizing that it tastes better when fried in lard. James C. Scott may think that agriculture is humanity’s greatest mistake, but I’m quite happy to instead think of all the forgotten nobodies, bleary-eyed and staring down the barrel of another day’s hard labor, who still took the extra second to ask themselves, “what am I going to do to punch up this millet porridge today?”

[jujedispatch]

Today on the further adventures of Theory and Juje...

A buddy/colleague of mine got something published on Lucky Peach’s online site recently. Personal envy aside, I congratulated him, and when another colleague asked him what Lucky Peach was, he said, you know, classic late capitalism commodity fetishization, food as experience, that sort of thing.

Which hurts, because it’s dead on and because I love food culture. I get down with explorations of regional liquor production, will brake for reviews of restaurants I know I’ll never go to, read cookbooks cover to cover, all that jazz. Food as experience is great because it’s the universal leveler, unashamedly subjective, and totally practical. We all eat, and we all like different things. Apart from the uncomfortableness of dropping serious cash for a tasting menu when you know there’s starvation in the world (a dangerous yet selfless line of argument, resulting in total altruism and no me time, Billy), the hobby seems innocuous and life-affirming.

But there is something weird about cutting edge global cuisine becoming entertainment, because it removes the Realness of the hobby. Calvin Trillin wasn’t touring rural America looking for entertainment experience, he was looking for what I will term the “nomsy” experience-- folks who go the extra mile to make their food taste even better than it needs to in order to nourish and sustain because Primal Animal Instincts have met Human Drive For Improvement and Capacity for Obsession. Which is another way of saying that when a restaurant turns your meal into a floor show and abandons the pursuit of nomsy-ness (or “nomsitude”), it’s fun, but it’s lost sight of what makes food and modern food culture great and human and universal: our love of chewing on things that were heretofore inconceivably delicious (”nomstacular”).

So I propose a new direction for the benevolent cabal in charge of chefs and food journalists: let’s slow down with the rankings and stars and get back to whether or not the cooks at a place are turning out food that makes you groan and drool and text all your friends. I don’t care if it’s a shack on a rural highway, someone’s grandma, or a five billion-star Dream Team concept restaurant with one seat in the middle of the grill station. If that food at that moment is nomsy as all get out, that’s all we need to know. Commodity fetishization be damned.

[jujedispatch]

... And, predictably, the grand project fell by the wayside as the forces of Real Life demanded greater and greater sacrifices of “time” and “focus”, all in the name of our foul lord, Course Requirements...

Anyways. Sometimes with all of the deep thought about the value and purpose of books in our culture, I end up losing focus and forget how normal people enjoy this stuff in their free time. Which is why it was great to have a train conversation with one of my colleagues (which I have now?) about the fun merits of Michael Chabon and New Girl. She was anti-, I was pro-, and that was about the end of that. In the olden days, I would have revved up and turned the whole thing into something philosophical, with a right and wrong idea of what we should all enjoy, but I’m playing with the big dogs now-- you can’t theory-troll your theory classmates.

Which was great, because I finally get it: producing scholarship about the political dimensions of material culture is one thing, but being a grown-up in the real world means letting other people like and dislike what they want, and not feeling grouchy when they disagree with you. Took me 26 years to get here, but I’m turning in my badge. No more will I try to convince people that what they enjoy is bad for them, or that they’re wrong when they don’t like three-hour Spaghetti Westerns. Because, all things being equal and not secretly fascist or racist or anything, it’s about personal satisfaction. I think we forget that sometimes in academia, and end up doing the humanities version of quoting statistics at each other during dinner.

Doesn’t mean I won’t scamp on you for whatever, though. The path to total cultural enlightenment seems long, and this is just the “don’t be a jerk” stage of the journey.

[jujedispatch]

On a lighter note (and hell, why not post twice when I’ve been sloppy with my schedule?), it’s been almost exactly five years since Steve brought My Beautiful Dark Twisted Family into my musical life. Western Massachusetts and senior year of undergrad are both far, far away right now, but listening to that British lady on the opening track brings me right back to sitting around our fake fireplace in the co-op, pretending to do work while hearing this for the very first time on a cold November night (it’s always a cold night around here, ain’t it?)... and then driving down to Central PA for Thanksgiving and hearing this again. And again. And again. We started our mornings with this, finished our evenings, played it at every party to this day. But beyond anything else (here comes another night), my Proustian memory here is of cold, snow, darkness, Christmas lights, and cruising down the country roads near Selinsgrove, talking about nothing and everything. Five years. Damn.