I enjoyed the latest Paul Thomas Anderson flick, One Battle After Another, as a piece of entertainment. But I found myself a bit skeptical of its political message, inasmuch as it even had a coherent politics. So I was glad to read this scathing review by Jason England in Defector. I don’t know if I agree with everything in it, but I love a good no-punch-pulled argument against anything suspiciously popular. A sample:

Because of the messiness of the racial politics, One Battle After Another functions as a hybrid of Rorschach test and rage bait, providing heavy-handed symbols of contemporary social and political ideologies, with nebulous insights underpinning them, while also providing ammunition for the insufferable intraracial gender wars.

It helps explain what I found missing.

High recommend for the Weird Studies interview with Shannon Taggart where she discusses her investigation into the liminality and spectral persistence of Michael Jackson. I generally love Weird Studies, and this episode is a standout. Here’s Taggart on the strangely shamanic quality of Jackson’s sleep:

Part of my major thesis is that his themes are transformation and change—and that the control of the dream state, I propose, was possibly the reason he died in such a strange way. So he died of acute propofol intoxication in 2009, and he had not had REM sleep in 60 days. A Harvard doctor testified that he is the only documented example of a human being having such an extreme sleep deprivation. Because propofol does not put you to sleep, it makes you enter a coma-like state. So I found this quote of Michael saying to Deepak Chopra, he asked, ‘Deepak, have you heard of this thing that takes you to the Valley of Death and then brings you back?’ He was obviously talking about this anesthetic. So I proposed that part of his death was to gain inspiration.

Did you know that mummy brown was one of the favorite paints of the Pre-Raphaelites? Next time you gaze on one of their horny, numinous canvases, just think of how this “rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint” was “made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh.” It only went out of style when “fresh supplies of mummies diminished,” and even then it continued being sold into the mid-20th-century.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a parallel between how 18th and 19th century aristocrats treated mummies (see: mummia) and the cavalier but also quasi-religious way that our elites treat the flammable fluid fossils known as petroleum.

The latest from Animation Obsessive, “The ‘Toy Story’ You Remember,” seems potentially abstract and technical: it’s about how in the early days of digital animation, films still had to be transferred onto 35mm prints to be distributed to theaters, which perversely means that the currently available digital prints of these movies (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, The Lion King, Aladdin) are showing different colors than the original release. But the side-by-side comparisons are truly shocking.

(That’s the 35mm Aladdin print on top and the current streaming version below.)

As a child of the ’90s, these films are canon. It’s crazy to realize how much they’ve changed.

On the topic of what actually leads to political change towards more freedom and justice for non-elites, I love this passage from James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism:

As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have convincingly shown for the Great Depression in the United States, protests by unemployed and workers in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement, what success the movements enjoyed was at their most disruptive, most confrontational, least organized, and least hierarchical. It was the effort to stem the contagion of a spreading, noninstitutionalized challenge to the existing order that prompted concessions. There were no leaders to negotiate a deal with, no one who could promise to get people off the streets in return for concessions. Mass defiance, precisely because it threatens the institutional order, gives rise to organizations that try to channel that defiance into the flow of normal politics, where it can be contained. (xviii)

Don’t hold your breath waiting for someone embedded in government to disrupt the status quo. That’s what protest movements are for.

Here’s Gary Schteyngart on “The Rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance” (via Austin Kleon):

Frivolity and absurdity are kryptonite to authoritarians who project the stern-father archetype to their followers. Once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return…. What is happening to us is as serious as a guillotine. We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling.

It won’t surprise you to know that I’m inclined to agree. But I take seriously the way that this approach seems precisely upside down to many “serious people,” especially those embedded in liberal institutions. A PhD-holding colleague told me the other day that they think the No Kings protests aren’t leading anywhere because they saw a row of people in inflatable costumes posing for pictures. I’m not saying these protests are the cat’s meow or anything, but I also would point out that relying on liberal institutions and high-minded, serious people to save us is an approach that has been failing us for decades now.

Lifelong Giants fan here, but oh my goodness, Yoshinobu Yamamoto can pitch. Who didn’t come away from the World Series in love with that guy? If you, too, found yourself amazed, don’t miss the ESPN story about his trainer, Osamu Yada. Yada’s method seems to basically embrace tropes about East v. West, flexibility v. strength, kung fu v. boxing.

“There are things that are natural in nature, and then there are things that are normal in the sports world,” Yada said. “And what I’ve been able to do is teach Yoshinobu about things that occur in the natural world. And because the general philosophies and the things that are accepted are so different when you look at it from a sporting sense, it seems like something that’s outrageous.”

I’d love to read a New Yorker treatment of this figure, giving him a bit more skepticism and context. But the ESPN article is great fun. (One thing was off, though: no mention of iconic skinny pitcher Tim Lincecum! Criminal not to mention The Freak.)

How do you chill out in these fallen days? My own algorithm occasionally serves up things like “Abandoned 100 Year Old Workshop Renovation - 2 Year Timelapse.” Good stuff, actually. The English accent is great. And it’s of extra interest to me because in a past life I myself spent about two years rehabbing a hundred-year-old barn and workshop. But if you stick around to the end of the video, this last little bit is wild:

Unfortunately, the owner of this building has gone completely quiet, which is a bit of a challenge. I’ve been trying and failing to get in touch, to agree to the next stage of work, so that I can get the workshop into a useful state. When he resurfaces, I’ll pick things up where I left off. Just in case he doesn’t re-appear, I’ve started looking for a workshop to buy, and I’ve found some amazing options, including buildings nearly 300 years old. While all this goes on in the background, I’m going right back to basics. I’ll be heading into the woods to prepare for an attempt to cross the Irish Sea in a DIY Stone Age boat made entirely from animal skins and wood. Along the way, I’ll be making everything I need from scratch: buckskin clothes, flint tools, weapons, food, and finally the boat itself. On to the next adventure.

All these content creators are nuts. You did that, on a volunteer basis??? You’re also a Stone Age LARPer? (For myself, I have to confess that I actually enjoy doing projects without a camera pointed at myself the whole time.)

This reminds me that the last time I wrote rapturously about the quality of the light in L.A. was a blog post titled “Meditation, David Lynch, L.A.” that I published on January 5 of this year. Two days later, wildfires began buring through the city. Dozens died and over 200,000 people evacuated, including both us and David Lynch. He died a handful of days later, his precarious health tipped into crisis by the emergency move. The whole thing messed me up for a long while.

I hope I’m not jinxing anything by writing about that L.A. light again.

It’s silly, but I think part of why I’m drawn to live in LA is that sunsets like this—

—remind me of the original cover of Gravity’s Rainbow—

—which I never actually even owned (my copy during high school was the one with a blueprint (that is to say a cyanotype) of a V-2 rocket on the cover), but at some point I saw a picture of the original dust jacket online, and I always thought about it and how I wanted to live in that vibe. I know, I know, the artist meant to evoke an old-world European skyline and a WWII-era bloody sunset, but who cares what they meant to evoke! I found it here in LA.

Protest update: we made it out to a No Kings Day protest on Saturday, and it was downright fun. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the iconic Portland frog who backed down a dozen heavily armed ICE officers, boldly, lewdly, a few weeks back.

This frog has inspired dozens or hundreds of copycats. At our protest there was no frog, but there was a blow-up dragon and a blow-up dinosaur (“DINOSAURS AGAINST THE ICE AGE”). Still, this is exactly what a protest movement needs: participatory fun that takes the piss out of the would-be secret police. The kid loved the costumes and was talking about them for hours afterward.

Back in the spring I suggested that we should be “Invoking Mythical Americana to Fight Fascism.” In some ways, these goofy inflatable outfits are even better than what I imagined.

If you’re worried about this regime but haven’t been going to any of the No Kings Day protests, I strongly encourage you try to make the next one. It’s motivating and makes you feel less alone. Plus, as protests go they’re extremely fun and nonviolent. For a recap, I especially loved this report from Sarah Jeong on Saturday’s protests in Portland. Here’s the luminous closing passage:

“ICE is the only fucking terrorism in Portland,” a protester told the feds over a loudspeaker, mocking them for their militarized kit. “Look around. Your enemy is a barista named River.”

While the feds postured from the top of the building, state troopers passed unimpeded through the crowd on bicycles. Local police liaison officers strolled back and forth. Signs and chants still derided the police but no one seemed to be particularly bothered by the actual police. All eyes were on ICE, instead.

“Jump!” the crowd chanted at the feds on the roof. “Jump!”

As the feds turned a blindingly bright spotlight towards them, middle fingers sprouted across the crowd. When I glanced behind me, I could see a sea of upturned faces in the rain, eyes shining in the light.

A zine came in the mail this week from the writer Sarah McColl: the annual print zine for paid subscribers to her newsletter Lost Art.

It’s about quilts!

How nice it is to hold writing like this—a spiraling, quilted essay, full of synchronicity and personality—in your hand. It makes me want to make—and distribute!—a zine of my own. (Watch this space!)

As inveterate cult-doc heads, we watched the latest cult-doc, Thirst Trap: The Fame. The Fantasy. The Fallout, which turns out not to be about a proper cult but is instead about how this young man named William White started making TikToks where he would make sexy faces at the camera, and he quickly developed a rabid following of middle-aged women who bullied him with money into being a full-time livestreamer / sex worker, and things just went downhill from there. It’s a pretty sad story. It’s also, I’d say, a cautionary tale about just how horribly wrong Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” idea can go.

Beautiful cover story for the latest issue of The Believer (which we recently subscribed to): Mona Kareem’s “The Labyrinth.” Here’s the subtitle: “One Bidoon father’s all-consuming and occasionally illegal efforts to assemble the perfect personal library.” It’s a moving portrait of the author’s father, a stateless person and profound bibliophile, making a life full of books in Kuwait from the ’70s to the present. I especially loved this passage:

Whenever we ran into someone rich at a bookstore or a book fair—meaning someone who could afford to buy books without checking the price tag or haggling with the bookseller—my father would begin to grumble. He’d express pity for the books bought by that rich customer, for they’d not be read, and chances were they’d not get to see new places and new owners, because rich people would never have to sell their books to make the rent. My father would direct my attention to a rich customer and say: ‘Look at this, this is tragic, they don’t deserve this book. Who’s going to read that book now? Certainly not this man. Tragic!’

Speaking of big vats of yellow liquid, I adore this Youtube series called “Big Batches,” and this one might be my favorite: “How 150,000 People Are Fed For Onam In Kerala, India” If you asked five-year-old me how a kitchen could feed thousands and thousands of people, I would definitely have imagined the immense brass pots and mountains of cut-up vegetables from this Keralese kitchen. Maybe I wouldn’t have imagined that they would be tended by buff, shirtless guys. But how great to see these men cooking in socialist Kerala—like a vision of a different future. Plus, who doesn’t love seeing papadam instantly puff up.

Speaking of ravenous forces in the neighborhood that would, if left unchecked, swallow each and every one of us up and keep on being hungry, how about the sublime stink spirit from Spirited Away (2001). As I recall, that avatar of a polluted river was not defeated by giving it one more thing to eat, and then one more, and then another. Some dangers one must address at their root.

There are a lot of us who wish we could just give something to the supremacists and it would be enough to satisfy them, and then we could go back to whatever it is we liked doing back in more peaceful times. A prominent example of this worldview is the podcaster and writer Ezra Klein. He’s an incredibly influential voice—several close family and friends are on a first-name basis with “Ezra.” Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, this New York Times columnist is willing to trade away, you know, the rights of trans people to exist or women’s bodily autonomy, in the hopes that it might mean electoral gains for democrats and a return to a fantasized state of harmony. This is “enlightened centrism.”

If you’re having some doubts after the last heel turn from the wonk himself—a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”—the best piece of writing I’ve seen on it is A. R. Moxon’s “Eventually You’re Going to Have to Stand for Something.” Moxon’s essay focuses on this telling exchange from Klein’s follow-up conversation with Ta-Nahesi Coates:

Coates: Would you define for me how you see what your role is?

Klein: I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. And the role I somehow have is sometimes that. But I’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.

Political peacetime sounds great, man. But appeasement ain’t getting us there.

Roxane Gay has a great essay about how “civility—this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences—is a fantasy.” I especially love this part:

They will tolerate a protest but only if you congregate in an orderly fashion, for culturally sanctioned causes, and if you don’t raise your voice or express anger or overstay your welcome.

Within this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left.