#4: Existential Boy Summer Begins!
Death By Consumption
5/27/24 - 6/2/24
I'm experimenting with actual subject lines for these. Why not! Gotta do something to keep morale up, here in the consumption trenches.
For various reasons, this past week I consumed a lot of media about uncertain futures in our dying world, which directly juxtaposed how absolutely beautiful it has been all week, weather-wise. Feeling existential dread while luxuriating in the summer sun is very Lana Del Rey-coded of me! Embarrassing. I'm embarrassed.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in the Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing — paperback
If that wordy-ass title doesn't give it away, this is a dense, academic book. Which isn't exactly what I was expecting, nor was it what I wanted! I read this during a busy week, squeezing a few pages in here and there, and it turns out intense academic writing on mushroom biology and how it relates to global capitalism isn't exactly cozy bedtime reading material. A sample sentence, picked at random: "Assembling assets, we ignore the common — even when it pervades the assembly." I am definitely smart enough to understand this at first read! Please don't ask me any questions about this book.
Every 3 pages I strongly considered setting this aside (I am a recent and now fervent convert to the practice of giving up on books you're not enjoying; life is too short, and people won't stop writing books! Ban new books!). But every 4th page, I'd find something beautiful or interesting, just enough to keep me going. And ultimately I was happy to have read it, although I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. But it was nice to spend some time thinking about forests, and the mushrooms beneath the soil that stitch it all together, and how capitalism is working hard to destroy most of the planet, but nature and humanity still prevails, sometimes. See? Really fun bedtime stuff.
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes — paperback
This, on the other hand, I tore through — 500 pages in 3 days! (Though the wide line spacing means there are far fewer words per page than a typical book, so it's probably more like 350 pages.) This is a true summer page-turner; come for the scifi mystery, stay for the musings on aging and dying. It's very Arrival-meets-Annihilation-meets-Interstellar.
Wow, surprise surprise, a gay dude loved a story about a depressed woman encountering alien mysteries, should we alert the press????
"Conan O'Brien Must Go" — on MAX aka HBOMax
The one thing that didn't give me dread this week! God, it's so good to have Conan back. This show — which you need to watch ASAP so we can get more than 4 episodes, okay? — is refreshing in how old-school, funny, and sometimes mean it feels. Have the puriteens canceled Conan yet? They will when they see this!
The premise of the show is: Conan goes to different countries, makes a fool of himself, is rude to everyone, and we learn nothing about anywhere he travels. He is the anti-Bourdain, precisely the hero we need at this moment. It's good to be reminded how truly hilarious and quick Conan is, but the best parts (which true Conanheads know were always the best parts of "Late Night") are when a person he's just met says something so outrageous and/or funny that Conan can't help but fall in love with them.
One of Conan's best skills as a comedian/interviewer is how he's happy to be the dancing clown to get a laugh, but the moment he senses he's talking to someone with a unique sensibility, he'll immediately switch into a supporting role, and ensure that they become the star of the scene rather than him. In the Thailand episode in particular, Conan goes to a woman's house to basically confront her mother (long story), and then we see the mother absolutely rip the scene out from under Conan, until he's left giggling on the couch at how funny this woman is, literally kicking his feet in the air like a delighted child. Sorry for being hyperbolic but I think if we let Conan run the UN, he could fix the world.
Songs of Earth (2024) - at IFC Center
To start on a good note, I will say that this is an absolutely gorgeous film — Norway seems very pretty, and the music and sound design is spectacular! A truly immersive theater experience. But, if you’re looking for anything deeper than beautiful sights and sounds……....eek! The film “follows” the documentary maker’s 84-year-old father for a year in a remote corner of Norway, where he mostly just hikes the same trail. And hikes it again. And then hikes it again. And he says things that amount to, “It’s nice to look at flowers,” and, "It's beautiful here." Not to be rude to a seemingly VERY nice 84-year-old man, but not everyone is meant to carry a narrative, okay? Sometimes old people don’t have that much wisdom to hand out to us, and that’s okay!
Every once in a while the film would tease us with something incredibly interesting — the neighboring family entirely wiped out in an avalanche except for one, or archival footage of village life in the early 1900s — and then we’d be yanked away, back to a ponderous drone shot of the same glacier we’ve been looking at for 45 minutes. At various points in this experience I felt: awe, boredom, irritation, amusement, nostalgia, hunger, exhaustion, serenity, interest, sleepiness. Which I guess is a bit of a positive review? I felt a lot of emotions during this! That’s probably more than I will say after I watch JLo’s confusing AI Netflix movie! (Cut to me RAVING about Jennifer delivering the green screen performance of a lifetime.) Anyway, if you want to see this movie, my recommendations are: 1) see it in theaters, because you WILL check your phone if you watch it at home; 2) have a little edible to really soak up the nature shots, but not too much of an edible, or you’ll for sure fall asleep. It's a delicate balance. Good luck out there!
The Innocents (2021) — on Mubi
Full disclosure, we only made it less than an hour into this film — a horror movie about Nordic kids who have supernatural powers and are maybe evil — before there was an absolutely brutal cat-torture scene that made me lunge for the remote to switch it off. This movie gets good reviews, but no thanks! Not interested in seeing the rest of that scene, bye! I can't believe the only movies I watched this week were both Nordic, and both left me kind of mad. What's going on up there? Are you guys okay???
A martini — on our roof
NYC is experiencing an unprecedented stretch of truly perfect summer weather, minimal humidity, mid-70s to low-80s, mostly sun with the occasional, brief thunderstorm just to keep things interesting. So, after a 6-mile walk with friends on Saturday, we suddenly remembered our building has a roof that no one ever goes on. So Justin whipped together some absolutely stunning martinis (we estimated he could sell them for $30 at a high-end bar in the city), and we sat on the roof with a friend and watched the sunset. And once the sun set, we stayed up there and kept drinking, peering into neighbor's windows while discussing how weird they all seemed — never mind what we're doing standing in the darkness on a roof and looking into your kitchen, what are you freaks doing?! Sometimes all you need to heal your existential dread is to peer into your neighbors' windows. James Stewart understood this!
It's not a new or interesting thing to be like, "Things are bad right now!" but things are bad right now! So every once in a while at sunset, make sure to have an ice-cold martini, or a nonalcoholic but still cold, crisp beverage, okay? You won't regret it.
