same as it ever was ✌️🙂‍↔️🤳

New thoughts (I think?) on repeat culture and investigating emerging — and surprising — never nudism in Euorpe.

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Harris: Choose ‘freedom and fairness’
Words Used at the DNC and RNC
Kamala, Outfitting a New Era
Pro-Palestine Speech the DNC Refused
Gus Walz tearfully cheers on his father
Meet Teresa Woorman, the ‘childless cat lady’
”driving me nuts that she said ‘hollowed’”
The breakouts from the (largely unproblematic) DNC.

Trump Activists’ Attempt to Infiltrate DNC
"Matt Walsh is allegedly at the DNC"
"Mike Lindell in disguise"
Also at the DNC: the right donned Scooby Doo ass disguises to sneak into the convention, only to get Uno reverse card gotcha’d.

RFK Jr suspends campaign
Hopefully we never hear from this sentient sandpaper “anti-establishment” dollar bill ever again. (If you love insane RFK Jr. stories, a new one just dropped.)

'Time has come' to reduce interest rates
This should be good news? Maybe??

Sicily yacht sinking
Manslaughter charges considered
It’s the second year in a row that billionaires have been swallowed by the sea. This one is “big” because Mike Lynch was “Britain’s Bill Gates,” hence the swirling conspiracies.

Telegram CEO arrested in France
This is wild! But also obvious, considering the platform “allows criminal activity to go on undeterred.“ Fair. Now…do Elon next!

Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters
“We tested Google's new Reimagine feature”
As if pissing on tech creators wasn’t enough, Google’s “Reimagine” feature is an AI nightmare tool coming to Pixels very soon. Let this radicalize you!

Sephora cuts jobs in China
If you’ve been betting on the beauty sector, maybe pull back your chips. Is Gen A’s love of Sephora making beauty culture uncool? Or is this in the anti-filler splash-zone?

China Hits Renewable Target Six Years Early
It’s comical how well China is doing as far as renewables. Incredible.

Microplastics are infiltrating the brain
Why worry about brain fungi when you can worry about microplastics?

In one living room there is a reproduction of a Chagall painting over the mantle. However, the Chagall painting does not go with the ugly brick fireplace, the ten-cent-store moderne pole lamp, or the blown-glass birds or the vase full of rushes that also adorn the room. It seems to have been chosen for its religious subject matter and not for its artistic merit.

This is an excerpt from Gene Thornton’s New York Times review of photographer Chauncey Hare’s 1977 MoMA show. The excerpt jumped out while reading Robert Slifkin’s Quitting Your Day Job, a biography of Hare and his path from chemical engineer to documentary photographer to activist and anti-art artist ,who gave up his art career for therapy, to help undo in people the abuse that comes with living under what we’d call “capitalism.” The MoMA show in question was one of the things that pushed Hare out of art because, in his eyes, the art world was just as bad as a place like Chevron, where he worked. When he visited the MoMA offices, he “couldn’t tell the difference between the offices and hallway” of his workplace from that of the museum. “I couldn’t tell any differences between [curator] Szarkowski and some person at Chevron who is about three levels above me,” Hare said. “The same kind of authoritarian outlook.”

I’ve been searching for those words, an articulation of symmetries that keep popping up — and it’s funny that they came to me from fifty years ago, at a time that we imagine to be removed from cultural and capitalist bloat but instead is ground zero for decades of Groundhog Day. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that this is a time of mirroring, that it’s the same as it ever was, that we as people do the same things over and over again. We’ve discussed variations of this before (Ahem, algorithm.) but these cycles are perhaps born of too-much-stuff-ness, made worse by cultural echolocation that bears reflections as artifacts, gestures as completed action: “Y2K” and indie sleaze, which originally aspired to be fiftysomething year old aesthetics; every city feeling the same; the “new” Dune, Mad Max, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen (and The Crow, Beetlejuice, Road House, Mean Girls, more); deforestation in Mexico from avocado farming and deforestation in Brazil from cotton farming, as the US, Europe, China, etc. drive demand for cheap goods; LA and NYC hats being sold by a vendor at a provinçal street fair in the south of France; the top YouTube videos this week being “I Tested the Weirdest Amazon Items,” “Every Cooking Gadget You'll Ever Need,” “I Shopped at SECRET STORES,” “I Bought a $50,000 TikTok Shop vs Temu Mystery Box!,” and “BUYING EVERYTHING IN ONE COLOR For My Daughter”; ongoing kidification; a bedroom for your other bedroom; “Jesus Christ on a plastic sign.”

Somehow, there’s a symmetry to the asymmetry too. See a Tweet that went viral again this week two years after the fact. “rich kids being able to do art for a living may be a reflection of their privilege,” it reads. “but it seems to me like a reflection of the fact that a human that doesn't have to worry about money will often choose art. everyone is an artist until rent is due.” That sounds obvious and aspirational but let me put it another way: “‘I want to do everything else but be in corporate,’” someone said on TikTok this week, noting the 2020s trend of corporate people lamenting their jobs, that they want to be baristas, that they want to scoop ice cream. “Let me have your job,” the person continues. “I want to be salaried…I don’t want to pull more espresso shots.”

These are responses to cultural TMI, poisoning by excess: remember that. Life as meetings, creatives turned strategists: these are symptoms of suffocation by stuff, by having to turn your wheel despite there being better things to do with your time. “Modern indentured servitude” — but you can’t live without money, can you? Damned any way you look at it. Did you know that there was a time before voicemails? After phones were invented in the late 1870s, it took nearly a century, until the early 1980s, for answering machines to emerge. This pre-voicemail time was an era when someone would call and you’d have no idea. If you missed a letter, you missed information. If you didn’t read something (or hear it on the radio or on the television), you didn’t know about it. Just a few years ago, email and “the internet” wasn’t too far off this: this passage from David B. Auerbach’s Meganets helps explains “the good old days” of technology, the calm before the storm of excess.

Prior to the rise of Gmail, even large email services like Hotmail and AOL acted as no more than supercharged post offices, sending and receiving virtual letters to millions of other distribution centers. Communications were point to point, from one person to another, not broadcasted one to many like television and other mass media.

This was maybe when the echoes started, when your life went from being outside in the world to stuffing your metaphorical house with copies, information, demanding that you always be “around” for it too. You can “unplug” these cords but the cords snake around for you, searching for your throat, as they have since the Industrial Revolution. Just ask Sadie Pfeifer.

No wonder we rot! No wonder, as

Tell the Bees

explains, loserdom has become mainstreamed — but it’s more than that. It’s a supreme, profound lack of creativity despite claiming creativity as our modus operandi when we’re really just mainstreaming worker ant culture. Shovel cultural shit until you die, sip and paint that reproduction of Matisse until you get arthritis. They Live, but do we? All of us, in our enclosures, before our screens, echo an image Chauncey Hare took in 1978 at the Social Security Administration offices: a woman sits at her desk, torso obscured by inboxes and typing tools, her phone line an extension of herself reaching down from the desk. Floating above her, in the direction that her eyes wander, is an inflated teddy bear sticking its tongue out. It wears a shirt: “HUG ME,” it reads. As the distance proves, as the emptiness shows, no one is coming to give love. No one else is even in the room.

“I need you to answer questions”
“CLOCK THEM QUEEN”
"could’ve been said in a better way"
"This Madonna quote from 1991 "
“Nothing could prepare you.”
“I got scared”
This week saw the inevitable hateration pivot for Chappell Roan, which I was going to write about in a longer form (a la, about parasociality and how fans colonize the rights of public figures) but I find that a little boring and four years ago. Either way: this definitely kicked up lots of conversation — and Chappell is right (but her use of f-bombs is so Teen Who Wants To Be Edgy™).

"the failure of the ‘megan’ album "
"The failure of ‘This Is Me… Now’"
“comical mishaps and easily avoidable blunders”
The VMAs Decide Now Is the Time to Honor Katy Perry
Related to the Chappell thing: there is a strange cultural salivating for failure that I find so icky which, while part of the attention game, doesn’t end with celebrity as politics and even things like layoffs emphasize an addicted to public humiliation, which almost always involves female and minority targets. This is also to say that people need to get lives and find true happiness. I will also say: the Katy Perry punching bag item is so twink-who-is-mean-because-they-don’t-have-a-life. Teenage dreams, y’all!

Very Demure TikToker Jools Lebron
Demure is dead but the creator, Jools, is a rising star primed for fame as this late night appearance shows. To that: we should study the difference between Jools and Hawk Tuah, as Jools’ celebrity is based in personality while Hawk Tuah is an America’s Funniest Video moment that had no (Ellen-style) vessel to go in (which is why she is — predictably — now swinging to the right).

Kraft Spending Millions to Climate-Proof Ketchup
A cool look at how Heinz is climate proofing tomatoes and, by extension, ketchup.

‘Dark oxygen’ discovered on the seafloor
I saw a TikTok about this and I’m going to simultaneously marvel and worry about this.

Olympian found dead after choking
One day I will write an essay about how it is my destiny to die by choking as I’ve had three almost-death chokes that involved heimlich-ing. This is to say: chew your food!!!! (Also…is this a bit sus? Given her open criticism of Chavez and Maduro?)

“A forty year old mystery was solved”
Model from Duran Duran's 'Rio' identified
This fell through the cracks: the fascinating lore behind Duran Duran’s iconic Rio cover by Patrick Nagel.

'Megalopolis' Fake Quotes Were AI-Generated
This is so funy, considering the quotes were “an epic piece of trash” and “diminished by its artsiness.” Here’s the best thing to come out of this profoundly lazy AI art snafu.

Shout out to

Mina Le

for the shout out in her great video essay, which ties together the history of travel and overconsumption in fashion. Mina is, in my opinion, the person who perfected the video essay. An icon!! It’s a great watch!

Also! Paid subscribers got to read an essay on self-image, gay body politics, and why I’ve had wearing a Speedo™ on my 2024 to-do list. Read it here! I put my whole writussy into it!! Also for paid people: this Tuesday you’re getting a breakdown of southern France trends and a guide to Marseille. Upgrade now to view! The next essay previews some thoughts.

“It could be fun,” Bobby said about the beach. We looked down a few winding paths between houses only to find cliffs or groups of teenagers chasing each other before jumping into the waves. As we walked back to the hotel, we decided to try one more path. Maybe this would be it?

We ducked under low growing fig trees and uneven sandstone that had been worn, made slick by generations of foot traffic and salt sprays. We climbed short cliffs to find a makeshift “beach” of flat rock tilted toward the water, as if something underneath us was going to shake everything off and into the sea. Dotted out in the sun (and under a few umbrellas) were sunbathers and swimmers, no more than twenty of us total. They wore hats and sunglasses but neither tops nor bottoms: everyone was nude, save for sun protection. No one and everyone looked at each other, bodies factual by all of our being at our essential. There were the old and young, the big and small, the fit and not, and a racial diversity that suggested the obvious: we all have bodies, no matter its form.

This was the beach we had been looking for. We set out our towels and took off our clothes, feeling slightly odd mostly because we had to put sunblock on our usually blocked body parts. We lay and we read and, like our unclothed compatriots, we jumped off the cliff and into the sea when it got too hot. The whole experience was less “liberating” as it was a reminder that such things like nudity and one’s own body are non-issues: they are facts. We all have a body, under our clothes.

We went to this beach try something new, which was partly inspired by Bobby having had a birthday a day before. Why not start the year doing something different? The other thing — which had been swinging back and forth in our minds — was seeing an exhibition at Mucem weeks earlier about the history of nudity, “nudism,” and naturism in the Mediterranean and how being in nature and swimming whilst unclothed has become more and more taboo over time, only practiced by the hippie, the healthy, and the otherwise “weird.” “The heart of naturism is to reconnect with nature,” curator Amélie Lavin told ARTnews. “I hope that the exhibition also allows us to question the equation that we systematically make between nudity and sexuality.”

The exhibition itself was funny because…isn’t Europe — Or France! — ground zero for wearing the tiny briefs to the beach, for ditching your top and baring breasts to the sun? As I’ve come to find in the past weeks and years living in Spain with stints in France, this is and isn’t true: in Spain, clothes are basically optional at beaches, as men wear the tiniest swimming costumes and women suitably match. The idea of the “European beach” is very much alive in a place like Catalonia. But slightly north, in France, something has shifted toward purity, demurity. Of course this isn’t “bad” but there are certain things noticeable enough to be “trends”: a surprising amount of men wear double briefs to the beach, wearing swim shorts over underwear, as double waist tags convey a fear of revealed male lower-body-parts, or that many are swimming in their daywear or trying to flex brands; men now only wear swimming trunks — besides myself and my new pair — as they opt for at-the-knee non-board shorts, a signal that they would never, ever want to be confused with the bottoms of a woman; breasts are no longer in fashion as everyone is covered up and, while no one wears one-piece bathing suits, there is the overall feeling of modesty on the beach (unless you are an older woman, who take their tops off almost out of habit).

These all may sound colloquial — Especially toplessness! — but understand that it’s not: these beaches only featured French speakers, largely persons coming from life in the Marseille area to catch a break from the heat. The trend of non-toplessness has seen a steady rise in the past fifteen years, which has continued to shock people. (Colloquially, I asked a French colleague based in southern France about this. She too confirmed no one goes topless in her area.) While torso coverings and shirts while swimming remain American pastimes, there’s an obvious stink to the water: conservatism, emphasized by France’s narrow defeat of conservative power in July. Consider too the ongoing macro-trend of youth social conservatism. Why is it that we the young and recently-not-young are seeking nature and the natural but so aggressively hiding our bodies? It’s hard to seek freedom when you only know how to build walls.

We spent hours on that beach, dipping in and out, watching others and watching ourselves, never once getting a sunburn despite complete exposure. At one point, an older woman — whose body and soul clearly worship the sun — darted up and yelled at a man who watched from across the mini-canyon, where clothed swimmers pretended not to see us. “No telephonique!” she yelled at him. “No telephoto!” He stared back confused, putting his arms up, putting his phone away. “No!” she yelled. He descended the cliff, eventually joining the nudists to lay nude himself. People came and went, unclothed and reclothed, and it was quite possibly the perfect beach day.

The next day we hiked out to a calanque, a small cove walled in by natural stone headlands and cliffs. There were too many people and the beach was made of giant stones that made walking and laying impossible. The water was full of people — and jellyfish too. As we walked back, we passed the entrance to where the nude beach was, unnoticeable to passersby unless you knew where to look. “We could go,” Bobby asked. “Or we could go hang out at the hotel.” It was a simple answer. “We can always hang out at a hotel,” I said. “But we can’t always go to this beach.”

“I’m here with Corporate Erin”
“Talking to Anita Hill”
"presidents keep getting shorter and shorter"
"hillary while the crowd chanted"
"the audaciousness of this man"
“dear god”
“They say the next ones”
“drove my chevy to the levy”
Best political posts of the week (and two involving Minions).

"DNC their song of the summer"
"GOP convention their song of the summer"
Would anyone like to co-author a research paper based on these two TikToks?

“Ordinary People”
Creative people are so talented!

"WELCH IS TOCH EEN"
I, too, have been saying this about Hawk Tuah. (Another good Hawk Tuah post.)

"just a small corner of the internet"
Weekly reminder that the internet isn’t really real.

“Please forgive me”
“This traumatized me”
“#goldengirls”
Some AI nightmares to make your weekend better.

“Teenagers do a haul”
Crying. Teens really don’t know how to have, um, emotions.

"me and my butch wife"
Another week, another Rizzler post 😊

"MrBeast always taking backshots"
He really is out here being a freak on main.

And, finally, how I look collecting information to put in these weekly Reports™.

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