On the occasion of the Backrooms film release, I wanted to share an essay I wrote back in June 2022, originally published in Dirt Magazine. It grew out of my fascination with the Backrooms phenomenon as a whole, and the inherent tensions between the "sublime terror" of the original image and the sprawling collective storytelling it unleashed. Out of that tension had emerged a particular auteurist vision by an unknown 16-year-old filmmaker named Kane Parsons, whose instantly viral web series brought the Backrooms to new prominence, managing to channel the uncanny surrealism at the heart of the concept while pursuing an actual (if oblique) narrative. His series showed such prodigious directorial talent that it seemed inevitable Hollywood would come calling ASAP (and I said as much in the piece), but I was still surprised it happened so quickly, with A24 announcing a film adaptation in February 2023. I have not yet seen the film, but I'm incredibly curious to see how it represents a new phase in the Backrooms' transformation from mysterious image to collaborative meme to mass entertainment — all the while remaining one of the most revealing pieces of contemporary folklore born of, and ultimately about, the digital spaces we cannot escape.

Liminal dust-up: Fighting for the future of The Backrooms

(First published in Dirt, June 29 2022)

In the early seasons of the pandemic, I, like millions of others, found odd comfort and inspiration in the communities dedicated to photos of “liminal spaces”. Even as they stretched Victor Turner’s original anthropological concept to its breaking point, the young and extremely online who were redefining it in realtime were also breathing new life into the term, responding not only to quarantine, but a host of anxieties and longings about the real but ephemeral, everywhere-and-nowhere digital space we dwell in.

However, I was even more intrigued to discover a new form of youth-driven internet folklore surfacing from the “liminal space” phenomenon. “The Backrooms” was originally a meme that has, arguably, evolved into a mythos. Since May 2019, it has spawned stories, comics, fan art, video games, and increasingly high-production value viral videos on YouTube (and maybe a cinematic prodigy or two). As it bubbles up through mainstream culture, it’s even been cited as an influence on AppleTV’s recent series Severance.

Along the way, it’s been characterized by a schism that seems to parallel other tensions within art, entertainment, and fandom today: do we want lore, or do we want the sublime? Does a strong, clear singular fable lose its power when it can constantly be open-sourced into extended universes?

For the uninitiated, the Backrooms originated in a 4chan post on May 12, 20191, on a thread calling for “disquieting images” that “just feel off”. An anonymous user posted an off-kilter photo of an empty interior (office? basement?) space with mismatched yellow wallpaper, extending to unknown dimensions in the background, and another user replied with the following…

This image macro was essentially a “creepypasta,” a bite-sized type of digital horror fiction that also spawned “Slenderman”. More than most creepypasta, however, this one seemed to tap the mainline of cosmic horror, channeling much more ancient traditions of uncanny geography, existential dread, and inferno art from Lovecraft to Lynch, Sartre to Tarkovsky — even the Minotaur’s labyrinth. While creepypasta are inherently collaborative, perhaps this one, with its mythic charge and the fact it depicted and described a speculative “space” (instead of a discrete character or artifact), issued even more of an irresistible call to “fill” it.

Fans responded, soon developing not just art, stories, 3D visualizations, and Roblox games that fleshed out the original space and staged dramas against it (often tales of individual characters who had fallen into this cursed maze) — but also EXPANDING its conceptual borders. Soon, this open-source world-building had sprawled into aesthetic anarchy.

On the main wikidot, for instance, the original Backrooms image became known as “Level 0,” so that a series of open-sourced new levels could proliferate — eventually including everything from “skin-stealers,” to giant spiders, to an old Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant, to the notion that the Eagles’ 1976 soft-rock hit “Hotel California” refers to a specific floor of the Backrooms (because “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” naturally.)

These expanding levels spawned new art and animated videos exploring them, including a thriving sub-genre of YouTube videos (in languages from Arabic to Korean) dedicated simply to explaining the Backrooms ecosystem as an iceberg of lore, the headphoned hosts like so many Gen-Z Virgils hopped up on candy and soda, guiding the viewer through the circles of crowd-sourced (and often hilarious) hell.

Obviously, many of the additions to the Backrooms are designed for a laugh — Shrek, Doge, and even Saul Goodman have all have made their cameos — but the more straight-forwardly “scary” levels and entities could be seen as a process of domesticating the true cosmic horror of the original post — of making the “unheimlich” more “heimlich”. If nature abhors a vacuum, maybe the human mind abhors an endless, empty labyrinth of beige carpets and would rather fill it with multiplying entities that range from plausibly frightening (fast-moving, faceless mannequins) to silly (flying bagels).

Then came the backlash. “You guys ruined the Backrooms” began a Reddit thread in July 2021, continuing, “the original concept of The Backrooms was the idea of isolation, and the idea of slowly going insane from seeing the same walls, rooms, and halls everyday without change. Many posts capture a similar sentiment: “…The back rooms was such a cool and creepy concept at the beginning but 12 year olds decided to make it not creepy anymore by adding monsters and shit into it. It’s gone from slow burn eeriness to jump scare low effort creepypasta schlock.”

For much of 2020 and 2021, this dichotomy continued, the same debate repeating in countless threads between what could loosely be called “purists” versus “expansionists”. This is an issue that seems endemic to digital-native storytelling and fandom in general, and many have compared the Backrooms to the earlier creepypasta/narrative ecosystem known as “SCP Foundation“ as one that similarly spiraled in all directions and that many lost patience with. For the Backrooms too, maybe the sprawling lore is inevitable, a snowball effect of its popularity. As more fans discover it (especially young ones), the avenue of participation is by addition, not merely sitting with the static eerie-ness of the original.

It’s also probably worth recognizing that the Backrooms, and other phenomena like it, are art forms driven in no small part by actual children (as in, middle-schoolers). Perhaps there’s a youthful tendency toward adornment and baroque excess (I’m thinking of the insanely blinged out Geocities webpages I made as a tween), the abundance of story itself seen as a value, and the creation and mastery of arcane taxonomies that is also the delight of most subcultures.

The Backrooms might have just continued this way — a singular, minimalist vision of dread, and its ever-expanding maximalist spin-off. But in early 2022, another narrative strain emerged. In January, a 16-year-old filmmaker called Kane Pixels (aka Kane Parsons) began uploading a series of YouTube videos set in The Backrooms with his own twist on the mythos, rendered entirely in Blender but with insanely high production values (the first installment has already racked up over 30 million views2). Besides showcasing a possible baby Spielberg on our hands (I would be shocked if Parsons is not fielding calls from agents right now), the series is fascinating for being expansionist yet auteurist (as opposed to collectivist).

For the ultra-purists who want the Backrooms to remain as “mysterious” as possible, Parsons’ worldbuilding, slowly clarifying over the 10 non-chronological episodes (and a handful of unlisted easter eggs) posted to date, will disappoint, as there is a suggested “origin story” for the Backrooms. But while Parsons’ output wears its influences on its sleeve (including Stranger Things and Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, among others), it’s also vibrantly original in look and feel, and committed to the subtlety and pacing that retains some of the cosmic horror of the OG Backrooms — so much so that it has now triggered a league of imitators adopting his aesthetic and storyline into new videos (which reverently cite “inspired by Kane Pixels” in their summaries).

In a mainstream entertainment landscape dominated by IP franchises and their sequels, prequels, and reboots, aggressive worldbuilding is increasingly the norm. What better way to keep extending those extended universes than ensuring there are enough deep wells of lore to be fracked as needed? This tendency has strange effects on storytelling itself, often producing shows or films that “contain both too much plot and not enough” (as Kyle Chayka put it), when narratives stretch like taffy to cover the necessary number of episodes/installments, or push exposition off-screen with the expectation that fans will fill in the blanks for themselves (and become more invested in the franchise in the process).

Against this backdrop, the Backrooms phenomenon and its various camps illuminate this same struggle, between narrative excess and the longing for mystery, for an artistic encounter with the truly unknown. Even Kane Pixels’ work demonstrates the strength of the Backrooms central mythos to accommodate new stories, and maybe even absorb them back into its genuine strangeness.

For instance, on another thread lamenting how the Backrooms have become overly explained, one Reddit user recently posted this provocative new twist: “I like the idea that the ‘new lore’ is just a fake roadmap created by the makers to inspire false hope. There are no rules. There is no knowable answer. You are simply: trapped.” Another quickly replied: “Ohhhh that’s fucked up, I like it.”

“We’ll Get You Your Thumbnail: The Hipster Media Empire and the End of the ZIRP Era”

Samantha Culp

In an early scene in Amalia Ulman’s 2025 film Magic Farm, Dave (Simon Rex), the executive of a media company, is preparing to fly back to New York only hours after arriving in Argentina for a shoot. His largely American team is attempting to profile a wacky local musician they discovered online, but are having trouble locating him. He tells his young staff, who seem to already be facing the limits of their own competence as journalists: “You guys just make a good show, okay? This is already costing twice as much as that piece we did on the Bolivian teen exorcists.” The sweet-natured sound guy Justin (Joe Apollonio) knowingly reassures him: “Don’t worry dude—we’ll get you your thumbnail.”

This small exchange illustrates so much about these characters and their world, but also, more broadly, the extractive economics of the hipster media empire they work for, and the entire zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) era of capitalism which we can only see clearly now that it’s in the rear-view mirror. For anyone who ever worked for Vice, the company that clearly inspired the fictitious one in this film, the scene triggers an uncanny sense of déjà vu.

Someday, our grandchildren may ask us: “What was Vice anyway?” In retrospect, the company’s arc reads like an Adderall-fueled allegory about the cooptation of youth culture by neoliberal globalization. Originally started as a government grant-funded punk zine in Montreal in 1994, Vice grew into a free, ad-supported print magazine that was ubiquitous in record stores and vintage boutiques across North America and beyond. Vice covered “music, art, trends, and drug culture” with a rude signature voice and brash photography from the likes of Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson. The three original founders of Vice—Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi, and Gavin McInnes—honed a template that was, in McInnes’ own words, “stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way,” and were unafraid to offend anyone across the political spectrum, which often meant plenty of “ironic racism” in the magazine’s pages1. This took on an even darker cast after McInnes parted ways with the magazine in 2008, and went on to found violent alt-right extremist group the Proud Boys.

Vice’s sensibility sold, to put it mildly, and they began two decades of manic expansion. In a late ’90s interview, Alvi defined this ethos as punk capitalism: “Staying who we are, yet wanting to do some business.”2 By 1999 the company had moved to New York and in 2006 launched a digital video website in partnership with MTV, which soon sprouted dedicated verticals on art, electronic music, food, and sports. At the same time, Vice established Virtue, a marketing and creative agency to service brands that wanted to advertise with them, and to pursue lucrative partnerships with companies like Intel, Google, Snapchat, Levi Strauss & Co, Hennessy, Unilever, Bank of America, Toyota, and Philip Morris. In essence, Vice made the cool “thumbnails” that attracted young eyeballs, and Virtue made the ads that would sit next to them, reaching the wallets on the other side of those eyeballs. Multinational corporations paid handsomely to blend in better—in other words, Vice offered them a hipster camouflage for the same old beer, car, and sneaker ads. The difference between these two types of thumbnail could be negligible, which was of course the point (particularly because it was often the same people working on both). Eventually, critics would say Vice was “an advertising agency with a news outlet attached,” instead of the other way around. But the business model for traditional media was imploding, the argument went, so if doing some sneaker-sponsored video profiles of graffiti artists could help bankroll the fun, weird shit on the site—as well as the occasional hard-hitting political reportage, what was wrong with that? The argument continued from a growing number of genuinely great journalists who came onboard to work for Vice—what if, uh, there are fewer and fewer other jobs out there?

Because of discernible profits plus the brilliant bullshit artistry of Vice’s executive chairman Shane Smith, from 2013 Vice began attracting attention and capital from the “old media” establishment: companies like Fox, Disney, and Hearst (via the television network A&E) invested hundreds of millions of dollars. Vice started tackling more ambitious reporting, setting out to disprove they were merely “hipsters with camcorders” when it came to important global news stories. In a 2013 interview, Vice UK editor-in-chief Alex Miller explained: “We have basically gone from putting on loads of parties and taking drugs and staying up late and watching bands to thinking, actually, the world is changing, it's becoming a more serious place.”3 HBO began airing a Vice news show that was originally pitched as “60 Minutes meets Jackass,” but soon won awards for surprisingly serious journalism on topics like human rights abuses in Myanmar and the Syrian civil war.

With each new funding round, channel launch, international office opening, or Emmy win, Smith claimed bigger valuations for the company. After an investment deal with the private equity firm TPG Capital in 2017, Vice’s value went up to 5.7 billion USD. For a time they even planned to go public. But then it all began crumbling, through #MeToo scandals, mass layoffs, dwindling profits, and a rotating door of new C-suiters, who each wandered off with six-figure bonuses even as the rest of their staffs were downsized by the hundreds. Following multiple rounds of layoffs, the firm filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Vice’s future is unknown, but it’s clear this chapter of its history is finished.

Those are just the headlines. It’s harder to give a snapshot of just how influential and omnipresent Vice was during the years of its ascension—particularly as it solidified its global reach by opening offices in over 30 countries that churned out content by and for diverse regional audiences, as well as helping cover trends and news for the largely Anglophone mothership. For a certain time, in certain global cities, if you worked in or around journalism, documentary, music, or art, it was highly likely you might end up working for Vice. Whether you were paid—much, on time, or at all—for such work is another question, as Vice was notorious for underpaying their young creatives (the “vibe” and the dangled carrot of future projects were meant to supplement the fee)4. There was also a persistent rumor that Vice had an unofficial policy of paying freelancer invoices as late as possible—often up to six months—so that at any given moment, there were more assets on the books to look good for investors.

I myself was one of these freelancers on more than one occasion. One job involved scouting for a sneaker company that wanted a campaign featuring an artist making an eye-catching public piece in some Southeast Asian locale. After rounds of client feedback, it became uncomfortably similar to a scenario in Magic Farm, when it was clear we would have to reverse-engineer a trend or character that didn’t quite exist: “Can you find a female street artist, in Indonesia, who has a cool look, speaks English, and does, like, massive wall murals with either neon-colored tape or recycled LED lights?” Coordinating with local artist friends, we did manage to “cast” this role with an artist who was willing to stretch her typical practice for a pretty sizable fee, but the piece never got made.

Of course, Vice did not invent the commodification of youth culture, nor the concept of “coolhunting” in the Global South for markets in the Global North (and sometimes vice versa). They were just the latest, perhaps most state-of-the-art machinery in the cool-industrial complex, putting a particularly efficient twist on fracking pockets of “undiscovered” cultural and aesthetic energy for profit. The world of trend forecasting, market research, and consumer ethnography has long been criticized for its colonial dynamics. Nowhere is this better summarized than in a throwaway line from Malcolm Gladwell’s canonical 1997 article on the rise of coolhunters, which describes them as “the Lewis and Clark of cool,” after the military explorers who led an 1804 expedition across western North America to map Indigenous lands and facilitate colonial expansion5.

Not all of Vice/Virtue’s activities could be categorized as “trend reports,” but their general positioning was based on the same logic, and they were right on time to tap into the rising tides of neoliberal globalization, even as they reported on its injustices and catastrophes in their news section. In her excellent history of the trend industry, scholar Devon Powers describes how trends became an ever-more prevalent lingua franca in the corporate world of the 1990s. “What distinguishes the trend industry’s take on globalization is its forward momentum, or the contention that globalization is where the future resides,” she argues. “The global is the future because it represents the plane of possibility; like the future, the global is at once boundless and manageable, reachable and elusive, quotidian and utopic.”6 For its part, Vice helped package a hipster vision of globalization, with its Bolivian teen exorcists and heavy metalheads in Baghdad, which was at once intimidatingly exotic yet reassuringly accessible. And Vice was able to expand so extensively through another historical development that eventually also led to its downfall—the era of zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP).

In late 2008, after the American subprime mortgage crisis and resulting Great Recession, the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to almost zero to try to stimulate growth, investment, and jobs. ZIRP remained in place until 2015, when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates until approximately 2.5% in 2018, but then slashed them back down to near zero between 2020 and 2022 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The direct result of ZIRP in the U.S. was that borrowing money was cheap, which also meant that traditional investments were generating lower returns, so venture capital was driven to seek new and riskier horizons of investments for better payouts. This nearly 15-year period was a boom time for Silicon Valley, allowing established behemoths like Apple and Google to bolster their empires, and scrappy start-ups to focus on rapid expansion and user growth instead of immediate profitability. But the ripple effects were felt in realms far beyond tech. Investment flowed into entertainment, media, retail and food and beverage, inflating the value of certain companies, destabilizing traditional business models, and creating the consumer ecosystem of the upwardly mobile, Western millennial lifestyle that was taken as the new normal until the cheap cash that had irrigated this ecosystem started to dry up.

In Hollywood, the ZIRP-subsidized streaming wars supercharged a tidal wave of content, and then destroyed the foundational economics of film and television (perhaps permanently). A similar story unfolded in traditional journalism, as the business model for news institutions was first weakened by the shift to digital, then further eroded by the “pivot to video” gospel, based on largely fraudulent numbers touted by Facebook to get more publishers on its platform. This left many news outlets vulnerable to the interest of private equity firms, who did not care about the function of journalism, and would often drive them into the ground and strip them for parts. One metric estimates that over the past 19 years the U.S. lost “almost one-third of its newspapers and roughly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists.”7

Vice was one of the companies that surfed the wave better than most, benefitting from investment that let it build a bigger house of cards… until it collapsed. Vice had been profitable, but was now running on fumes, with one former executive calling their accounting practices “fanfiction finance.”8 The end of the ZIRP era revealed that the underlying economics of many business models had been nothing more than a mirage. Seen through this lens, the fact that the Magic Farm crew in Argentina ends up not finding their original story but concocting an entirely fake trend, for a segment that never even airs, is a perfect embodiment of the ZIRP era, and the fictions underlying late capitalism as a whole. It’s an additional layer of fitting irony that the team fails to investigate the actual, important story right under their noses—the spraying of crops with Monsanto’s toxic glyphosates (called “the most controversial pesticide in the world”) that are making the entire community sick. It’s not impossible to envision a “Magic Farm Extended Universe” in which some of their colleagues from the news side do eventually report on the agrochemical scandal—maybe even winning a Peabody award—but still get fired when the parent company goes bankrupt. The ruins that remain of this empire will be the thumbnails it was built from—or eventually, as server bills go unpaid and link rot sets in, the thumbnails will disappear, and only exist on some underpaid freelancer’s external hard-drive, buried deep in a drawer.

In June 2024, it was announced that Vice, or what remained of it, was partnering with a Tennessee-based private equity firm called Savage Ventures to relaunch their cultural, sports, and lifestyle content and would soon start an email newsletter. With all its staff laid off, who exactly will be writing these newsletters? As Los Angeles Times’s tech critic Brian Merchant points out, given the firm’s track record, it could likely be created by generative AI.9 Savage ventures indeed. The old days of “punk capitalism” look almost quaint in comparison.10

9

Brian Merchant, “Crush!” Blood in the Machine (10 May 2024):

Blood in the Machine

"Crush!"

A few lessons from this week…

Read more

2 years ago · 50 likes · 9 comments · Brian Merchant

In May, the journal Off Assignment published an essay by my mother Candace Wilson Culp, who was still finalizing the piece with the editors at the time of her unexpected passing in January of this year. This is her first officially published essay, a lifelong dream of hers that I am so sad she did not get to see. 

It’s impossible to summarize any life, but especially my Mom’s, as she lived so many different ones in her 76 years. At the time of her death she was working on telling her own story in a memoir, which my family and I are working to collect and publish. After a tumultuous childhood, she was raised by a cocktail-waitress single mother in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Before she finished high school, she was already working in local fashion shows as a model, and at casinos like The Sands and the Riviera as a showgirl. Eager to leave the dusty mob town of late 60s Vegas for the bigger world, at 19 she followed modeling work to Manhattan and soon onto Europe.

This essay recounts an episode from that time in her life, a story she actually never told me until I was much older than she had been when it happened. She was 23 years old, newly arrived in Spain and newly in love, and decided to go along with an ill-advised plan of her new boyfriend and his friend out of, as she described it later, sheer naïveté and the desire to be valued. For some people, a story of smuggling hash would become a go-to cocktail party story, retold and embellished over the years as a tale of wild and brazen youth. But for my Mom, raised a good Catholic girl, she always looked back on this incident with embarrassment and astonishment, and even five decades later, a faint chill of how things could have gone so wrong so fast—but somehow did not. It was a pivotal near miss in a lifetime of both good luck and bad. Ever since she first told me the story, I’ve viewed it with so much tenderness toward who my Mom was at that time, and toward any of us who have felt lost and alone in the world, and seeking acceptance and belonging at all costs.

*Read the essay here*

Also at the Off Assignment link is a short bio of my Mom, and if you’re interested to receive updates on her writing and legacy, you can sign up at candacewilsonculp.com .

In addition, I suggest exploring all the incredible writing that is now part of the Off Assignment archives, including the 162 and counting “Letter to a Stranger” columns that my Mom’s piece is part of (you can also read the one I wrote in 2020, “To the Eye Doctor in Osaka”), and check out the first print anthology released in 2022. Here is also a lovely note from founding editor Colleen Kinder on the inception of the prompt and the project.

Even under such bittersweet circumstances, it was an honor to work with the brilliant Off Assignment editors to prepare my Mom’s piece for publication, particularly Aube Rey Lescure, whose own incredible debut book “River East River West” is one of my favorite novels in ages - a moving coming-of-age story that’s also that also captures the electric melancholy of early 2010’s Shanghai in a way little other fiction has so far. I highly recommend picking up a copy of “River East River West” here.

Bonus: “The Tourist’s Morocco”

In her essay, my Mom describes her arrival in Tétouan at a “touristy resort”, but as the journey progresses to Ketama in the Atlas mountains, she gets a glimpse of a different layer of the country - “this was not the tourist’s Morocco”. There are no photos of the Moroccan trip in question, but in her files, I found these vintage postcards of Morocco that it seems she purchased on the trip but never sent. I’ve scanned a few here:

In closing, among other charities my Mom cared about and supported, her final donation before she passed was to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund - if you’re able, consider donating here.

Hello all,

Below is a letter to the Substack founders that I helped draft as part of a group of publishers seeking answers to questions about the platforming and monetizing of Nazis. We are all publishing the letter on our own individual Substacks today for visibility, and to make our readers aware of our asks and concerns. Thanks for reading.

Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis? 

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem: 

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns. 

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” 

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed, 

Substackers Against Nazis

Hello, 

I just spent a week in Northern California for book research, and while both my copilot (thanks Matthew :) and I have done that drive many times, it was the first time we had since the pandemic began, lending a weird novelty to even the allegedly boring but efficient I-5 route (as opposed to the slow but psychedelically beautiful Highway 1). Things like the once familiar signposts of Pea Soup Andersen’s in Santa Nella and the perversely named Pleasant Valley State Prison in Fresno felt surreal this time; each solitary Live Oak silhouetted against a heat-bleached hillside looked more like a DALL-E rendering of a Steinbeck book cover than actual landscape. On the return leg, we stopped at the Flying-J near Lebec, always a pretty average Grapevine truck-stop up until July when it became the site of one of the biggest jewel heists in history. Read more about how a team of master thieves robbed a Brinks truck of between $10-100 million dollars in gems and jewelry while one driver slept and the other was getting food, and how the mystery has only deepened since, with Brinks claiming physically-impossible timelines of transit in their official statements. If you’re a Heat fan, it’s hard not to become a little obsessed with following this story, and see the dusty Motel 6 and Wendy’s of the Flying-J in a new Dante Spinotti-esque light.

More on the trip itself soon, I hope, but the brief snap of true autumn up in the Bay was a nice reminder of the seasons changing, and how it’s been a while since I sent one of these (and how, like everybody who sends out their newsletter approximately thrice yearly says, I’d like to do it more often 🙃). 

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Recently

• “Liminal dust-up: Fighting for the future of The Backrooms” (Dirt)

Back in June, I wrote about the creepy online folklore of “The Backrooms” and it's expansive (and contested) narrative subcultures. It’s been fascinating to watch this debate continue over the months since the piece was published, and to see more installments uploaded to the YouTube channel of cinematic wunderkind Kane Pixels whose work sort of splits the difference between the camps. If you are interested to check out his ongoing series, I suggest this playlist “The Backrooms (Kane Pixels In Chronological Order” (made by another user) which presents all his episodes in sequence (including unlisted easter eggs like the one that [spoiler alert!] suggests the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was triggered by the creation of The Backrooms by shadowy government experiment). 

• “An Institution at the Intersection” (Hyundai Artlab)

I also wrote a short article reflecting on the history of LACMA’s pioneering Art + Tech program and its recent reincarnation, mainly to have the chance to mention one of my favorite projects that was part of the original 1971 edition: the unlikely residency of artist John Chamberlain at the RAND Corporation.

Chamberlain conducted his residency [...] as a form of trickster performance art, at one point circulating a famous memo to the baffled (and eventually hostile) think tank staff reading “I’m searching for ANSWERS. Not questions! If you have any, will you please fill in below, and send them to me in Room 1138.

I didn’t get to mention in the piece that one of the best replies he received was as follows (and you can view at the link):

“AN ARTIST IN RESIDENCE SOOTHES THE CONSCIENCE OF THE MANAGEMENT”

Reading

Michael Mann’s Damaged Men (NYT)

All the Flying-J heist saga made me recall this lovely recent profile of the Mann himself, which includes this great quote about systems thinking and the experience of incarceration:

Like many of Mann’s protagonists, I remarked, this man seemed to have a bird’s-eye view of his position amid various superstructures. Mann nodded. “If you’re an experienced convict,” he said, “you have a systems analysis.”

Handbook of Feelings (October Journal)

A must-read essay by filmmaker Tiffany Sia on the ever-tightening political and artistic climate of Hong Kong, which ends on so powerful a note I don’t want to spoil it here. If you can’t get around the paywall and want to read this (as I highly highly recommend you do) just email me.

The remaking of the city unfolds as a gradual erosion. “It’s actually happening quite fast,” my friend ▇▇▇▇ said recently. “Every week it’s something. And sometimes daily.” Every quarter brings a seismic headline: forty-seven pro- democracy politicians and activists arrested in a single day; the newspaper Apple Daily raided and then pressured into folding; the teachers’ union, which had a membership of 95,000, disbanded under political threat. And yet there is another, less visible front line of the crackdown: the bureaucratic process of censor- ship, the regulation of public spaces and licenses, and the films and artworks the public does not hear about that are never screened or exhibited. You cannot know about what you cannot see.

“The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry” (Orion)

A sensitive and beautiful essay about celebrity, death, and the desire for greener burial practices (emblematized by the charismatic but apparently not-quite-functional art piece/invention known as the “mushroom death shroud”).

Luke Perry knew about desire, having been buried in a laundry hamper to escape it. He also knew it as the holder of a notion about physical erasure from the planet, that our bodies don’t have to harm the earth when we die. We all know desire. Death is a muse, but desire is a blunter sort of thing.

Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)? (LA Mag)

If you haven’t yet read Jarrett Kobek’s two-part meta-investigation of the Zodiac Killer mythos (which may have accidentally solved the case - yes, really), I hope this recent overview in Los Angeles Magazine will convince you to pick up “Motor Spirit” and “How to Find Zodiac” asap.

At this point, the man was becoming a troubling distraction. Kobek had set out to write a cultural study that explored notions like uncertainty, historical revisionism, and self-validating leaps of logic, not to lose himself in rabbit holes of his own making. But each new bit of information, rather than excluding Doerr, as Kobek expected, seemed to deepen the connections.

Tacita Dean Interview (Vogue)

I liked this interview with artist Tacita Dean on filming in Los Angeles for her many witty lines (“When I first drove up to the Getty, I thought, “My God! It’s like the afterlife”), but especially because it introduced me to this Walter Murch quote I had never heard before:

Walter Murch asked, “Why is it if you shoot an empty room on film, it looks like someone’s going to arrive, [and] if you do it with digital, it looks like someone’s left?” It’s something to do with the anticipatory nature of the medium.”

Thou Old Serpent! (LRB)

Reviewing a 2021 book about exorcisms (“The Penguin Book of Exorcisms”), this essay had this great aside on how the history of exorcism is tied to the development of theatre and performance:

Exorcism has many theatrical qualities, which are sometimes explicitly embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the Church’s access to supernatural knowledge – and mixing these claims into a theatrical display is a precarious business. In its golden age, exorcism was a ritual with all the trappings of theatre, but what was happening was taken to be real in a way theatre was not.

This piece came to mind again recently with the release of Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”, and the equally-if-not-more amazing and discomfiting graphic novel by Nick Drnaso, “Acting Class” (one of my favorite books of the year so far).

Fantasize in the Extreme! (Gawker)

The serendipitous timing of the two and their similarly ominous explorations into the nature of “performance” is covered well here:

The joy of Drnaso’s Acting Class rests on a similar propulsion: when we’re watching each other closely, odd and terrifying things happen.

Doc 079: Matthew Specktor (Interlude Docs)

Also slightly related to the topic of mysterious doppelgangers and detection as a form of performance itself, Matthew wrote this palm-sized essay about an enigmatic business card found in his mother’s archives after her death. It reads:

“DAVID BYRNE 

DJB INVESTIGATIONS

sub rosa specialists”

Listening

One of the best bands in the world is playing Los Angeles on October 3rd! The Mauritanian diva Noura Mint Seymali and her psych-rock band are touring internationally for the first time since COVID, and the experience of seeing them live is not to be missed. Show info here, and the road-trip-ready video for one of their singles from 2016 below:

Noura Mint Seymali - Na Sane

Images

These images are all from late Japanese artist Akira Kurosaki (黒崎 彰, 1937-2019). Known for his “darkly reverberent” approach to color as a prolific painter and print-maker, he also apparently dabbled in video art? Wish this 1979 video piece held at MoMA was streaming online! There is at least this rad clip of him teaching print-making class in Seattle in 1980 which, for my money, sees and raises Bob Ross ASMR any day of the week.

x shc

I have only recently learned that there are three kinds of twilight: Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight, and Astronomical Twilight. Civil twilight refers to the period right after sunset, when the sun is still within 6 degrees of the horizon but there’s still plenty of light streaking the sky. Historically, civil twilight was important because, surprise surprise, it allowed people to see - and keep working - without the aid of illumination (as 19th-century French physicist Auguste Bravais commented “The length of twilight is an element useful to be known: by prolonging the day, it permits the continuance of labor”). Nautical twilight starts once the sun drops further, between 6 and 12 degrees of the horizon, and it’s really too dark to see clearly - the name comes from the fact that it’s “when a mariner cannot distinguish between sea and sky.” Astronomical twilight is the final phase, when the sun is between 12 and 18 degrees of the horizon, and faint stars become visible (hence its value to astronomers). After that, it’s true night, pitch dark, etc - until the cycle begins again in reverse: astronomical dawn, nautical dawn, civil dawn, then sunrise.

It’s not a perfect metaphor, and of course blurred further when one considers the winter equinox and the lunar calendar, etc - but if we're lucky, the end of the year can be a chance to immerse in the sense of twilight. And not just the "civil twilight" where we're expected or forced to keep laboring, but ideally the nautical and astronomical twilights where borders blur and invisible stars become bright, before the deep dark, and then the coming of the light again. I hope very much that you got even a bit of twilight to rest and regroup, and in case you'd like some things to read, watch, and listen to now in the pause or in the year ahead, below are some lists I made (many new, some just new-to-me).

Books

Recommended Books of 2021 - view on Bookshop

(Plus some to look forward to in 2022, listed here)

Films

Recommended films - view on Letterboxd

Podcasts

Recommended podcasts (yes, I included my own :) - view on Podchaser

Music

Too much to list here, but you could do worse than ringing in the new year with Gigliola Cinquetti’s 1974 “Si”, a high-drama Italian pop ballad with ABBA-worthy choral harmonies (maybe unsurprising that she finished second behind ABBA in Eurovision that year - but to lose to ABBA? What an honor). While the Netflix “Halston” show was a disappointment, it was almost worth it for the wonderful montage that opens S01E03 (“The Sweet Smell of Success”), focusing on muse-turned-design-icon Elsa Peretti, scored to this song (seriously, just watch the first three minutes). Or loop an Italian-TV version of the song below with incredible stage design and a party-worthy green sequin gown:

To a brighter 2022,

shc

PS:

The images are by Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), a Swiss painter with a prodigious and varied output (whose nudes were savaged by Julian Barnes, but I don’t think they’re bad actually, just weird and sweaty and mannerist). I particularly love his sunset and sunrise paintings (some of which get very proto-psychedelic). I also always find it reassuring to read maudlin, anxious letters and journal entries by long-dead, super-established artists. In 1888, Félix was struggling with his art and his finances, and wrote this rather self-pitying letter to his parents asking them to send money:

“…I practically never go out. I work from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. This has not produced any great results so far, everything must work out soon…”

It seems like it did, so I guess there's hope for all of us.

It has been a(nother) year of loss, and some of the writers/artists/icons passing at the end of this year have left a particular sting. I came late to Eve Babitz, but I’m grateful I first encountered bell hooks via riot grrl zines as a tween, and then a bit later in high school, Joan Didion. Her voice, her image, her peerless sentences, left an indelible imprint, which is by now a cliché in itself. Being basic for loving Joan Didion became an inescapable part of loving Joan Didion, and yet, here we are. “Certain writers are unavoidable, whether one would care to avoid them or not,” is how Matthew put it in his lovely tribute for Los Angeles Magazine; Haley Mlotek’s canonical 2015 piece about the branding of Didion also captures this dilemma.

But as an aging millennial, I’d like to point out that being a teenage Joan devotee in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, pre-Internet, was a lonelier (if no less cringey) pursuit. There was no Etsy full of prefab Didion merch when I was a high school junior and decided it would be brilliantly punk to satirize the 1990s evangelical meme WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets by making my own version - WWJDD (What Would Joan Didion Do), painstakingly punched out on loops of label-maker tape (some of these may still be rotting in storage somewhere). But by the time I got to college and was no longer wearing my allegiance quite so literally on my wrist, I found I was in good company of fellow Didion dorks, including a dear friend, the wonderful writer and editor Meredith Levine. In the fall of 2003, the news spread like wildfire that La Didion was coming to give a talk in the English department, and we scrambled to interview her for the campus quarterly nonfiction magazine I co-edited.

If I recall correctly, Meredith and I drafted the questions together, but decided that she would ask the questions (maybe we flipped a coin? Maybe we correctly assumed that I might hyperventilate Chris Farley style ?). When the day arrived, we crammed into a classroom with perhaps a hundred other kids jockeying for their this-is-more-of-a-two-part-comment-than-a-question-slot, and faculty with their own fandoms to indulge. Soon JD arrived in her signature dark sunglasses and cashmere, the sea of unwashed undergrads parting for her bird-like figure. She did not disappoint! And was incredibly gracious with all the same boring questions she had likely fielded a million times prior. Meredith did an amazing job, a Didionesque “cool customer” in her poised delivery of our question list, and I believe I only piped up once with a very lame question about Jerry Schatzberg and “Panic in Needle Park” just to assert my 1970s film knowledge (??) which we wisely cut from the final Q&A write-up.

After digging around on old hard drives for the past days, I managed to find a PDF of the final printed interview with extremely weird typeface formatting (probably because it was exported from an ancient version of InDesign). It’s short - a total of 9 questions and brief answers - and is hardly revelatory, but it felt so meaningful for us, an audience with the oracle (however much Didion herself would have shredded that sentiment with one withering glance). Of her answers, this was the one that was most urgently relevant to us at the time, and maybe resonates differently today:

How did you transition from college to journalism?

I was at Berkeley, I was an English major, and I was really intimidated by it. There was no way I could ever hang a sentence like Henry James, no way I could ever intercut like Flaubert - and your experience bank is kind of low, because you've been in college… so you have to move around, do some reporting, build up a sense of being outside.

After two years where literally being outside has been more fraught with complexity than ever before, I don’t think I’m alone in seeing it afresh as a priceless commodity in not just the creative process, but understanding ourselves and the world. If nothing else, I hope 2022 brings you more of “a sense of being outside”, however you define it. Thank you and farewell JD.

You can read the full 1-page (!) interview here as a PDF: Download “The Look of the Place”, from Wake Journal Fall 2003

Bonus Holiday Content

• “Notes on Cocaine Christmas” - loved this surprisingly charming story by Jason Diamond (on his always great newsletter) about a Christmas spent DJ-ing in 2004 Brooklyn which I described to someone as “like an Electroclash O. Henry story”. (The title also feels like a nod to the epic “My Heroin Christmas” essay by Terry Castle, which Matthew has written about here)

• This incredible “It’s a Wonderful Life” trailer from 2019 remixed “like an arthouse movie” to emphasize the still-bracing despair and beauty of the film (even if you’ve watched IAWL a million times, watch this anyhow, it’s <2 minutes long)

• My favorite reggae Christmas song from 1968 - The Ethiopians’ “Ding Dong Bell”! That steel rhythm guitar! Loop it for the next 24 hours.

  Happy and safe and bright and healthy to you all -

  x shc

Here is a new project that just launched after many years in the works:

With some stellar collaborators, I co-reported, wrote and produced a podcast called “The Beige Room”, out now as part of the anthology series “The 11th” by Pineapple Street Media.

It's a three-part documentary tracing the stranger-than-fiction history of the Landmark Forum, an organization with roots in the 1970s Bay Area consciousness scene that grew into an influential part of mainstream business culture in America- and reflecting on what its philosophical legacy means today.

With my frequent collaborator Kelly Loudenberg and our producer Eric Mennel, along with the fantastic team at Pineapple, we have been working on this project since 2019 and are glad to finally share it. It's an honor to be part of "The 11th", a magazine/anthology podcast that has previously featured writers I admire like Hanif Abdurraqib and Sarah Viren.

Listen to all three episodes of The Beige Room here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Addendum Ampersand Etc.

• I am writing a book, and will be sharing more on my research and related topics in future mailings (which I would like to make more regular, but let’s see)

Reading

There’s so much to read, and rage over, in regards to the COP26 climate summit, but here’s one very moving piece not to miss, out in The Atlantic.

In “A Climate-Change Anthem for Oceania” by Julian Aguon, an Indigenous Chamorro lawyer and activist from Guam reflects on the struggle of Pacific Islanders in the climate crisis, particularly in Micronesia where many low-lying coral atoll islands are quite literally on track to disappear - horrifyingly soon. Micronesia is an indescribably special part of the world where I’ve been lucky to spend time (via a research grant in college), and a place that, you might even be able to guess, has some of the LOWEST carbon emissions in the world while being among the first to face the catastrophic destruction wrought by wealthier countries’ emissions, greed, and unconscionable inaction (also in particular: the complex history of U.S. colonialism and exploitation of the land and sea for military use). The existential threat to its people, cultures, and ecosystems is one that urgently deserves more attention, which Aguon poetically illustrates here, and I look forward to following his crucial work (his recent book “Properties of Perpetual Light” also looks phenomenal, and is now in the queue)

In the Marianas, many indigenous Chamorros and Carolinians of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are fighting the destruction of our lands and seas by the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world: the U.S. military. On land, these activists are opposing the construction of a massive firing range, which they say will destroy a limestone forest and imperil a whole host of nonhuman life. At sea, they’re challenging the Defense Department’s attempt to militarize a section of the ocean almost the size of India.

All this to say, if my corner of the Earth had an anthem, it’d be this: To hell with drowning.

Read the whole piece here

Listening

For some music that lives up to its name, I have been enjoying Corntuth’s “Music to Work To”. Also not to miss their recent “The Desert is Paper Thin” which has a beautiful album-length visual accompaniment.

Stay safe and well,

shc

Hello for the first time in a while,

Los Angeles is hot and much of the world is burning (*except for friends in Henan, who are flooded instead).

For a few droplets of refreshment, a manageable mist not a flood, here are some late 60s/early 70s images from a particularly splashy series by quintessential L.A. artist Ed Ruscha. I always think of Ruscha's paintings as being "dry", products of an arid desert climate. The stark cut-out of hills against sky at sunset, chrome surfaces at the gas station, etc. But these (along with his Nine Swimming Pools book, of course) are the artist working in a nicely slippery mode.

Relating to Hollywood and "Hollywood" (locations that are geographically linked but not identical), and the liquid ambitions and illusions that have historically powered both, I have a book recommendation to share:

A Very Good Book

My husband Matthew has a new book coming out July 27 from Tin House books! "Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, & Los Angeles, California" is a hybrid of memoir and cultural history that explores the magic and mirages of Hollywood, the 1970s, artists forgotten and revived by time, how both creative failure and success are never exactly what they're cracked up to be. I am obviously biased but think you will really enjoy - here’s what the Los Angeles Times had to say.

If it sounds up your alley, links are all here and pre-ordering helps writers a lot (it really does impact how bookstores display it, etc). If you pre-order, email Matthew (mspecktor@gmail.com) with a receipt and he’ll send you a digital care package of all kinds of goodies—grey-market video streams, rare bits of musical and literary arcana. Also drop a note if you'd like a signed book plate!

Pre-Order from Bookshop

(You can also pre-order from The Other Place, or better yet, your neighborhood bookshop)

Virtual Book Tour Events:

If you’d like to tune in, there are some fun online events planned for next week’s launch (each one will be different; no re-runs!)

Tues July 27, 6pm PST - Book Soup (LA) with Jonathan Lethem and Dana Spiotta (rsvp)
Wed July 28th, 6pm PST - City Light Books (SF) with Adam Pfahler of the band Jawbreaker (who happens to be Matthew’s high school classmate! Expect some anecdotes about ‘80s punk teenhood, rsvp)
Thur July 29th, 4pm PST/7pm EST - McNally Jackson (NYC) with Janet Fitch (rsvp)
Wed August 4th, 7pm PST - Third Place Books (Seattle) with Lili Anolik (rsvp)

Recently

I wrote a few short-ish pieces, both of which are only scratching the surface of huge questions about the ways artists and other culture-makers are trying to survive in an increasingly hostile economic/distribution ecosystem (and of course, in relation to the *actual* ecosystem!) More on this front to come.

The NFT Funhouse Mirror (Noema Magazine)

This one already feels a bit frozen in amber from when I wrote it in March/April - but if some of the hype cycle has slowed (for the moment), the same fundamental questions remain. I am grateful to the many artists and friends who shared their perspectives and concerns with me (particular shout-out to Kyle McDonald).

Close-Up: Emily Segal (Air Mail)

You might know her as one of the co-founders of K-HOLE, but in recent years, artist/trend forecaster/multidisciplinary sage Emily Segal quietly transformed into one of the best novelists around. Her “Mercury Retrograde” is, among other things, in my all-time top-5 of sharpest books about the art world and its mutating periphery - it is also just compulsively readable and hilarious. Highly recommend picking up that and all the new releases from her indie press Deluge Books.

Listening

A few weeks ago I stumbled across this 1975 song "Altogether Alone" by Hirth Martinez - a piece of smooth bossa-nova-inflected pop that also happens to be about a UFO visitation? It has been in constant rotation since. Warning: it’s a bit of an ear-worm.

Martinez has been called “Chicano music’s best-kept secret”. Growing up in East Los Angeles, he got his start in the 60’s Latin and jazz music scenes, even touring with Ray Charles, and kept busy as a session player before he was eventually discovered by Bob Dylan. Dylan introduced him to Robbie Robertson of The Band who produced his first record, 1975’s “Hirth From Earth”, which met mixed reviews. Martinez had a long career but seems to have always been more of a “musician’s musician” - he was clearly ahead of his time. I mean, look at the inside and back cover of his debut album! The whole album is great, considering our terrestrial loneliness and the cosmos from a warm, scruffy, even a bit goofy point-of-view. Stoned but grounded. Maybe it feels extra resonant right now against the backdrop of space billionaire vulgarity. Like it says on the cover, Hirth is, resolutely, from earth.

Stay cool and dry, friends,

x shc

Hello, the news is bad, and that is hardly news. Let’s dive face-first into some soft neon petals.

I was recently revisiting the work of the artist and poet Walasse Ting (1929-2010), best known for his color-soaked paintings of flowers, birds, fruit, and above all, languorous ladies. Walasse Ting (aka Ding Xiongquan aka 丁雄泉) led a fascinating, globe-trotting life, born in Wuxi near Shanghai and nicknamed “Hua La Si” (“spoiled”) by his family, which he would later stylize as “Walasse” as a nod to his idol Matisse. Growing up and first studying art in the turbulence of wartime Shanghai, he decamped to Hong Kong in 1946 and onwards to Paris in 1953; he reportedly arrived in France with a cardboard suitcase, a roll of rice paper wrapped in a red cloth, five US dollars in his pocket, and not a word of French. But soon he reinvented himself as the quintessential bohemian exile, living in a garret, falling in with the artists of the CoBrA group, and combining Chinese calligraphy and ink painting techniques with abstract expressionism in his evolving personal style. After moving to New York in 1959, he became friends with Sam Francis and others, and along with painting, began publishing his brash, surreal poetry, like in the fetchingly-named “My Shit and Love: 10 Poems” (1961), and the epic “One Cent Life” (1964) which was illustrated by loose-leaf lithographs by his pals like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana. Starting in the 70s, he leaned into vivid figuration he would explore for the rest of his life, these infinite gardens of flora, fauna, and les femmes. Ting’s women are always sensual, sometimes outright erotic, embedded in the complex history of the male painterly gaze and its muses, but also imbued with a relaxed and playful vitality on their own terms.

In Ting’s “One Cent Life”, one of his riotous poems contains the phrase: “MIRROR SPIT LUXURIOUS FLOWERBUDS”, which as either an imperative or a description could apply to his canvases: a mirror of the dreamed-of world that could reflectively spit luxurious flowerbuds back at us. Compared to the screens that are continuously spitting horror, this command, which sounds almost like an oracular Google search string, is something to aim for instead. The flowerbuds will not eradicate horror, but we need to conjure them all the same.

You can read a bit more about Ting’s long and storied life here but sadly there is no full-length memoir or biography yet (I hope someone is working on this? It would also make a fabulous movie, btw).

Sudden Tragedy vs Slow Takes

There has been a lot of strong writing and reflection on the devastating murders in Atlanta and anti-Asian racism more generally. As with so many sudden tragedies (which are less “sudden” when seen as tied to the big picture of systemic violence and inequality in this country), I particularly value the collective, conversational, and “slow take” responses (and actual one-on-one conversations with friends above all). We need the news, but after an eruption of shattering violence, it often feels like the pace and structure of social media is deeply at odds with the human ability to process, absorb, understand, grieve, etc. I thought this piece on “the impossibility of silence” online summarized some of these paradoxes really well. I wish our ecosystem had more room, incentive, and resources for slow takes, long takes, cold takes, multivocal takes, and in the meantime, I will keep looking to some outlets like the below who do such consistently thoughtful work.

- “Covering Anti-Asian Hate" - a roundup by invaluable newsletter Chinese Storytellers which collected responses by Asian and Asian-American journalists; this quote from Wilfred Chan particularly struck me:

It’s also surreal to experience this as a journalist. Some people I’ve spoken to since the Atlanta attacks assumed I must be working on a piece about it, but I’ve been grieving while turning down editors’ requests. The current discourse is already at a fever pitch — I don’t think the world needs another “hot take” on Actually, The Killings Were Caused by [X].

- “Interpreting the Atlanta Massacre” - a moving group discussion from the excellent podcast Time to Say Goodbye examining the interweaving of gender, nationality, and class in the Atlanta attack and its media reception, and their earlier conversation with an organizer from Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers who organize transnationally. Further list of great orgs to support here.

A Fundraiser Worth Your Time

Just want to give a shout-out to this fundraiser organized by friends, artists, and curators I admire, hosted by Make Room Los Angeles and full of treasures by Yanyan Huang, Peng Ke, Pixy Liao and others.

“We Stand Together to Stop AAPI Hate: A Fundraising Exhibition”: March 26-April 23, 2021

We Stand Together to Stop AAPI Hate is a special exhibition brings together dozens of works committed by over 40 of the foremost diverse artists across generations, from both within and outside of the gallery’s program. Participating artists includes Judy Chicago, Kat Lyons, Pixy Liao, Dominique Fung, Susan Chen and Eddie Martinez, among many others. The works will be sold to benefit the AAPI Community Fund and Stop AAPI Hate Organization to enable tracking and efficient response to the surge in racism and xenophobia.

View online here

Watching ~ A New Golden Age for Experimental Docs?

There are a lot of incredible virtual screenings/film events going on right now, particularly of experimental documentaries; I’ve rounded up several below. It may just be the fact all festivals/cinematheques from around the world are currently online, but it also feels like there is a groundswell of new, exciting energy in experimental/hybrid docs and shorts. Perhaps it’s due to a new generation who has come of age with super-low-budget smartphone video, and YouTube/torrents as both film school and distribution platform (see also rise of the “desktop doc” as a key subgenre). I also wonder if it’s a side effect of the “Netflixication” of the professional documentary class - eg, more mainstream/narrative doc makers have had more opportunities to ply their trade on more establishment platforms, leaving more room in festivals/grant-making organizations/etc for the truly DIY, personal, weird projects. Whatever the case, it’s inspiring to see, and I hope more of these films reach a wider audience and that the makers eventually get Netflix-level resources without the compromises (we can dream, right?)

• On *April 1* ¡TODAY!, Thursday 7pm EDT: “And Besides, It’s True” with Paige K. B. & Tiffany Sia, an evening of screenings and discussion devoted to disinformation and rumor, presented by Triple Canopy /Spectacle Theatre. The artists “will each give presentations of found footage and media clips, tracing the distribution of psy-ops, censored messages, and subversive appeals through such varied networks as Twitter Live and The David Letterman Show. K. B. will consider the comedic angle of American manifestations of LARPing as reality, from Andy Kaufman to QAnon; Sia will examine the Rashomoning of Hong Kong protest footage and its legal implications.” (If you have not yet seen Sia’s modern masterpiece "NEVER REST/UNREST”, you have another chance via Prismatic Ground, listed below!)

• Until April 3: “Terre Femme” (2017-2021, dir. Courtney Stephens) as part of MoMa’s Doc Fortnight. I caught “Terre Femme” last year as a livestreamed performance and it’s a painstakingly researched archival dive into Western women’s amateur travel films/home movies from the 1920s-40s. I loved this quote from Courtney about the tensions of the project:

  “There is an idea when you’re scavenging around in archives that you're doing the work of feminist retrieval, and you’re going to be able to stumble into other peoples lives and experiences in ways that resolve your own, or offer a gift to the present. And there's something really attractive about that. But what is found is usually more fraught, thorny, and full of the ‘bad old days,’ as Rick Prelinger calls it. But one still has to contend with the beauty in the films while applying a critical apparatus.”

• Until April 4: “Dream Delivery” (2018, dir. Zheng Yuan), a hypnotic riff on the infrastructure of overworked human delivery couriers that powers China today. It’s the last installment of “Crashing Into the Future”, a program of artists’ films curated by Cao Fei for e-flux.

• April 8-18: the lineup for brand-new experimental documentary festival Prismatic Ground is a jaw-dropper. (Tiffany Sia’s “NEVER REST/UNREST” appears in the awesomely-titled program “Kill the Colonizer in Your Head”)

• Until July 15: “Cousins and Kin” series for San Francisco Cinematheque, curated by Cousin Collective (formed by Adam Piron, Alex Lazarowich, Sky Hopinka and Adam Khalil) which supports Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. Very excited to dig into this monthly; catch the first cycle until April 15 here.

• Anytime: “The Anguish of the Feline Webcam Filter” - my friend Kristina Budelis co-directed this short doc for the New Yorker investigating the “Lawyer Cat” video that went viral a few months back - revealing that the original cat in the filter in question is from Taiwan among other delightful details.

Reading

• “Fermentation as Care” - did you know that bees make “bread”?! One of the gems of this piece on the relationship between fermented “cultures” and human “culture” and the intermingling of people, microbes, and food processes from the brand-new issue #5 of LinYee Yuan’s ever-prescient MOLD MAGAZINE on the future of food. Order the gorgeous print issue HERE.

• “The World’s First Programmable Organism” - Claire Evans explores the programmable organisms known as Xenobots and their mind-bending implications: “Cognition, then, isn’t a binary; it’s a long continuum that reaches back into evolutionary history…”

• “What AI Can Teach Us About the Myth of Human Genius” - Elvia Wilk probes this question through the new book “Pharmako-AI” written by K. Allado-McDowell in collaboration with GPT-3. Touching on similar points as both pieces above: “Although we don’t typically think about work in these terms, it is not a stretch to say that humans collaborate daily, if unconsciously, with nonhumans, both organic and machinic.”

• “You’re living inside other people’s dreams; and these are not good dreams.” Dean Kissick’s latest column in Spike Art on the largely dismal aesthetics of the current surge of cryptoart (which are not the least of it’s problems… but certainly one of them. Much. More. To. Be. Said. On. This.)

• Dirt: Daisy Alioto on Elsa Peretti & YouTube Faces: “I like that her hearts are asymmetrical. A human heart is asymmetrical because one side has to work harder than the other one, which I think is an apt metaphor for the ebbs and flows of relationships.”

• Chelsea Hodson interviews Jo Ann Beard about grappling with aging, how a writer’s process changes over time (Beard’s did! which gives me profound hope!), & the radical act of just sitting and thinking:

  JB: There are a million different permutations that take you from childhood on through middle age, but when you get past middle age it all changes. You’re not living for the future anymore because you’re in it, you arrived, the car has stopped and it’s time to get out and stretch your legs, take a look into that deep chasm you drove so far to see.”

• “This Piece of Land, These Bits of Sea” - A worthwhile long essay by Robin Peckham on how Taiwanese artists are developing a new geo-ontology of their, well, “piece of land”:

  Increasingly, the language that describes Taiwan is drawn from this definition: the phrase “this piece of land” seems, anecdotally, to be slowly replacing the more standard references to political jurisdictions, specific cultural backgrounds, and shared immediate histories. It is a phrase that recognizes a complex reality, including the arrival of successive waves of colonizing and occupying powers, settler societies, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In extending this claim to geoontology, contemporary Taiwan subsumes Aboriginal historical time in a way that could be seen as either inclusiveness or appropriation, and no doubt contains elements of both.

Listening

• Field recordings from Bishan village, Anhui Province, by the Chinese artist/curator/multihyphenate Ou Ning. I especially like the tracks “Lovely Lambs” and “Reminder from the Robotic Forest Policeman”. His new book “Utopia in Practice” about long-term projects revitalizing rural spaces in Bishan and beyond is great; this interview with curator Hu Fang is also a good intro to his work. Ou Ning’s Instagram is one I have been living through vicariously all year of lockdown and these recordings are especially transportive. Cottagecore drools / villagecore rules.

Gifting

I am always stumbling across *cool things* that could be nice gifts for yourself or others, especially from indie artists or that benefit good causes. I am going to start collecting them here.

• I love this “Who the f*&% is Ralph?” tee/tote (22 USD) from SÜPRMARKT, the project bringing affordable organic food to South Central LA. This fundraising design is inspired by the closure of Ralphs market because its parent company did not want to pay its employees hazard pay (ugh). Proceeds benefit families in Crenshaw/Slauson area directly.

Wishing you jewel-toned parrots, cats and peonies,

x shc

The images in this issue come from the wonderful Alice Lang, an Australian artist based in Los Angeles. In 2020, Alice began a series of paintings riffing on the infinite combinations of the ultimate four-letter word, deceptively chill in their psychedelic marbling but containing a crystallized outrage. Or at least that’s how they feel to me, echoing the ambient sentiments (and frequently *literal* groans, shrieks, cries) of this past year, and each new piece of heartrending news hitting the timeline. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck off. Fuck death most of all.

The pieces are also just, funny, which is always an underrated aesthetic quality. I loved seeing this series evolve over the past year via Instagram, popping up occasionally to punctuate the scroll, each one a silent colorful curse. Here are a few of my favorites, and for those in L.A., the full set of “40 Ways to Say Fuck” appears in Alice’s new exhibition “Cool Story Bro”, up until March 31 at AFP gallery in Los Angeles (dm the gallery to make an appointment).

100 Films To Understand China

Way back in the ancient past of January 2020, friends at the digital publication Radii China asked several China filmmakers, scholars, critics and curators to weigh in on a deliberately impossible question: What are 100 films to understand China? Not the 100 best, or most important, and certainly not in any order, but what are 100 films that could serve as an introductory cross-section of China’s current and historical complexity? For simplicity’s sake, we were asked to only focus on films made in a Mainland Chinese context - excluding the industries of Hong Kong and Taiwan, because, uh, the list would otherwise be at least 500 films long. I was honored to chime in with a few of my all-time favorites to this sprawling list that finally came out last month, which is helpfully divided into 10 roughly chronological categories (Pre-War, the Mao Years, Opening Up, Arthouse, Documentary, Wuxia, Pop(corn), China Today, Bad Films, Animation).

Read the whole list here, and see my particular picks below with brief summaries; many of these are available through streaming sites online! (The main one that I would encourage you to see someday safely in a theatre, in its full 3D glory, is “Long Day’s Journey into Night”)

West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002) - West of the Tracks documents social changes wrought by urbanization & “opening up” with a pace that’s somehow simultaneously brutally fast and painfully slow

San Yuan Li (Ou Ning, Cao Fei, 2003) - An experimental film by two of Guangdong’s most influential contemporary artists, Ou Ning and Cao Fei, San Yuan Li focuses on life in a traditional village beset by the spread of urban centers.

Oxhide (Liu Jiayin, 2005) - Filmed when director Liu Jiayin was just 23 years old, this familial movie takes Liu’s family as its main focus, depicting their daily lives within an impossibly small apartment. The film takes a seemingly mundane topic and transforms it into something huge, and emphasizes the possibilities of film on a tiny budget.

The Panda Candy (Peng Lei, 2007) -Directed by the frontman of legendary Chinese rock band, New Pants, The Panda Candy depicts rebellious youth and lesbian love, set in karaoke bars and concerts with the lead in the film on tour with her friend’s band, The Panda Candy is at once an ode to youth, to music and to sexual longing.

China Concerto (Wang Bo, 2012) - An arthouse film in the classic sense, screening at a variety of museums and auditoriums, Wang Bo’s China Concerto is framed as an essay, a theoretical and elucidating dive into culture, showmanship and spectacle in a modern China that refuses to compromise its uniqueness.

Old Dog (Pema Tseden, 2011) - Set in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Pema Tseden’s Old Dog depicts the conflict between commerce and emotion, with the country’s burgeoning trade industry for mastiff dogs the backdrop.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018) - The director of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Bi Gan, might be the most experimental and interesting director in China today. My rambling endorsement: “This is the first 3D film I have ever cared about, and could be the last — it will be near impossible for anything to top it. Yes, its characterization is thin and opening half is molasses-slow — but that’s ultimately all on purpose, lulling the audience into a near-REM state to be prepared for the second half, a 59-minute unbroken single take filmed in 3D that floats through and around a nighttime village in ruins as a noir-ish antihero searches for a mysterious woman. Besides being technically brilliant, the sequence may capture the dislocated experience of late 2010’s reality (in China and elsewhere) better than any other — the suspended logic of a dream.”

The Great Shanghai Daft Punk Scam

Daft Punk broke up!

"How good were they? Almost impossibly. Is this breakup a stunt? Hopefully. Were they scammers? In a way, though only in the tradition of popular music’s cannibal contract."

I liked this elegy to the duo by Sasha Frere-Jones quoted above, and that particular line brought to mind something that, unless you lived in China in 2009, you may not be aware of. That is, of course, the Great Shanghai Daft Punk Scam.

On February 8, 2009, I was living in Beijing and a Shanghai friend emailed me with the exhortation, “if this is for real, COME!!!” and a link to a short-lived website: http://www.dafthidden.com, which with shiny chrome accents presented an irresistible idea: Daft Punk would be playing a secret show in Shanghai in a week’s time! The warehouse venue would only be revealed the morning of by text message to avoid being shut down by authorities (which was a frequent risk for concerts at the time). Tickets were a cool 500 RMB (appx 80 USD), which was outrageously high, and so obviously targeting primarily expats and wealthier music nerds/party kids. It was certainly outside my budget so I told my friend I would have to decline. As the days until the concert ticked by, and more people went to a pop-up event office to pay for their tickets in cold hard cash, rumors started to circulate that maybe it wasn’t real. By the time the French robots would have been theoretically hitting the stage, it was clear that two (also French?) scam artists had bilked Shanghai’s (heavily French!) expat community for perhaps hundreds of thousands of US dollars. And then disappeared forever. While I have some local friends who also got scammed, I can’t help but understand the broader schadenfreude (and hilarity) of this story, with its extra dose of postcolonial frisson. To relive the whole thing, read this contemporaneous account on the local website SmartShanghai, which even contains the classic post-scam scene where the reporter shows up to where they were selling tickets days earlier - and it’s now just an empty shell:

“The author accused them of setting up a hoax, they got into a fight and the call ended. On Tuesday morning he got a text message to go to the office for a meeting at 11am.
He showed up, no one was there, and the money was gone.”

Adieu, Shanghai Daft Punk scammers, and now, 12 years later, adieu Daft Punk!

Listening

• 🎧 Los Brincos “Contrabando”, 1968 - I only just discovered this 1960s Spanish garage rock group and their handclappy “Contrabando” is what I have been looping… listen on Youtube, incredible original album art below. Sidenote: what do you call *this style* of line drawing/aesthetic? I’m lately fascinated by late 1960s/1970s “retro” kitsch that riffs on 1930s Hollywood/deco. As far as I can tell, this is a sub-category that is yet unexplored in Aesthetics Wiki or the stunning research that CARI - “Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute” is compiling. More broadly, I’m interested what we could call “sedimental retro” (sentimental sediment?) or “meta vintage”, ie how earlier time-capsules of a “retro” interpretation gradually layer and/or filter through to our own era. If you have more thoughts or reading recs on this, please let me know!

Reading

• “Why Chinese artists are moving to the countryside”: There is much more to say about the “neo-rural” movement in China, but start with this textured introduction by my friend Jacob Dreyer that explores the term “neijuan” and the inward turn in Chinese culture right now:

  The Chinese Internet started discussing the agricultural term neijuan (内卷) as a metaphor for life in the country—the phrase literally means ‘rolling inside’, like a person trapped in a barrel, their energies prevented from being released into the outside world. 

• The just-launched newsletter “Chaoyang Trap House” was an automatic subscribe for me - a new collaborative publication by many China writers/artists I admire, billed as “a lit/based China newsletter for hot/cringe times”. Apparently the first few issues will cover keywords like “China’s First Listener,” “Rich Kids English Police,” “Luo Xiang Detective Club,” “Ryuichi Sakamoto Cringe,”  “Advanced Lesbianism,” and the “Cold Showers Blockchain.”

• The epic crossover event of Ingrid Burrington interviewing Keller Easterling - two voices I value very much on large-scale system thinking and infrastructure (but so much more than that). Read the dialogue and then consider getting Easterling’s great new book Medium Design. Particularly love this:

  IB: […] this is the problem in trying to talk about the book—I’m sort of expected to say, “Keller Easterling says this is the way forward,” or something, and it’s really written in opposition to that whole idea of the singular great idea or perfect certainty.
  KE: The book is trying to expose a kind of ideational monotheism for which we’re still hardwired. The assumption is that the author will unleash a radical new idea that kills the father and replaces everything else. Even when you don’t do that, they will say you did, and they will always use the word “radical.” But I am trying to find a trapdoor out of that habit of mind…

• A tribute to the globally beloved, only-vaguely-named “super soft blanket” or “flower blanket”, lushly photographed by Farah Al Qasimi… this made me instantly nostalgic for freezing winter nights in some random Changsha or Nanjing hotel where the bristly kiss of this blanket was the one thing keeping out the chill

• The latest volume of “Orange Crush: The Journal of Art & Wrestling”, which just arrived in its full print beauty; check out their splashy virtual “table” at the most recent Printed Matter Art Book Fair, and a CNN article about the inspirations for the project. I particularly loved the interview of Mike Watt / Raymond Pettibon by editor Hunter Braithwaite

• Haley Mlotek on “the queer art of divorce” in conversation with Torrey Peters and Ethan Philbrick.
  “EP: Marriage is often thought of as a ritual for creating something new, for instituting a new family, but for so many people it’s a consolidation of continuity[…]”

• “Who didn’t want to scream for much of 2020?” Jace Clayton in e-flux on collective screaming, catharsis, and an excellent video by artist Meriem Bennani

Best fucking wishes (but truly),

x shc

It’s a few days into the Lunar New Year, and I hope this finds you warm, well, and full of dumplings. If you’re reading this on Thursday, it is technically the seventh day of the New Year, "Human Day" (人日), the day when in ancient Chinese mythology the creation goddess Nüwa (女娲) made the first humans out of yellow clay because she was lonely. During these times of increased isolation, I think many of us can relate. With travel on hold, I have felt particularly far away from my friends in greater China this entire year and a wave of nostalgia for CNY’s past has hit hard this week. I went digging for some photos of the *last* time the Year of the Ox rolled around, which was January 2009 when I lived in Beijing and experienced the full, explosive exuberance of nonstop fireworks throughout the city for 15 days. It was an especially pyromaniacal few weeks, as exemplified by the rooftop fireworks display that accidentally set the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV tower ablaze (which I watched from the backseat of a taxi stalled on the third ring road). By the following holiday regulations were more strictly enforced, which was obviously a good idea, but I will always think back to the sheer hazardous joy of that holiday season’s omni-directional fireworks, the simultaneous terror and catharsis. (Perhaps what I'm really saying is that I miss youth.) Scroll down to the end for a sonic snapshot from those days.

Recent Writing

I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the allure of "pop futurist" books, the way the genre has evolved, and how it reflects changes in the futures industry as a whole. This is one thread of a larger research project charting how the future became a cultural concept and a commercial industry, and all its complex feedback loops with capitalism and geopolitics.

Inspired in part by my love-hate relationship with Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" from 1970, which I first encountered at a garage sale in my 80s childhood, I wanted to revisit the book on its 50th anniversary and its far-reaching but sometimes invisible legacy. The massive success of "Future Shock" spawned a cottage industry which have continued to evolve along with the concerns of the time but for too long was the echo chamber of primarily white, Western, male voices, and the assumptions of a corporate, profit-driven world view. As the futures field transforms, that's changing, as is the "pop futurist" book and its concerns. Last year saw a record number of releases exploring the terrain in new ways & I survey some promising directions through just a few titles (there are many more!)

One of the unexpected delights of this piece finally coming out was that many friends sent me snapshots of vintage editions of “Future Shock” they had in their personal libraries! Scroll down for Nicolas Nova’s photo of his mother’s original French edition (merci Mme Nova!), Angie Baecker’s 1985 Chinese edition (and follow the amazing Pinyinist Instagram account for more vintage Chinese books), and the first Japanese edition (which I don’t own but someday would love to). There is much more to be said about the international spread of “Future Shock” and the Tofflers’ work, particularly in China (an excellent introduction is this 2019 article by Julian Gewirtz in the Journal of Asian Studies).

Etc:

• Read my article here - if you hit the Atlantic paywall, let me know and I can send it to you

• Listen to a short playlist I put together of “Future Shock”-related songs, including the Curtis Mayfield hit, the James Brown take, and some other more recent and random tracks

• Watch the full “Future Shock” documentary from 1972, narrated by Orson Welles, which feels so quaint to revisit but also like a major unacknowledged influence on Adam Curtis.

• There was *also* a short-lived James Brown-hosted Soul Train-esque dance TV show called “Future Shock” of which only a few recordings exist - this one luckily features James Brown in a shirtless/vest ensemble that’s pretty epic.

• Also in the course of writing this I discovered that the fashion labels APC x Braindead collaborated on a Future Shock-inspired capsule collection in 2019 that claims to be an homage to the “movie” - not the book? As designer and appalling Sinophobe Jean Touitou said: “the general idea behind the Interaction line was not only to revisit the Brain Dead logo, but also to play with a movie entitled Future Shock.” I’m curious if this was licensed through the Toffler estate and/or if they care?

Event on Clubhouse

Tomorrow (2/19) I will also be on Clubhouse to chat about the article and the weird legacy of “Future Shock”! I’ll be joining Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith of Changeist (whose book “How to Future” I covered in my piece) for their semi-regular meetup of some very thoughtful futures-leaning folk. **If you want to join but aren’t on Clubhouse, email me and I can share an invite code**

Friday, Feb 19, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 6pm CET

Link to Clubhouse Event

Perhaps like many people, I am still fairly agnostic about Clubhouse. I think it’s no better or worse perhaps than any other for-profit platform, and was genuinely moved by the (extremely brief) window it provided for some cross-Great Firewall dialogue among diverse Chinese and diaspora speakers a few weeks ago (see this nice thread of reflections by Lokman Tsui). Whether it’s Clubhouse or something else, I think there is interesting potential value in the grey area between “conference call”, “Zoom lecture/panel”, and “podcast/radio”. An ephemeral audio, low-stakes, high-serendipity-of-discovery, participation-optional experience that is mobile-first so that it’s easy to set it playing while you're walking or cooking or whatever (*which is something I’ve recently discovered even Instagram Live doesn’t allow; it turns off if you put your phone in your pocket or the screen goes dark, etc). I also liked the more conceptual observations by Zeynep Tufekci in her latest newsletter about apps like Clubhouse as a throwback to much older traditions of human oral culture: “The shift from orality—the basic human condition—to literacy changed everything about our epistemology and our culture.” Personally, I will also be intrigued to see if/when Clubhouse develops its own “weird” uses, a la Weird Twitter or Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performances. If you see any emergent examples of “Weird Clubhouse”, do let me know!

Reading/Watching/Listening

• 🎥 I loved my friend Anna Kerrigan’s new film “Cowboys”, which just released on streaming platforms for rental. The tale of a father and his child (who is trans) on the run, it’s a beautiful, textured Western that deconstructs the genre and the complex codes of masculinity, all within the stunning landscape of Montana’s Glacier National Park. Watch the trailer here, and read an interview with Anna about the film’s inspiration and her process here.

• 🎨 I hope to write much more soon about the Hong Kong based multi-hyphenate Tiffany Sia’s incredible new book “Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕” ; in the meantime, she has a related exhibition “Slippery When Wet” that just opened at Artists’ Space. View it in person in NYC or online here (one of the nicest “browser-based” approximations of a show I have seen in a while)

• 📚 📚📚 “Nomads are also keeping an eye on the dinosaurs, periodically texting [the paleontologist] with updates." Of all the strange ripple effects of the coronavirus, one I can safely say I never thought about until just now is the huge treasure-trove of dinosaur bones stranded in the Sahara due to the pandemic. This is a fantastic story by Danielle Paquette for Washington Post about what’s at stake for Niger with this priceless find, ie. where paleontology meets postcolonialism, and also how scientists keep dinosaur bones safe in the middle of the desert. [Note: I would so watch the movie of this. Why aren’t there more postcolonial archaeology movies/series? I also read this 2013 article recently about the controversial Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass that got me thinking about this woefully underexplored genre]

• A wonderful thread about Denis Johnson’s writing guidance from one of his former students, including this PDF of quotes he would share with his classes. Some are

• An appreciation of the Japanese photobook by photographer Leo Rubinfien: “I was fascinated by their grainy black and searing white, their howling angles and resolute honesty. I somehow knew that they meant to say what Japan really was, and were making cameras, which had once arrived on Western ships, yield a profoundly Japanese poetry.”

• My favorite tea expert Charlene Wang was on KCRW discussing colonialism and tea, branching off of her reflective piece for Whetstone Magazine.

• Critic Stephen Kearse gives a terrific overview of N.K. Jemisin’s worldmaking in speculative fiction. Kearse also wrote “Retriever”, one of my favorite short stories of last year - imagining a near-future America where gun-buyback legislation has come to pass, and the individuals that risk their lives to carry it out. Read “Retriever” on Plotter Magazine.

• The great Joanne McNeil profiles the great Patricia Lockwood. There are so many good details in here that only Joanne could pick up (eg. that Lockwood used to mark her dream publications to write for with a *bloody fingerprint* in her copy of the Market Guide for Young Writers)

• An investigation of Apple Beige, the color of the computers of my childhood

Listening

• 🎧 A New (Niu) Year mixtape by old pal Josh Feola w Krish Raghav of indie sounds from around China

Wishing you a healthy, bright, expansive, regenerative Year of the Metal Ox 🐂 full of laughter, love, and dazzling light. Let the fireworks sweep away all bad luck (without actually setting anything on fire),

shc

(Sound on for video: 💥💥💥 ringing in the Year of the Earth Ox in Beijing, January 2009)

It is now February, and January alone has already been an entire year’s worth of derangement. The weirdness whirlwind continues to accelerate. I hope this finds you are safe and well, however relative that is. As I have been saying on Zoom calls and emails and texts all year, I am “hanging in there, in the classic 1970’s cat poster sense” and am extremely lucky to be doing so. But wow, have my feline claws started to ache something fierce. I imagine yours have too.

Recent Writing

Here are two pieces that I wrote in the twilight blur of winter 2020:

1. For Art in America, I considered a recent wave of augmented-reality (AR) art initiatives and the medium’s inherent tension between radical visions and shiny, profitable spectacle. This piece was inspired by my ongoing research into the mutating relationship between artists and brands or corporate patrons, and particularly a few great books that came out in 2020 on the mid-century heyday where technology companies and their engineer employees directly helped foster the birth of media art. I mention “Making Art Work” by Patrick McCray in the piece itself and it’s really worth a read, as are two other surveys with their own spin, “Technocrats of the Imagination” by John Beck and Ryan Bishop, and “Think-Tank Aesthetics” by Pamela M. Lee. In writing the piece, I loved rediscovering the ManifestAR Manifesto for Augmented Art, which is only a decade old but reads both like an ancient scroll and still very timely. The hopes it presents for a truly radical AR art are as compelling as ever, but feel ever more difficult for a variety of reasons. Even those who are using the medium for the most experimental and politically-driven projects are still bound by the platforms and physical devices of huge nation-like corporations. In any case, the ManifestAR manifesto is still inspiring, and I find myself wishing for more “hidden”, delicate, surprising, anti-spectacle AR works to come.

   “AR art is anti-gravity. It is hidden and must be found.It is unstable and inconstant. It is being and becoming, real and immaterial. It is there and can be found – if you seek it.”

2. For MIT Technology Review I was delighted to interview Xiaowei Wang, the Oakland-based writer, scholar, artist and designer about how rural China is shaping global technology (and vice versa) as explored in their crucial new book "Blockchain Chicken Farm". I have known Xiaowei for many years and been following their research throughout (see this earlier conversation we did for NYMag in 2018). The book became one of my favorites of last year especially at a time when travel back to China wasn’t possible - a form of virtual travel to the Chinese rural landscapes that Xiaowei reveals in entirely new ways. “Blockchain Chicken Farm” is not only a tour through geopolitics and the ideologies of technology, environment, and global capitalism with subtle ethnographic detail — it’s a speculative cookbook! A selection of Xiaowei’s ongoing project of “Sinofuturist Recipes” appear with instructions (and short fictions) on how to make mooncakes with lunar-grown maize, a porridge for AI, and more. [*As the piece is paywalled, here’s a little excerpt, and message me if you’d like to read the whole thing.]

   Q: Even if they don’t cook them, what do you want readers to get from the Sinofuturist recipes in the book? 

   A: I’d love for people to say, “Hmm, I don’t have access to moon-grown cornmeal,” but to have a sense of wonder about the ingredients that are available to them, and to frame that reality as a weird form of fiction. To question “Why do we eat what we eat?” and understand how that relates to technological change. I was really inspired by a cookbook by Mary Sia, who talks about how in China you don’t get a lot of baked goods; you get a lot of boiled things, and that’s due to the fact that China simply didn’t have enough trees to cut down to generate as much heat as is needed in baking. For me that was a reminder of how what we cook is totally shaped by what is available, as a result of the technology that we use.

Also:

• Xiaowei wrote a great short speculative piece on future-fashion for Guernica.

• For Knight Foundation, Xiaowei together with another favorite thinker An Xiao Mina wrote on how the “Great Firewall” metaphor for the Chinese internet may not be relevant anymore (if it ever was), and might be more clearly understood by reframing as the “Great Shopping Mall”.

• In light of the financialization of memes (meme-ification of finance) in recent weeks, it's worth revisiting An Xiao Mina's excellent book "From Memes to Movements" from 2019 on the far-reaching mutable power of viral symbols/signals.

Some More Things In No Particular Order:

• RIP to Melvis Kwok, Hong Kong's own Elvis and a true King; he performed every night not he streets of Lan Kwai Fong for decades. In 2008 I was lucky to spend an evening with the legend himself, filming this little video clip as a promo for National Geographic's short-lived music channel (sorry for lo-res video, can't find the original!). I learned more about his rather bittersweet life from this obituary - glad that the NYT commemorated his passing. The news of Melvis’ death is just one of the many things that make my heart pang for Hong Kong, as it does several times a day, for all that is changing and being lost there now, and most importantly for the friends, colleagues, artists, former students, former teachers, and beloved strangers whose are facing it in realtime.

Reading/Watching/Listening

• In the waning hours of 2020 I put together some of my favorite books I read last year (many new, some old) and made a Bookshop list in case you’re interested - whatever affiliate pennies may accrue will be donated to Pages and Time, a local California non-profit getting books to incarcerated people.

  Highly Recommended Books of 2020

• January 30th was the birthday of actor Gene Hackman, one of my all-time favorites, so in honor of him I clipped this crucial line of dialogue from the underrated 2001 David Mamet movie “Heist” (spoiler alert: it’s about a heist). It may not be “The Conversation”, or even “Night Moves” (which I only saw for the first time this year; an incredible psychosexual Floridian-noir), but Hackman is as grumpy-iconic as ever in this exchange with Sam Rockwell, an aspiring member of his heist crew. It gets funnier each time you watch it.

Images

• The paintings in this newsletter are all by Sadamasa Motonaga (1922-2011), a Japanese artist who was a founding member of the post-WWII avant-garde group Gutai. While his early works affiliated with Gutai encompassed everything from expressionistic drawings to site-specific forest sculptures, I am particularly drawn to the color-soaked, bulbous abstraction of certain later works like these. Some of them also have incredible titles (see below). Here’s a short booklet about his work from a show at Repetto Gallery.

• I often think about “what is the style that comes *after* the millennial aesthetic/Corporate Memphis/etc", and the style that feels both bracing and balmy for my tired eyes is something in the neighborhood of these Motonaga works. In some other directions, I sense the surfacing through the visual ether of references like fellow Japanese artist/designer Awazu Kiyoshi, 1960s Polish film posters, the Shanghai-by-way-of-Paris-and-New York bon vivant Walasse Ting, Austria’s Hundertwasser, and the Australian 1980s pop painter (and souvenir impressario) Ken Done. There’s much more to say on this, but maybe we all just want to escape into color — any colors, all the colors, taste-defying colors— we haven’t been staring at within our walls for a year already. Our eyes want to pull our flesh to touch the textures we can’t feel through a screen.

Wishing you ladders and arrows as necessary,

shc

**

Hello, I’m Samantha Culp, a writer, producer, and strategist based in Los Angeles after many years in greater China. You’re receiving this because you signed up via my website, or an event, or perhaps we even know each other from the offline world (wild!). Feel free to unsubscribe at any time by clicking here.

Note on the title: much of my work explores peripheries, faultlines, liminal spaces, hybrid phenomena. The edges, the overlaps, the places where things bleed together. The “Border Studies” newsletter includes things that I have been working on and thinking about, alongside selected artefacts worth reading, hearing, watching.

**

For those of us with ties to China, it’s been weird times since the start of the year, but it’s finally, properly weird everywhere now. I say “weird”, because there is a cluster of new COVID-19 emotions that don’t seem to have names yet: The copresence of dread and calm. The mixed relief and guilt in being *able* to self-isolate at home (not to mention *having* a home). The fear of buying either too much toilet paper or too little. The bitter necessity of staying away from sick or elderly loved ones to keep them safe. The outrage at governments selfishly refusing to act, which is the direct and inverse corollary to the admiration of the healthcare workers and ordinary individuals who are acting with utmost selflessness. And most of all, the continued confusion and uncertainty. What next? How long? What will happen to the most vulnerable among us? How can we do more to help our neighbors and worlds, when, for the time being, we’re not supposed to go outside*? (*A tiny, immediate stopgap idea for this last one: donate to your local foodbank if you can)

There will be more sacrifice. There will be more grief. There will be more rage. But there will be (and must be) moments of joy, humor, creation and community amidst the gloom. 

I’ve been planning to (re)start this newsletter for a while now, even though newsletters are perhaps already retro and blogs are more ripe for a comeback (see Indoor Voices, an actual honest-to-Blogspot blog launched just days ago by my pal Kyle Chayka). But the past weeks have made me more keen than ever to have a space to “distantly socialize” with friends and strangers, to share the thoughts, artefacts and strategies that may make this period more bearable. 

Talking about Hong Kong, history, and the rhetoric of disease on the LA Review of Books podcast

In early March, when I was still, like, going places in the world in (with a lot of hand-washing), I joined my friends over at the LA Review of Books podcast to do their weekly “book recommendation” guest spot (it just got released; I’m on around the 19:40 minute mark).

The book I talked about was “A Journal of the Plague Year”, not Daniel Defoe’s 1722 classic (which I have also been re-reading, and remains starkly modern and amazing), but a catalogue from an art exhibition first staged at Para/site Hong Kong in 2013, which then traveled to Taipei, Seoul, and San Francisco. Founded as an artist-run space in 1996, Para/site is one of the coolest galleries in the world (I may be biased because I’ve done projects with them in the past, but just check out their website), and this show, which I saw in its debut iteration in 2013, was typically excellent. It used the 10th anniversary of the SARS epidemic as a lens to explore Hong Kong’s history as a site impacted by global epidemics (dating back to the 1894 Bubonic plague outbreak) and more broadly, the cultural spectre of “contagion” that has been mobilized by Imperialism and other political forces across time. There’s also a very moving thread of tribute to Leslie Cheung, the beloved Hong Kong pop idol who committed suicide during the first weeks of SARS, and became an emblem of that dark time. Alongside the show’s artworks, the beautiful catalogue includes essays and stories on these themes by artists, curators, fiction writers, film scholars and journalists (including the great Dung Kai-Cheung, author of 2012’s “Atlas: the Archaeology of an Imaginary City”, a Calvino-esque mapping of an alternate Hong Kong).

I love this show and its catalogue for many reasons. Of course, it feels personal because I was in Hong Kong as a college student in spring 2003 when SARS broke out, and then lived there for four years, in a city forever shaped by the outbreak (I wrote about some of this in a 2017 essay for Affidavit journal). And because Hong Kong is a place that has faced a recent pandemic, it was arguably better prepared to meet COVID-19 head-on in a way we can all learn from. But the book is also an illustration of the ways that disease can be used as a tool of racism, xenophobia, exploitation and oppression. It feels all too relevant as people of Asian descent are currently facing discrimination and even attacks in various places around the world due to the virus. As the co-curators of the exhibition Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero write in their catalogue introduction, “it seems as if a periodization of modernity could be structured through humanity’s experience with pandemic diseases and the paranoia and acts of exclusion that follow.” No kidding. 

One of the most haunting images from the exhibition - a famous photograph of British colonial police clearing houses in a Bubonic plague outbreak area in Hong Kong in 1894.

I try to summarize some of these thoughts in a rambling fashion on the podcast (episode from Mar 15, featuring journalist Joshua Hammer), but better yet, order a copy of the book for yourself here. Coincidentally, right after recording the podcast Para/site announced that they’re donating 50% of book sales to COVID-related charities in HK (and if you’re a bookseller interested in taking part in this charitable effort, please contact the gallery)

The Quarantine Canon

Like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the books/films of the “quarantine canon”, and more generally, works about isolation, restricted movement, self-contained communities, etc, as those are some of my favorite genres. I want to keep expanding the list, especially to works that are more obscure or overlooked, so I reached out to experts Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley for a recommendation. They previously curated the exhibition “Landscapes of Quarantine” in 2011, and are currently writing a book about the history and future of quarantine for MCD Books (due out spring 2021; which is so far away!). The dynamic duo kindly shared this tip: 

It's tough to say what books are overlooked - so many, particularly in the last few weeks, have gotten their moment of sunlight, from STATION ELEVEN to THE STAND to, of course, the film CONTAGION. The outbreak canon - Camus, Defoe, Poe - is already so strong. A book I'd recommend with broad, meta-relevance to the general idea of quarantine is Daniel Jütte's excellent THE STRAIT GATE, on the political, symbolic, psychological, and ritual role of doors in Western culture. Thresholds, inside/outside, keeping things at bay. It's definitely under-read and it deserves more exposure.

Some other things that are keeping me sane

-- This inspiring thread by Francis Tseng, “things we allegedly can’t have but we can”. Worth going through the whole thing and following as it grows.

-- Desert Oracle, the quarterly zine and podcast and radio show charting the myths and landscape of the Mojave Desert - I wrote a little appreciation of it here on the Inside Voices blog, and listen to it here (best on the car stereo driving on a moonlit highway between mesas, but also fine in your bedroom)

-- Spending time in the glorious backlog of NTS Radio - for some always on-point vintage jazz mixes out of Tokyo, check Chee Shimizu’s Organic Music

-- Glimpses of the wider world - not just outside your door, but under the sea, as in, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s #Jellyfishcam. The aquarium is closed, but the jellyfish are now telecommuting to *you*.

The website says: “Watch our sea nettles as their long tentacles and lacey mouth-arms move smoothly through the water.”

You don’t have to tell me twice.

Distantly, but with you, 

shc

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Hello, I’m Samantha Culp, a writer, producer, and strategist based in Los Angeles after many years in greater China. You’re receiving this because you signed up via my website, or an event, or perhaps we even know each other from the offline world (wild!). Feel free to unsubscribe at any time by clicking here.

Note on the title: much of my work (and perhaps entire adult life) seems to be about exploring peripheries, faultlines, liminal spaces, hybrid phenomena. The edges, the overlaps, the places where things bleed together. The “Border Studies” newsletter includes things that I have been working on and thinking about, alongside selected artefacts worth reading, hearing, watching.

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