I didn’t realize right-wingers were really into Lana Del Rey:
Lana’s early work didn’t just express nostalgia, but also showed how it changes the way we live our lives in the present; how that longing can lead to outbursts of self-destruction and hedonism along with sentimentality. This phenomenon occurred after the JFK assassination, from the Beatles to brightly colored polyesters to LSD and heroin. Then again after the Great Recession, when American communities turned to pain pills, booze, and crank in the wake of collapse. The loss that Lana most deeply mourns in songs like “Ride” is not a decline in material prosperity, but the loss of a way of life that was beautiful and full of possibility
Lana also always carried a certain detachment from the ideological expectations of celebrity. Like when she commented on the January 6th protests: “I think, for the people who stormed the Capitol, it’s disassociated rage. They want to wild out somewhere… We don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world.” This wasn’t an endorsement of the protests, nor a criticism, but the thoughts of someone who wants to understand. In a healthy culture this trait would be widely recognized as a good thing. But of course that’s not the culture we live in. Lana became instead the target of a torrent of online abuse for her comments; for posting of rioters looting on her Instagram page, for being photographed in a mesh face mask that did not meet CDC standards, for not including enough people of color on her album cover, for being a glamorous woman, for not being sufficiently interested in feminism, for being feminine herself.
Blue Banisters dropped just six months after Chemtrails, but is a marked change in maturation. It’s the full realization of a woman who has come fully to terms with her inner desire for domesticity. Lana has become a maternal archetype, both in her art and her personal appearance, a radiant vision of fertility. Underpinning this is an anxiety that maybe the domestic life she desires will continue to elude her best efforts to realize it. This manifests lyrically not as desperation — because there is a certain surrender to fate that has already taken place — but a sober and immanent bracing force. She confronts childhood traumas, identifies the BLM protests as a sublimation of personal frustration into a socially acceptable outpouring of catharsis, alludes to the emptiness of the post-Trump era, the challenges of the country, and the frustrations and joys of romance.
“I’ll pray for you. But you’ll need a miracle, America.”
Culinary Luddism, like most types of Luddism, imagines a past that does not exist:
For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.
So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives–sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye–to make edible foodstuffs.
A young writer with a coveted staff gig at the New Yorker shared his working methods, but the work commitment of the role is more significant than I expected:
I have to write 20,000 words a year for the website and 24,000 words a year for the magazine, and while I’m called a staff writer, I’m basically on an annual retainer. So for the web I tend to write one 2000-word story per month, then three or four longer stories a year for the magazine, and they always take a variable amount of time
I also loved this description of a pleasant but underwhelming story:
I had to write a profile of Jeremy Corbyn for The New Yorker, not too long after he became leader of the Labour Party, in 2015, early 2016. And I was having to do it under real time pressure for one reason or another. And I got the note back from David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who said that the piece was like “eating a chocolate chip cookie, but there weren't any chips in it.” That was pretty crushing.
The most actionable advice is looking for stories away from the internet. And it doesn’t mean using shoe leather:
But I get my most interesting stories from libraries – not necessarily looking for ideas, but spending lots of time doing research in books, as opposed to on the internet. There is amazing stuff in books that people tend to miss when they’re just looking for things on the internet.
I’ve also been listening to Petite League. The LP cover caught my eye with its Mets color-palette and a composite NYC baseball field scene. There’s a song “When the Mets don’t win and it hurts like sin.” I like when the Mets appear in songs. The Strokes did a good one.
The last rap album on which I took a chance was Thank You For Using GTL. I liked the cover. Judges books by their covers when you’re consuming media.
I did the same with $ilkMoney’s new album I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. It’s dense and powerful and I love the Pitchfork review:
The average $ilkMoney song is stuffed with information, a veritable almanac of psychoactive drugs, John Singleton movies, and Black liberation theology. There aren’t many rappers in 2022 who could spit about phonemic orthography, like some long-lost member of X Clan, before dissing jeweler Johnny Dang and dreaming of someone stealing his stash of DMT so they can expand their minds; there are even fewer who would title the song in question “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy.