This summer has been tough and busy. The time has gone quickly but all the processes I’m involved with have been slow. Life feels a little like a junk drawer, with things thrown in, some important, some trivial, some to be receovered and used, others to be forgotten and discarded in time. Packing up the apartment felt like that too—literally and figuratively.
A long distance move is behind us now, but we’re still unpacking and organizing. Plus there’s an entirely new town, and new part of the country, to learn and get used to. Chicago is, of course, very flat and laid out on a grid. Easy to navigate. Ithaca is the opposite of all that. And now that the Cornell students are coming back in, I can see how even in this small town, traffic and lines can seem to be troublesome.
I’m also in between jobs, since I had to leave my last, office-based position, and I’m looking for my next role—ideally a remote position, but something local would be good as well. (If you happen to know my background at all and think you might have a lead or a connection, please feel free to ping me—I’m happy to talk.) Suffice it to say that this is another project that takes time and energy.
I. So Long, Chicago
I lived in Chicago longer than anywhere else. Ten years ago, having already been there for six years, my life changed rapidly and many of the support systems and the sense of direction I had in my life vanished. And I spent the past decade rebuilding my life from the ground up. I acquired some new and better habits. I stumbled my way through my last years of academia before I decided to leave it behind. Rationally speaking, that probably was one of the better life decisions I’ve made. Nevertheless I have felt like I’ve been missing something of a vocation ever since. The second career I made for myself, with no small amount of hard work, has been good to me though it doesn’t scratch all the same itches that sent me running toward a career to be spent—at least nominally, at least partially—in pursuit of the life of the mind in community.
More of that will come, in time, regardless of my next professional steps. Maybe I’ll find some new opportunities for it here in Ithaca. In some sense I believe I have only ever tried to find my way back home, and this is especially true since my life blew up in 2015. And if you’ll overlook the absurdity of the comparison, I take a little comfort in the idea of arrival, like Odysseus, in (an) Ithaca after a decade of (mainly spiritual and mental) wandering.
Meanwhile, the exit from Chicago felt rushed and unceremonious. We didn’t get to say all the goodbyes, hit up all the spots, that we wanted to. Not by a long shot. Perhaps it only means there’s unfinished business there.
The much-maligned “Midwest nice” became a meme to imply that people were only superficially nice but actually mean-spirited and judgmental, but I think this is, itself, a superficial and often inaccurate understanding of the phenomenon. I like a lot of the Midwestern spirit, the range of Chicagoan attitudes and postures. They came to feel like home to me.
Earlier this spring, driving back home one night along Lake Shore Drive from downtown after a long and stressful day, a song called “End of Beginning” played on the radio. I’d never heard it before. I learned later it was by Joe Keery (“the Stranger Things guy?”), styled as Djo, and it had been a TikTok hit for a while already. The song is a stylistic emulation of an earlier moment’s stylistic emulations of an even earlier moment, and maybe it’s a bit cheesy to like it, but damn if it didn’t hit hard as I cruised along LSD with the lights of tall buildings flanking me in the dark.
And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
I wave goodbye to the end of beginning
II. Monoculture
Katherine Dee proposes that the ephemeral vibes constitute a certain normative touchstone for culture:
Last year, I wrote about the never-ending carousel of “aesthetics,” where what I’m about to describe is most obvious. The identity isn’t any individual aesthetic (cottagecore, dark academia, coquette, whatever). The identity is the act of aesthetic curation itself. The ability to navigate between different modes, to know when to deploy which references, to remix and synthesize—that’s what matters now.
These fads are our monoculture.
Elsewhere, Dee suggests a different way of understanding the expression of sincerity in our current media environment. I think it’s useful to try to think about these new adventures in postliteracy in ways that don’t seek only to condemn or celebrate:
TCC [what Dee designates as the true crime community, a type of fandom] is what that looks like in a mediated world. It is why TikTokers post videos of themselves crying in their cars. It’s not because they’re narcissists, or they want fame and fame alone. They can only understand and experience their emotions, and by extension, themselves through media depictions. It is not enough to cry: You must cry with yourself, through the screen. It must be a TikTok, or a tweet, or a micro-blog.
Meanwhile, tangentially, Ran Prieur has written,
I've said this before: postapocalypse fiction is full of cults, but I think cults mainly happen during apocalyptic times and not after them. Right now, with everyone losing faith in the old systems, and LLMs that feed back beliefs, and the general difficulty of checking facts, I think we're entering a golden age of cults.
III. Criticism
My friend Matt Clayfield invited Adrian Martin and me to discuss a few things about film criticism in a freeform way. You can listen to an edited version of the conversation on Matt’s Substack, Weariness Makes a Good Mattress. I don’t sound like someone who should appear as a guest on a podcast, because I was running on just a couple hours of sleep and using my sub-optimal laptop microphone. (I also—thoughtlessly, unforgivably—lack an Australian accent.) So, sorry for the roughness I bring to the discussion. But you should listen to the chat anyway, because of Matt’s good work bringing everything together, as well as the thoughtful responses Adrian gave to the questions!
IV. Films Watched
My reading slowed down considerably this summer, mainly because I’m rarely able to get more than through 10-15 pages at a time. I’m sure that will pick back up soon enough. I have been able to watch a trickle of films though. A few words on some of them, for the curious. Newer films first. Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025) seemed like a polished nothingburger. I wouldn’t say it’s artistically bankrupt like such elevated horror attempts as Longlegs or The Black Phone—it’s better than those— but nevertheless consists mainly of a lot of posturing and vibing, little substance. Benedict Wong’s hungry snappy hand gesture was my favorite bit. Last Breath (Alex Parkinson, 2025), about an underwater deep sea accident and rescue, succeeds when it’s focusing on suspenseful, logistical storytelling, but is pretty thin in its more nakedly “human interest” elements. Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024) has a lot to recommend it but I’m not sure how much it coheres. Or rather, I don’t think it’s exactly trying to “cohere” and failing, but even if it hits its unconventional target, I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by the particular prickly shape it makes. It feels like 50% a Tim Robinson sketch, 25% borrowed vibes from an “A24 horror” template (even though it’s not a horror movie of that type), 15% topical sensitive drama, and so on—in short, a bricolage of some things that maybe all do work better when they aren’t welded together. Stand something like this up next to Milos Forman’s Taking Off or Alan Arkin’s Little Murders, and you’ll see how wide the gulf is, in my opinion.
I enjoyed many things about The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987) but thought it lost some steam the more it leaned into its science fiction explanations. (To be fair, it doesn’t try to “worldbuild” with “lore” like a 2025 movie would be all but forced to do.) Bob Clark’s Loose Cannons (1990), meanwhile, doesn’t work up enough steam to lose any in the first place, unfortunately. I caught up with James Whale’s 1936 adaptation of Show Boat, which I confess I found a real slog, despite its cast, and despite the care with which it approaches many of its images. A revisit of Larry Clark’s Bully (2001) left me with mixed emotions; Clark is a tricky filmmaker because he’s clearly working with the raw material of cheap tricks, but it’s hard to say definitively that he’s ever ending with a cheap trick. The highlights of what I’ve watched in recent weeks have been some titles by Želimir Žilnik (Little Pioneers, Early Works, and Marble Ass), as well as another Yugoslavian Black Wave classic, The Ambush (Živojin Pavlović, 1969). These all seem like wonderful, humane, exploratory works that engage with their world and all the customs and political conflicts and contradictions, and do so in a way that can surprise. Imagine that!
V. The Finger Lakes Environment
There are a lot of wasps around here. We saw a baby bat crawling on the sidewalk. One is likely to spot deer, rabbits, and chipmunks at various points throughout the day. The occasional appearances of outdoor cats in our neighborhood torment our indoor-only Vivien Leigh, who is friendly and affectionate to humans but does not like other felines. The vistas and waterfalls that can come into view suddenly when driving or walking around Ithaca are breathtaking. One of these days I’ll take a little trip to see locations associated with the likes of Nabokov and Pynchon.
I hope and plan to be back before the end of August with something other than another “junk drawer” installment. Until then: cheers, my friends.