Welcome to Reality Farm. Yes, I know it’s Wednesday. All of reality is disordered, I don’t know how you could possibly expect me to put out a newsletter on time.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
Will the millennial aesthetic ever end? || The Cut
You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.
A basketlike lamp hangs overhead; other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow; mint-green and mustard confetti; white, with black half-circles and two little dots — aha. Those are boobs. You look down. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. A fiddle-leaf fig somewhere looms. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. You sense — in a way you could neither articulate nor explain — the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.
note: I do love a new dispatch from the late capitalism millennial aesthetics
front. Incredibly, I ran across one of the brands mentioned in the article (Judy) last week while going down a prepper rabbit hole — the bug-out-bags and prep-boxes seem overpriced and under-equipped, but boy do they look slick
anyways, it’s truly incredible how widespread the millennial aesthetic is. I can think of only one close friend who has a coherent aesthetic radically different from the standard (which says more about me yada yada, I know) and his aesthetic seems informed by some combination of velvet ropes, leather pants, and the occult. His room looks like a velvety sex dungeon inhabited by an 19th century gentleman recently returned from the Orient, which is a great effect overall, believe me, very textured, but not entirely feasible for the rest of us
My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend Is Lady Gaga || The New York Times
In some ways this is the natural, if absurd, arc of my generation’s entire adult life. In a vertical cascade of photos, I watch my friends’ ex-boyfriends nurturing the pregnancies of the nice-looking women they married instead. Sometimes I know the names of the resulting children, kids I will almost certainly never meet — but I will know whether they were princesses or pirates for Halloween anyway. I’ve seen their Christmas trees and sand castles and their tablescapes on special occasions. Sometimes they go dark for a period, the dinner parties disappear and they’re single again. I keep following, a passive but not unwilling audience.
note: honestly this situation seems like a nightmare so props to the writer for handling it with some grace, though not props for declaring the whole thing ‘inspiring’ and using it as an excuse to buy things off the internet and splurge on large coffees
Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever || The New Yorker
The young Yuval had a taste for grand designs. He has said, “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture.” In the back yard, he spent months digging a very deep hole; it was never filled in, and sometimes became a pond.
note: I was going to write a whole bunch of stuff here about Sapiens and Harari but I simply cannot stop giggling at the image of this very serious man digging a very deep hole in his backyard
Escape Artist || Air Mail
Philbrick’s con exposes the natural frailties of the art market—an industry built on perceived status and handshake deals and gut feelings and nebulous trust. This is nothing new. Philbrick joins a long list of confidence tricksters who have thrived in the foggy gray areas of the art world—a business that has a lot of foggy gray areas. But the sheer gall of his alleged deceptions seems to have taken many by surprise.
note: naturally frail art market built on perceived status and handshake deals and gut feelings and nebulous trust and foggy gray areas taken advantage of by a confidence trickster ! the sheer gall !
Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art || The American Interest
To typical Americans of a certain age, people with orders-of-magnitude greater tolerance for disorder, dissent, and bad taste than typical Singaporeans, the chewing gum ban brings to mind the iconic scene from Woody Allen’s 1971 movie “Bananas,” in which the new dictator of the fictional Republic of San Marcos orders everyone to wear their underwear on the outside—something, in other words, so arbitrary as to seem slightly mad.”
But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless . . .
What is not necessary and would never be tolerated in the United States is not a universal formula. What passes for reasonable is context-specific.
note: looking backward and forward on the world’s most successful bureaucracy and only sovereign city-state. a surprisingly interesting read concerning gum, table dancing, and hookers.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
note: because I’m a good boy who fears Lord Zuck, I deactivated instagram for Lent. as such, I’ve had to reach back into my reddit days for stray sugar cubes
Approaching Shadow (1954) | Fan Ho
Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968) | Robert Adams
State Capitol Bank, Oklahoma City (1963) | Julius Sherman
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Reality is starting to feel a little unreal. Have you noticed?
I contribute this to the coronavirus, which is rapidly bridging the gap between problems that happen elsewhere, to other people and haha these symptoms I’m experiencing sure are awfully flu-like.
In times like these, it’s helpful to do a little reality check. The way I do this is I learn a new fact and try to determine whether or not that fact jives with reality (reality thus being in order) or clearly sounds fake (reality thus being disordered*).
Anyway, I recently learned a fun new fact that so radically shook me to my core that it’s a small miracle if you’re receiving this email and I haven’t talked to you about it yet in person.
What do you think was the bloodiest civil war in history? Well. It wasn’t the American Civil War (~1 million dead).
What do you think was the largest conflict of the 19th century? Well. It wasn’t the Napoleonic Wars (~3.5 million dead).
No, the bloodiest civil war in history AND the largest conflict of the 19th century was the Taiping Rebellion in China, where a man who thought he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother waged a fourteen-year war against the Qing dynasty which left an estimated 30 MILLION PEOPLE DEAD.
I am telling you this shit is absolutely bananas.
Basically, a failed bureaucrat read a Christian missionary’s pamphlet, which, in combination with a series of fever-dreams, he wildly misinterpreted, coming to the ultimate conclusion that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother sent to cleanse China of demons. The movement had two whipass names: originally it was called the God Worshipping Society (top marks for directness), and later became the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (top marks for self-confidence). The war was fought concurrently with the American Civil War and the fighters were armed with muskets and cannons smuggled into China from the West.
I can’t imagine why I was never taught about this in the American public school system (except for the obvious reasons w/r/t the American public school system). There’s certainly the possibility that I wasn’t paying attention in AP World History. But it’s more likely that the Taiping Rebellion actually never happened — plucked straight from the realm of the unreal. It’s too strange for reality.
My farm rebels against me.
*In a fun aside, influenza comes from the Italian influenza, which etymologically traces its roots back to the Latin influentia, pertaining to the influence of the heavenly bodies. The Italians of antiquity quite literally believed that when the planets were out of whack, reality became disordered and spread disease.
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
Okay here’s the thing about the masks. Surgical masks, N95 respirators, upside-down fish bowls, etc. Supposedly they don’t work for regular people but medical workers will die without them. Whatever. I have no beef with hospitals trying to conserve medical supplies.
But we’re rapidly entering the panic-buying phase of the coronavirus and people are going to buy what people are going to buy. I will not be buying a mask for two reasons.
The first reason is that a mask will not prevent me from getting coronavirus. This is not to say the masks aren’t effective, but if the extremely viral disease wants to kill me, it’s going to kill me. None of my half-assed prevention measures will work. Even if I wash my hands every thirty minutes and refrain from touching my face I will still blackout on Saturday and lick the top of a bar. I am young and stupid which is why God gave me a robust immune system.
The second reason I will not buy a mask is because I have gone deep down the prepper rabbit hole and it is simply too depressing. I would need to clear out half my bedroom to make room for the extra lithium batteries and pallets of chicken feed I’m supposed to keep stockpiled. No. In matters of the apocalypse, I’ve always envisioned myself as the kind of person who will simply die at the outset. In any case, I’ve long believed that neither the preppers nor the men in bunkers will inherit the earth — only those too indifferent or too stubborn to panic, those who keep showing up to work, those who keep going to their favorite Chinese restaurants will preserve and inhabit our society.
So the masks. Maybe they work, maybe they don’t. Everyone wants one, I suspect for aesthetic reasons as much as health reasons. In his book, Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama remarked something to the effect of “knowledge does not supersede symbol as a way of dealing with terror.”
And that’s just fine. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and it’s very comforting. We will ride into the new world on the crest of our symbols, masked or otherwise. Knowledge be damned.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
“The Last Unicorn” by Peter S. Beagle
(Fantasy, 1968. Twelve dollars.)
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
I first picked up The Last Unicorn when I came upon the following review by one of my favorite fantasy writers, Patrick Rothfuss: “The Last Unicorn is the best book I have ever read. You need to read it. If you’ve already read it, you need to read it again.”
Not your everyday endorsement, but Rothfuss was right. The Last Unicorn is unlike any other book in the genre — beautiful writing in the service of pure whimsy. Where other books would collapse from lack of substance, Beagle’s Unicorn stands on spindly legs of magic.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
The only political news that matters: the United States of America has taken possession of the Orb.