Welcome to Reality Farm.
As promised, here is the link for the Wall Street Journal real estate page’s House of the Year competition. I somehow missed it when it originally went up, so your votes technically won’t count for anything, but please send me your favorite house after you’ve pitted them against one another in gladiatorial combat.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
Skiers now have to compete with VCs for space on flights into Salt Lake City, where they can scout for a very particular retro brand of founder, combining the ambition of 2020 with the values of the 1950s — competitively groomed and vice-free, with tunnel vision on their business, their family, and the church.
note: Is this newsletter rapidly becoming a Mormon fanzine or what. 👏 business 👏 family 👏 church 👏 uncompromising social strictures 👏
The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias || The New York Times
Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”
note: Okay here’s some self-created utopia content that is not Mormon themed (you are very welcome).
Designing a New Old Home: Part 1 || Medium
Standardization is typical of the aesthetic deep state: before you can choose any options, you are limited by which choices are even available.
note: What’s fascinating about this post is the writer’s extensive use of photo apps like Pinterest, Google Photos, and Instagram, to aid in his design process. The writer shits on McMansions (which like, sure, obligatory), but produces a house that looks like it was conceived solely to be reproduced on Instagram and Pinterest. Clean lines and natural light are abundant. This is like the Pinterest wedding of houses. I’m unsure myself of what’s beautiful and what’s simply a polished and unsurprising aesthetic.
America’s Favorite Poison || The Atlantic
By emphasizing individual rather than social reform, [Alcoholics Anonymous] helped cement the idea that the problem was not alcohol writ large, but the small percentage of people who could not drink alcohol without becoming addicted. The thinking became, If you have a problem with alcohol, why don’t you get help? Why ruin everyone else’s fun?
note: My mother informed me no less than ten times over Christmas break that many young people are becoming “sober curious” and she continued to poke me with this bit of information in a manner reminiscent of “when am I getting grandchildren.” Alas, she’s right and an inordinate number of people I know are doing Dry (or variations of Moist) January because we’re at that point in our mid-twenties where hangovers are getting progressively worse and, God knows we’ve tried everything else, so maybe a little abstention will stave off the all-consuming dread of our modern hellscape.
The Quest to Mimic Nature’s Trickiest Colors || Nautilus
It was an image in a book of a sparkly blue fish—a West Indian Ocean coelacanth—that inspired German painter Franziska Schenk to begin a project that would occupy much of her adult life. “It was mysterious and beautiful,” she says, “and as a child I had been enamored with the sea.”
note: I’m just tickled pink about this whole thing. Butterflies! Fish! Iridescence! Mixable powders and optical qualities! What fun.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
RADIO FREE REALITY 🎙
sax that brings u to life
electronic
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
From the literal UFO files: Top-secret UFO files could cause "grave damage" to U.S. national security if released, Navy says.
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
I cannot remember how I first came across Rendezvous in Paris. It feels as if the video has been with me since my earliest cyberdays. The (short) film consists of a car driving recklessly through Paris in the early hours of the morning, sometime in the mid-1970s. The camera is mounted to the bumper of a Mercedes, while the soundtrack is dubbed with a Ferrari driving the same route.
Pedestrians are passed, pigeons sitting on the streets are scattered, red lights are ignored, one-way streets are driven up the wrong way, centre lines are crossed, and the car drives on the sidewalk to avoid a rubbish lorry. (Wikipedia)
I forget about the video for months at a time, only to remember in a frenzy. The quality is grainy and the sound is unreliable. The video itself, for copyright reasons or something, isn’t hosted in any reliable place. Every time I want to watch it, I have to search for a new bootleg copy someone has uploaded, then white-knuckle my way through all eight minutes of the drive until the iconic end shot. The film is equal parts documentary, horror movie, thriller, travelogue, and romance.
The footage is magnetic and it’s liminal existence on the Internet is quietly thrilling.
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
Throughout college I was chronically sleep-deprived and often, at my most sleep-deprived, felt like I was losing my mind. It wasn’t until I graduated that I put two and two together and now I sleep nine to ten hours every night and only sometimes feel like I’m losing my mind. I cannot stress how much of a positive lifestyle change this was.
A few months ago, one of my roommates introduced me to melatonin (dubbed “mellies”). I have always fallen asleep quickly and slept deeply through the night, but I found something about melatonin to be inexplicably indulgent — the promise of deep sleep, twelve glorious hours of it dreamless through to the morning.
I once read something along the lines of “sleep culture is escapism” which is partially true because nobody can ask you for anything, tell you to do anything, or interact with you at all. You do not exist. I have seen ecstasy taken with less reverence and giddiness than the average person dosing themselves with melatonin. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that reading fantasy novels is also escapism but those books rock and sleeping is a lot better than doing heroin or something like that so go ahead and indulge, melatonin or no, just aim for seven to nine hours every night.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
“The Possibility of an Island” by Michel Houllebecq
(Fiction, 2005. Thirteen dollars.)
Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid.
This was my first foray into Houllebecq, who is regularly praised and vilified on the timeline as a some kind of reactionary for expressing the barest hint of skepticism about the modern condition. He is a keen observer of the spiritual and sexual state of Europe, and the book is an enjoyable, irreverent introduction to his work, and includes such elements as clones, cults, meditations on the degradations of age, etcetera onwards and upwards. I’ve forgotten most of what happens in it, but that’s no knock against Houllebecq, I just have a terrible memory.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Some interesting reading suggestions here for understanding the right’s burgeoning movement from everyone’s favorite libertarian ethos of “socially liberal, economically conservative” to a post-liberal “socially conservative, economically liberal” philosophy:
A post-liberal reading list || UnHerd
The peculiar thing about post-liberalism is that even though it aligns with many (perhaps even the majority of) people in the West — Right-wing on culture, Left-wing on economics — few, if any, mainstream political parties have moved in to occupy this space. Gramsci could so easily have been talking about the present moment when he said that a political crisis “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.
I’ll likely check:
The Aesthetics of Architecture by Roger Scruton
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
And, The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry