Discussing ambition and doom with Japanese Breakfast

Plus: I got existential with the Dewy Dudes.

A convenient thing about the intense memeification of The Substance was that being overexposed to screenshots of all that body stuff made it easy to sit down and watch it at last. I’m way too squeamish to have handled those final 45 minutes without ample warning, but I’m glad I finally saw what all the fuss was about.

Demi was amazing, of course, but the part that impressed me most about The Substance was the elegant visual vocabulary that the film used to explain the “procedure” without having some character stand there and deliver 10 minutes of exposition. It was very cleverly done; much like Sue, I found myself intuitively understanding what the tubes and syringes were supposed to do.

I also thought the writing itself was quite sticky: the “directions” that come with the titular substance felt on par with real-world advertising slogans, or even religious mantras. I’ve been having a hard time handling my workload lately (what else is new), and I’ve found myself co-opting and repeating those phrases to myself when I’m trying to force myself to “balance” my time. You stabilize every day, I whisper while I make myself journal at least a paragraph in the morning, before the chaos begins. Last weekend, when I crammed a deadline in on Saturday so that I could spend an unbothered birthday afternoon at The Met, I hissed to myself, Respect the balance! Obviously The Substance is not remotely about ha ha how hard it is to be a freelance writer, but this tweet did make me stop and think about our obvious cultural obsession with the splitting of the self + its clear incentives…

@longstosee

---

Two plugs for you today…First: I was a guest on the Dewy Dudes podcast, which is hosted by Emilio Quezada-Ibañez and Evan Shinn. (You may know them from their work as prominent downtown memelords). Honestly, it’s my favorite bro pod interview yet. We got pleasantly existential about stuff like personal agency, the state of politics, and TMJ. I talked a lot about my ambivalence with everything from freelance life to egg freezing.

We recorded at Emilio’s studio in Bushwick, which is 1) why the audio sounds amazing (I don’t think I’ve sounded this melodious in my life) and 2) was itself an experience; they greeted me by throwing the door open and announcing, “This is where The Dare recorded “Girls”! History is all around us…

---

The other project I’ve been working on recently is this interview with Michelle Zauner for Vulture’s “A Long Talk” series, which came out today. It was a real joy to get the time (and wordcount!) for such an in-depth conversation with Michelle about the crazy success she experienced with her memoir, Crying in H Mart, and her band, Japanese Breakfast.

Catching an artist during their breakout moment (like when I chatted with Chappell last summer) is what everyone always wants to do, of course, but this interview was fascinating to me because Michelle has now had a year off — which she spent abroad in South Korea, effectively on sabbatical — to process hers from 2021. Our interview was less about the usual weirdness of the parasocial fame-game and more so about personally feeling terrified and doomed by the reality of having her dreams come true. (I’d joked to her over lunch that this happened at all levels; the week when I was putting a book out, for example, I was literally convinced I was going to get hit by a car.) It’s funny because this is the same stuff essentially as what the Dewy Dudes and I talked about: this pervasive, unshakeable sense of precarity, even when things are going objectively well. It infects us all!

The new album is fantastic, btw. Out March 21!

---

Finally, for something more uplifting: If you’re in New York — and especially if you’re a former marching band kid — you have to go see the Tyler Ballon show, “Flying High,” at Jeffrey Deitch (which possibly has the best gallery website in the world) before it closes April 19.

At the opening last weekend, the gallery brought the Malcolm X Shabazz High School marching band in to parade down Wooster and serenade the crowd. It was such a treat — made all the sweeter when Ballon revealed that several of the students featured in his larger-than-life paintings were in attendance. I (a former flute/piccolo player of the DHS Marching Eagles) observed the performance in a very high key (lol) of emotion: ‘cause like, what are any of us doing if not dedicating generous portions of our lives to supporting musical education (and then making art to honor our children)? JUST SOME NORMAL POST-DAYLIGHT SAVINGS THOUGHTS NOW THAT REASON TO LIVE HAS RETURNED.

^^Here they are coming in :’)