dynamics of hot and cold

the bezos's wedding, zines, and a good example of "weird substack"

An exciting (if admittedly slow) weekend — picked up a shift at the restaurant because the power went out throughout the apartment building on Sunday. The temperature creeped up to the mid-90-degrees ever so gradually and I was caught up between a 95 degree apartment and the ice cold water of my bathtub. By the time I returned home from work, the power was back on and the AC was awhirl.

dynamics of hot and cold

The recent heat wave has got me thinking — and experiencing — the highs and lows of body temperature, the hot and cold of my apartment, the feeling in the shower of hot water being interrupted by cold spurts as the neighbors (or my roommate) begins washing dishes in the sink, presenting myself to the outside world or hiding myself behind my bedroom walls, presenting myself as clean shaven or unshaven, inside (hot) or outside (cool), or the inverse, inside (cool) or outside (hot). Hungry or full, I will still need to eat eventually. Inspiration or no inspiration, I still need to write. Why?

I’m not sure. If we’re fated to always navigate between an endless river of two opposing shores, does the river become easier to navigate? I suppose it does with the right habitual self-protections. I’ve backed away from the internet and from the notifications that were keeping me in a constant state of perpetual anxiety — as I laid out in last week’s paid post, I’m still attempting to only log onto the internet for ~2 hours a day — but the anxiety of being without the same ball and chain as everyone else gradually creeps in all the same… Will I stick with the habit? We’ll see, I guess.

On the Offshoring of Luxury Weddings (café hysteria)

Jeff Bezos’ wedding got (honestly) stunning coverage from the fashion and culture press last week — Anna Wintour hasn’t retired quite yet from Vogue, it seems.

The Bezos more-or-less took over Venice, rented it out like I might rent out an AirBnb for the weekend; the local police were on edge about ongoing protest from locals (like the US, Amazon has also eaten the EU alive).

Here’s a very European comment on the whole ordeal from the New York Times:

“I really don’t like what is going on here,” said Alice Francescatti, 23, smoking a cigarette by two police officers who surveilled the canal near her kayak school, and Mr. Bezos’ party. “We cannot keep selling out our world just because someone can pay for it.”

Paints a picture, doesn’t it? I can almost hear the Gondolier playing his accordion in the smoky distance.

The piece linked above, in the title of this section, by

Madison Huizinga

, is a fantastic read; it’s about the fetishization of weddings into almost a Barbie-ified symbol of feminine success. Can’t recommend her work enough.

“In the American imagination, the wedding is a highly personalized ceremony, designed to fulfill the particular dreams of the couple at its center. However, in the stereotyped American heterosexual couple, the woman is typically expected to have a stronger aesthetic eye and preference. Thus, the wedding - while focused on the couple - is conceived as more of a fulfillment and reflection of her dreams, in most cases, than the groom’s.”

But the lofty expectations of such an event are simply not achievable for almost anyone, even those over the six-figure mark. And besides, who’s making six figures in their twenties and thirties? Or at the very least, who’s making six figures and also has time in their day to invest properly in a relationship? Or to plan a wedding at all?

As Madison points out, ever since the KimYe wedding (not the best start to any trend line), the ideal wedding location has become Europe, invoking a nostalgia for the far-gone past, the romance of a European austerity preserved through the world wars, something that (mind you) doesn’t necessarily exist any more in Europe than it does at Disneyworld.

And of course, with this trend of romantic “experiences” becoming paramount, especially for weddings of the extremely wealthy — those who can afford the costs of an idyllic wedding —, entire European cities such as Venice are being rented just out, an act which rhymes vaguely with Davos, Switzerland’s evacuation for a month or so every year for the sake of the World Economic Forum, so that the world’s finance captains can gab in Swiss streets.

And speaking of global finance conventions, didn’t Bezos’s wedding fulfill a similar function to the World Economic Forum? Certainly the world’s financial leaders were also at the Bezos wedding, attempting to make power plays just like they would at any other gathering of the filthy rich. Succession is unfortunately as much a documentary as it is fiction.

Another quote from Madison, here:

“Thinking about the current exuberant state of weddings has me quick to wonder about how weddings once were - what they once represented and what they still represent. They were business deals. Matters of economics. Means of exchanging currency, property for women, and vice versa. Unromantic and unglamorous. But they were also the preamble to starting a family - a family that would be recognized by God. A wedding was a christening, imbued with the same significance as birth and death. It was a passageway. A portal to a new life. A baptism.”

She’s right! Weddings are still economic propositions! So it’s more than a bitter irony that the Bezos’s would offshore their wedding when their whole empire is also built on labor from the third world.

So the extremely wealthy are starting to rend out cities from around the world instead of the US, I can’t help but wonder what the good ole’ US of A is getting in return…

The Trump II administration’s goal to re-industrialize the United States would ideally “reshore” much of the industry, bring it back to the United States. There’s something. I doubt it will work, though; and while they’re attempting it, certainly hundreds of thousands will feel severe economic pain not to mention companies like Amazon (again, built off of the fact that the labor of production is being done abroad) will also suffer tremendously (not that I’m going to complain about this, companies aren’t people after all).

It’s telling, though, that while the richest people in the history of the planet begin to treat the planet as their personal amusement park, the American people, in return, get to be forced back into the factory to make iPhones in sweatshop conditions.

But also, by necessity of the means of production returning, materialist politics must also return the United States. Materialist politics is something which the original deindustrialization (the offhsoring of industry) done by Reagan’s administration onward was partially designed to deplete, deport, cede over to countries with much looser regulations and authoritarian governments with no problem turning a blind eye from electronics sweatshops.

If we want more products to be made in this country (not a bad thing at all), the cost of such is more unionization, more equitable benefits, and more pushes for systems of social care which the American ruling class and the Bezoses of the world seem intensely allergic to. Just look at how the media is slandering Mamdani right now. That’s what we’re up against. To see the media cozying up to Bezos’s “glamorous” wedding while accusing Mamdani — a warm, neighborly man living in a rent controlled apartment — of being a communist jihadi antisemite, who ought to be ejected from public life, possibly even deported, as soon as possible, is telling of the general state of things in the antiquated legacy media. It’s clear who they’re more willing to cozy up to and it’s not the people.

But going back to materialist politics for a second: the dominance of the Culture War in the US’s politics is a consequence of the lack of industry in this country, almost entirely; without the need to produce the goods themselves, companies in the US have become sleek and weightless glass buildings filled with finance interests. The labor that allows these companies to have any claim to doing anything at all — for the most part — being done by the third world and shipped here has allowed the pesky labor unions and workers rights concerns to move to the wayside of the discussion. This leads us to the strange politicial limbo we’re in. If we’re re-shoring industry, we’ll also reshore the full struggle for liberation that goes along with restoring the means of production to American soil. This is part of why Zohran’s successful campaign (I’m sorry for doing on him so much lol) for the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor is such a hopeful moment; he’s a bread-and-butter issue Leftist, something we haven’t had in the Untied States with any electoral success since the McCarthyist purges of the 1950s.

Anyways, Madison ends her discussion on weddings by mentioning her own yearning to globe trot the world, declaring that she’s going to begin saving now. And absolutely saving money is important (it’s a lesson I need to learn) but also remember: it shouldn’t be so difficult for us to afford a spectacular wedding, or to travel the globe. We can take real steps to redistributing the wealth: may we all have a beautiful wedding. Maybe one day we all can.

the death and birth of The Zine (wired)

Zines have a rather understated relationship with culture. Let’s say you have a thing for the music of the 1960s: it was undergirded with zine culture. Let’s say, on the other hand, you have a thing for the alt/grunge/indie scenes of the 90s: also undergirded by zine culture. The punks of the 80s? Zines. The abolitionists of the 1850s? Zines. The labor movements of the 1930s? Zines. Need I give more examples?

The unremarkable nature of culture in the 2010s and the 2020s (that being the lack of any coherent signifiers, distinct attributes, or scenes/assemblages that are in any way distinct from those in the 2000s) has been pointed out before by better writers than myself but certainly, if we’re looking for root causes for the lack of new culture in the 2010s and 2020s, the mere fact that the necessary supports to construct new and exciting youth cultures had been bulldozed for the sake of the platform economy.

The feeling of being haunted by trends and cultural symbols of the past, such a vast accumulation of retro vibes such that imagining of any new culture becomes somewhat frightening is a key component of Mark Fisher’s work involving Hauntology, and certainly when the supports to local youth culture are knocked down, what we’re left with is an unknowable ocean of quick stimulus that is easier to fill with ghosts than with any thing alive and growing.

Such a wash of stimuli is not a suitable replacement for a zine culture, in which cut-outs and new ideas can be circulated in small circles, written back and forth, open letters but open letters with a specific arthouse tint, shared among a community; and such a wash of stimuli is not a suitable replacement for the physical spaces that undergird an area too.

For instance, after I moved to Chicago near the end of 2023 I remember speaking to a friend whom I met in the city who described the pre-pandemic state of things: that every night of the week, there was at least a dozen house shows to choose from throughout the city, dozens of things to do and gatherings to take place in. There was a whole artistic and cultural community intended on creating new things that has since been eclipsed. Now, in the shadow of the pandemic, there are maybe a dozen house shows a month.

The platforms really ate local scenes’ lunches in the pandemic, and they ate zine’s lunch too. Other cities, such as Philadelphia, have been quicker to bounce back, but all in all it’s nice to see that history is not dead, that despite a feeling of (making up this term as I type) Cyber Realism still pervading, trends change and the small scale can be wrested back from the main algorithmitized gauntlet of international social media. That’s what we’re starting to see in the article linked above.

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet was likely more prophecy than anything else; the mainstream internet is filling up with reactionary insanity aimed at the widest swath of neuroses possible. There’s a need, then, for quiet sharing; some of the more radical politics in Zine culture are impossible when digital free speech is becoming increasingly dangerous for non-citizens, minorities, the disenfranchised generally — but, interestingly, it’s more the digital free speech that’s become illegal than the printed speech is.

This means that the watchdogs of an increasingly authoritarian Fed are not reading zines; the reactionary twitter mobs are not attending local events; there’s a safety in the offline.

Analog has a place in the future despite the Cyber Realism (the feeling that the internet and an increasingly interconnected world is inevitable) which so permeates the air. Zines are an interesting safety mechanism; for instance, they can warn neighbors about ICE techniques, give guides for self-medication and safe home abortions, can circumvent top-down restrictions on essential information, as the article puts it well:

“ With the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers limiting access to certain kinds of health care in the US, for example, zines about DIY health care for trans people or pamphlets about self-managed abortions could become even more prevalent. “If they start criminalizing that kind of information, how will you access that information, if not literally somebody passing you a pamphlet or a flyer or a zine?” Kaba asks. “For folks who are on the left, we better figure out how we're going to transmit information about important things to each other that is not using social media.” “

It’s the information age, sure, but all that name entails is that you must be more shrewd about the way you transmit information, the ways in which you receive it, and the ways in which you parse through it. The new wave of Zine artists are part of this broadening of the scope of information and communication beyond the hegemony of the screen. Certainly there’s some events in your neighborhood if you look around. Go check it out. See what’s up.

Speaking of Zines: what about weird substack?: a video (exclusive exclusive)

“weird substack” is what I’ve been calling the offbeat, zine culture on Substack, and I’ve long been considering writing up a piece compiling some of the best of what I’m calling here “weird substack”, but

evanie laurent

’s one of the best and most interesting creators on this platform. Their work is fascinating stuff, and I want to dig into their most recent video a bit because it captured my attention the other day and what else is a link roundup for except to explore these things?

The video opens with a discussion of fish¹ in an experiment. The lab fish live in a tank with three sections, one section with rocks and leaves and a dim light which the lab fish seem to enjoy, one main chamber, bare and empty, and one other bare chamber with a terribly intense light hanging over its water.

The fish are injected with a particularly painful substance (vinegar in this case) and a painkiller is dissolved into the water of the chamber with the terribly intense light. Of course the fish, when in pain, choose to swim around the painkiller, but only when they’re in terrible pain. When there’s no painkiller and they’re still in pain, they choose to swim around inside the dim room.

“How did you know to make that tradeoff? Your brain is having to take the pain and incorporate it with all these other factors like memories and preferences. The pain isn’t just partitioned off in some isolated corner of your brain relegated for unconscious reflexes.”

And after those words are finished, a high pitched droning starts playing over a clip of an interview with a musician in which he talks about how he always keeps a CD player on him because music keeps the demons out of his head, and he is interrupted by a passage from the bible describing how a man, in this case Saul, who has been abandoned by god must employ a lute player to clear him of suffering.

The high pitched noise throughout this first video clip fascinates me. It directly confronts the viewer — or in this case, the listener — with the itching pain of existence which the subjects of the video feels.

If we, idle spectators you and I, are the fish, this high pitched noise is the vinegar injected directly into our veins. And video content as a whole is perfect for avoiding pain and uncomfortable sensations, so we’re encouraged to keep watching the video to distract ourselves from the noise we ourselves are becoming stressed out by. Imagine the terror of watching a video such as this, with that high pitched hum, only to turn it off (uncomfortable at the avant garde anxiety of it) to instead open a random video on Youtube only to find that the high pitched sound is still going? Thankfully, though, to our ears and anxiety levels, the high pitched noise disappears as soon as the second clip begins.

We’re soon greeted by another man from another time talking about his friend Brian coming “unglued” and losing his sense of reality. There’s a lot of concern in his voice. He describes how Brian had a melt down because the Sun itself hit him over the head.

Then, a aesthete’s voice over hooded figures walking across a flat square, talking about sitting on a bed of nails. The pain is the point. The voice describes the pain as purifying him.

Then we’re given two kids talking on the top of an apartment high rise in Eastern Europe. One wearing angel wings who we soon learn has died — he’s an apparition of a dead child, a ghost or an angel — giving the other, a slightly older girl, the survivor of the unnamed calamity that made the ghost child what he is, the rest of the world as a birthday present.

The girl responds, saying “I’m sorry, I’m not sure it’s a good present. It’s windy… cold,” and threatens to jump from the roof saying that if the world’s all hers, why can’t she jump and fly away? If it’s all hers, then why is that not within her powers? The angel boy talks her out of it, saying “you remain dead for all eternity, but you’re only alive a brief moment.”

After this we’re taken to a severely mentally-handicapped German 22-year old who was never taught to walk; we spend a deeply uncomfortable clip with him as he hits himself in the head with a soccer ball, but once music is played from a small radio nearby, he puts his hands to the radio and smiles. He puts his head to the machine, hugs it to his body. “He likes it,” his caretaker says. “He feels something living.” Behind the frame, code starts flashing and then natural scenes, and then a fade to black from which emerges a heartbreaking black-and-white clip of an interview with a severely mentally disabled Japanese man discussing his fear of being photographed, his fear “toward normal people”. He says, describing being photographed,

“I thought about what I can do. I wanted to reverse roles. When I was with Hara, he always took pictures of me. Damn him. Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I be the photographer?”

I also have a slight aversion to having my photo taken. There is something so intrusive, sometimes about being preserved in such a way, without my own control. I can only imagine how it must feel, though, to be photographed when you yourself can never take photographs in the same way, you can never return the favor.

The video ends with a man filming himself with a frightening fish-eye camera discussing different kinds of pain, opening with “massages are only good if they’re a little on the painful side. The question is how much pain can you tolerate until it becomes unbearable…”

And so we’ve come to a strange place in the history of mass pain, mass painkillers, and the fish experiment at the front going on for far too long where pain has become something to be yearned for. The air we breathe is painkiller. The bubbles we surround ourselves with are painkillers. The water we swim in is relief from the heat. We’re insulated and forced to retreat into ourselves as technology looms heavy and exploitative around us, filling our lives with distraction and easy numbness; and we are at a point where we either give ourselves over to constant consumption or we push through the pain, ignoring the painkillers as if they were not there.

an article about cyber realism from 2017 (the guardian)

Elle

sent me this little article and it’s fascinating to read prophesies of digital from so long ago (only 8 years ago, I suppose) to see how it compares to the current digital dystopia which we’re hopelessly trapped within. Also, the note at the end is funny:

The author here worries about Sex Robots, Digital Privacy, and Brain Drain and while one of those is not like the other, the article is an interesting read in the way that last week’s newspaper’s warning about a significant inbound weather event becomes more interesting after the storm has washed away the entire neighborhood.

He targets a term from George Monbiot called “ecological boredom” as a prime cause for the growing apathy and depression the world seemed to be spiraling into. By that term he means a boredom with the natural world in favor of the artificial.

I want to push back a little on this explanation, though, because it feels a little simplistic and the author here seems more intent on selling his outdoor lifestyle than making any real point (such a selling of lifestyles has been a plague on the culture since the culture freeze of the platform internet began building steam in the early 2010s, imo). That’s not to say I don’t think ecological boredom is a real phenomenon, but rather that it’s a symptom of the trading-off of the real for the digital which is, in its own turn, more a result of a globalized system of capital built on cruel exploitation and a painkiller mechanism to keep ourselves apathetic and happy than anything else.

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