Practice resurrection

February, in review

A very belated review of last month—apologies for slow posting of late, life has been especially thick. Hopefully back to a more consistent schedule in the coming weeks.

All photographs by Katie Jane Fernelius unless otherwise noted.

We celebrated my son’s birthday, with dinosaurs. We made a big decision with imperfect information. We made, are making, plans. I lost and gained no pounds. My hair got longer. I thought about starting back up with guitar lessons. We called the plumber. In New Orleans, our friends celebrated. We missed them. We missed the city, and we missed that manner of celebration. One Tropical Depression reader wore these shoes on Fat Tuesday:

Shoes by Lindsey Sipes, photograph by Dacus Thompson.

Me, on Fat Tuesday, I drank three beers and watched several episodes of “Better Things,” and by the end I was confused and thought Pamela Adlon was my friend. Lent arrived. Things were subtracted. My daughter started taking piano lessons. At one lesson, I had to bring my two-year-old son and we sat together in the waiting room, which has lots of instruments for kids to play with. He did lots of drumming and shaking. When it was time to go, to my surprise, he did not want to leave, even with fast food burgers and mama awaiting him. At first we couldn’t understand what he was saying as he screamed through tears on the way out and in the car. We thought he was saying something about wanting gems. Marigold gave him a crystal she had handy. He threw it back. Finally we understood what he was screaming: “I want to jam! I want to jam!”

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Bankrupt on Selling

Over at the Honest Broker Substack, the cultural critic and music historian Ted Gioia wrote in February about the state of the culture, and the nasty way that the most pernicious and addictive forms of “content” are crowding out the forms of art we hold sacred and dear.

The creative economy is like a food chain, Gioia argues, and it’s long been the case that entertainment is the big fish swallowing art (obviously there is overlap between those two categories, but you get the idea). Sometimes that means that at the margin, mass entertainment squeezes out stuff that is smaller, independent, weirder, more localized, more niche, etc. Certainly most people spend much more time and money on blockbuster movies than on reading books, for example. But hey, entertainment has its own rewards (Diehard is amazing!), and local indie bands and poets and painters and sacred singers and experimental dancers and all the rest can typically find their corner, if not always enough to pay the bills.

But even the entertainment industry is now being swallowed up by a still bigger fish, argues Gioia:

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all. …

Here’s a better model of the cultural food chain in the year 2024.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.

TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook—once a place to connect with family and friends—is imitating it. So long, Granny, hello Reels. Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media.

This all feels descriptively true. But why is it so icky? Blockbuster movies become blockbusters because they try to give audiences exactly what they want. Is TikTok any different? And aren’t people voting with their thumbs? Do our revealed preferences show that actually scrolling through stuff on our phones is just what we want?

Here’s Gioia’s take:

This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics.

Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus. …

This is a familiar model for addiction.

Only now it is getting applied to culture and the creative world—and billions of people. They are unwitting volunteers in the largest social engineering experiment in human history.

So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.

Nothing Gioia is arguing here is particularly novel. I think a lot of us feel and recognize this endless loop of impulse triggers. If I say a book is “addictive” I mean that as a compliment—but this feels like something else. And the platforms we use seem ever more dedicated to locking us in to these compulsive loops.

And it’s not just that this “content” is dumb and disposable, the whole thing seems to make us bummed out. When we have a little free time to do something fun, we often get on our devices and do something that…I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn’t call it fun. It feels empty, or worse—it depletes rather than nourishes.

“The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive,” Gioia writes. “At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.”

Here’s a graphic Gioia made that has gone viral:

Okay, maybe a little on the nose, but definitely recognizable.

It’s hard to talk about this stuff without seeming scoldy. So: If you get a lot of joy from the apps and so on, that is great! I can only report on myself. Stuff like Twitter or Instagram seems to be bad for me, in part because it is good at luring me into using my time on stuff that does not bring me joy or meaning, and that is disconnected with the stuff in life that brings me joy or meaning. (Physician, heal thyself: I still wind up scrolling and giggling and sharing in spite of myself.)

One objection, I realize, is just: I’m old. Stuff changes. I’m convinced it’s worse—that social media, for example, more often than not has a uniquely noxious impact on people’s mental health, behavior, and spiritual well-being, and that it saps the collective creativity that is the sweetest and strangest thing about human beings. But that’s what I would think as a middle aged man. Stuff is changing, I am getting closer to death, etc.

Be that as it may. Even if this is just a case of the time passing me by, I nevertheless think there is value in running against the current, or trying. (Admittedly, I’m the tedious sort to insist that the Luddites were the good guys in the story.) Culture benefits from some push and pull, including those among us who find ourselves suddenly old-fashioned. Let’s say we might stubbornly hold on to the detritus in the wake of disruption. There is always meaning and value among the rubble as the culture moves on, and most of it will be gone, but some of it will be saved, because of those stubborn grips. Or in this case, at the very least, there must be merit in a new counterculture that declines to participate in the infinite swipe of content nuggets. For variety, if nothing else.

Or in more grandiose terms, when I look at the left side of that graphic, I see the special light of human life. Our sacred spandrels. Stuff that, as C.S. Lewis wrote of friendship, “has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Limited to our genomic inheritance, we would be clever apes, sleeping in the rain and scrounging for survival, after all these millennia. Our beautiful genius, our special trick, is cultural evolution—so our true inheritance now involves the best ideas of every human who ever lived. Language and tools and all the rest are subsets of this cultural evolution. We have songs and prayer and cities. We solve equations about stars. We preserve the symbols of oil on canvas, for a thousand years and then some. We read with our children, including books our parents read to us. We feel more afloat in our rituals. We feel in awe in our senses. No need is filled by beauty but we need it. The good stuff, the human way—the wild tickling of inexplicable consciousness.

And for me, when my experience of culture is stuff on the right side of that graphic, it just feels like I’m playing the slot machines. Like I have lost track of even the desire to win. I just keep pulling the lever to spin the wheel again, because I feel like I have to, lost in a void without beauty or connection. Dumb animal impulse, or maybe more machine than animal. A perfunctory culture.

Tropical Depression isn’t really about anything in particular, but in some way I can’t really explain, I hope it breathes more slowly, a little thread in the old warp and weft. I recognize the gnarly irony here: This is an online publication connected to a platform that has some aspects of social media. I’m still sorting it all out as I go.

Grace and I have been experimenting with different approaches to wean ourselves from addictive trash and try to promote alternatives, in our own creative practices and more broadly in how we engage with our communities. But we fail as often as we succeed, so I don’t yet have any program to recommend.

How are y’all feeling about all this? I’d love to hear in the comments. Maybe we can figure this out together.

May we all be like Cosmo and all get our wish: I want to jam! I want to jam!

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* For the following, R means something I re-read or re-watched; M means something I watched with or read to my daughter.

Books this month

We Shall All Be Saved by David Bentley Hart (224 pp.) – The Eastern Orthodox theologian and writer David Bentley Hart makes the case that an eternal hell cannot be reconciled with the morals, ethics, and logic of Christianity—and that scripture supports the universalist view of salvation much more than you might think from the mainstream theological consensus in Christianity. I am easy to convince on this front so the rigor brought to the question in his book might almost have been gratuitous for me; like Hart, my immediate and possibly unmovable instinct is to view the notion of eternal torture as an immoral absurdity. Still, always engaging to read Hart—a lively and pugnacious writer and deeply learned thinker.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson (309 pp.) – The fourth novel in Robinson’s Gilead tetralogy. Robinson is among my very favorite writers, a literary hero to me, so no surprise, I thought this was wonderful—if perhaps a bit short of the heights of Gilead and Lila, the two towering achievements in the series. A talky book that at times has the feeling of a play, with long stretches in between for our eponymous anti-hero to turn doubt over and over in his mind like he’s polishing a stone. At times both the conversation and these monologues in thought have the feeling of Robinson working these ideas out for herself. That sounds like a problem, but this is Robinson; I found myself glowing in the meditative beauty.

Stoner by John Williams (278 pp.) – Masterpiece. I have a feeling it will cling to me for the rest my life. I’ve often heard it called a “perfect novel,” which is true but almost undercuts the book’s utter strangeness and idiosyncratic warmth. It was published in 1965; there is something about the fastidious manner of the prose that must have seemed old-fashioned even fifty years ago. And otherworldly, too, despite the earthy and quotidian story. In a way, there was something nice about reading it alongside Marilynne Robinson, though she is hopeful at precisely the notes where Stoner is bleak. Robinson’s American archetype is the Christian, Williams’s is the stoic. If there is grace in Williams’s vision, it is lonesome endurance, not gifted but gritted out. The book is addictive—I raced through it over a couple of days—but it’s so searing in its intensity that it’s almost unbearable. Absolutely one of the best books I’ve read in a long time; I will never read it again.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (171 pp.) (R, M) – I still love it, and I am more than a little pleased that my daughter does, too.

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Movies this month

The Sugarland Express (1974) – Incredibly charming, smoking-hot movie. Goldie Hawn slays. Arguably as Spielberg got bigger, the charm turned to smarm; in its folksy warmth, this homier early effort is a great American classic—surely one of the best road movies ever. Highly recommended.

Showing Up (2022) – Pleasant but not sure if it cohered to much. I’m a partisan of the minimalist style, and I had a nice time watching, but this one felt like it was all air, no balloon.

Wonka (2023) (M) – Adequate.

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) (R, M) – As fantastic as I remembered it. My daughter loved. Grace was convinced she would be scared by the clown but Marigold just thought it was hilarious that her mother is afraid of clowns.

Priscilla (2023) – I dug it. Jacob Elordi was laughably unconvincing as the historical Elvis but that seems beside the point; his enveloping stretchiness stands in for Elvis’s softer swerve as an avatar for crushing male charisma. Sofia Coppola’s plush set design and costumes feel almost literally delicious, as ever. Here, that contributes to the film’s double lens: We absolutely feel intoxicated via Priscilla’s first-person teen fantasy, fizzy and smitten with wonder and magic; we also have a keen and visceral third-person revulsion at the sinister depravity of the situation. The film depicts predation through the lens of genuine attraction, no easy trick. As seductive and repulsive as a sugar rush.

Orion and the Dark (2024) (M) – Skip.

The Holdovers (2023) – I didn’t finish this – I rented it on a streaming service and didn’t finish before my 48 hours was up. The first half was too heavy-handed for me, but there were enough charms (and good performances from Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph) that I had planned to finish the film at some point. But now a few weeks have passed and I’ve already started to forget this one, so maybe I’ll never get around to it.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) (R, M) – Pretty entertaining for daddy and daughter—nowhere near a classic but above average among modern children’s movies.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009) (R, M) – I loved this movie when it came out, and love it still. It seems to be underrated, perhaps because it’s a less a movie about childhood than one immersed in it. Not sure if I know of another film so intensely focused on emotions themselves, the pure wild things we feel, unmoored from reasons or causes or contexts. A lonely, wounded, talky, roving temper tantrum of a movie—total delight (and the Karen O soundtrack is perfect). My daughter adored it, and that night she asked me to dig up the book. It had been a while.

Those are people who died

Pearl Berg, who had been the ninth-oldest known woman in the world, died at 114. Robert Beckwith, the New York City firefighter who handed the megaphone to President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks, died of cancer. He was 91. Don Gullett, a southpaw, pitched a perfect game in high school and had a nine-year career as a pitcher in the major leagues. Former Florida state legislator Betty Holzendorf had a street named after her in Jacksonville. The Ukrainian strongman Oleksandr Bilokon—a world and European champion in powerlifting and winner of “The Strongest Man of Ukraine” in his weight class in 2020—was killed in action in the war against Russia. He is Ukraine’s record holder for truck pulling. He was 32.

Here is a sampling from the renowned Nepali singer and composer Bhakta Raj Acharya, who died late last month:

Send me photographs!

All the photographs in this post (except the shoes!) were sent to me by Tropical Depression reader Katie Jane Fernelius in response to my request. You could also send me an image! Here is that request again: I’d like to experiment with mixing in some more images to Tropical Depression posts. Mostly I’m thinking stuff that has no connection (or only an oblique connection) to the content of the text. It doesn’t have to be a photograph—it could be art of any kind—but photos seem easiest? Game for images created as art, or just random shots that have a nice look. Anything that might fit with the Tropical Depression sensibility, whatever that is. Send one, or as many as you like, to: davidbramsey@gmail.com