An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time. Pipes found in his garden. Cannabis residue. And honestly this explains so much. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep; that is not a sober sentence. You write that at 2am after hotboxing a Tudor outhouse with the total stoned clarity that nothing has meaning and everything is beautiful.
There’s a small installation by Leah Rosenberg at the SF Moma titled “The Things We Use to Make the Things We Must” – what a banger of a sentence. A sentence so good it makes you want to go home and lie down.
Another article coming back from the grave: celery used to be expensive. It was displayed in crystal vases at dinner tables like a bouquet of flowers, nibbled on by posh aristocrats who thought it had magical powers, which is to say: the Victorians were deeply unwell. Then industrial agriculture got ahold of it, made it boring and cheap, and now it comes free with your buffalo wings and you need to drown it in ranch to enjoy. Somewhere in a farmhouse outside of Philadelphia a man is trying to bring it back by developing something he calls the Elton John of celeries, and maybe that’s what my delicate anti-celery palate really needs.
A definitive ordering of Diet Coke products, which I should preface by saying I have a totally normal relationship with Diet Coke and do not use it as a replacement for alcohol, nicotine, therapy, human connection, or any of the other things it is definitely replacing.
- McDonalds. Obviously, no notes, this is not a debate, and there is in fact an FAQ about why it’s so elite which I have read in full and which only raised further questions.
- AMC fountain first, other fountains after. The distinction is real.
- Cans.
- Glass bottles.
- The can I dropped on the floor of an elevator in Vegas this weekend which in the two feet between my hand and the floor achieved a flatness so total, so absolute, that it felt less like an accident of physics than a deliberate decision. The carbonation didn’t so much escape as it elected to leave. No fizz. None.
- 2 liter bottles, 30 minutes after opening.
I’ve developed a small, normal, completely healthy hyperfixation with the Strokes. I saw them in concert last month, then Julian Casablancas did some deeply Julian shit at Coachella, then I listened to The New Abnormal every day for two weeks like it was medication. I don’t like their two new songs. I am holding out a delusional, load-bearing hope that Julian is in fact trolling us; that “Reality Awaits,” and by the time the album comes out he’ll have peeled off the awful autotune, and the whole thing will turn out to be an elaborate bit he played on us, the sheeple, who deserved it.
I went to see the Monet and Venice show at the de Young. Two things. One: I had no idea that Monet had basically given up on the water lilies (the thing he’s now most famous for) and that Venice is what got them back together. He resented the lilies, he fled the lilies, he went to Venice to get some space from the lilies, and Venice was there, ready to fix that relationship. Personally, when I went to Venice I got bedbugs, which feels a bit unfair. Two: the patience. He painted the same Venice buildings over and over, on his only trip there, at 68. They hang several versions side by side so you can watch him do it. Couldn’t be me. I can barely look at a painting several times while I’m working on it without spiralling. I’ve abandoned paintings because I caught them at a bad angle on the way to the kitchen.
I’ve just experienced my first act of democracy in America, and boy, what a doozy. There are 53 people on the ballot for governor (fifty-three!), one of whom is named Barack Obama (not that one), and several men whose stated designation is just “Father”. I do not know what an insurance commissioner is. I do not know what the board of equalization is, or does, or wants from me. I do not know why there is more than one person per party running for these things. This is not how it’s done in either of the two other countries I’m a citizen of, which somehow seem to run regardless. This is an insane way to do a democracy and I am expected to think this is normal.