Loose Flyers

“[W]e can define ostranenie as a cognitive-emotional state, the renewed awareness produced when the habitual is depicted in an unusual way. What is habitual differs from reader to reader, from spectator to spectator. The intended effect can fail to manifest itself; conversely, one can experience ostranenie where it was not intended: say, reading a description of one’s country written by an astonished foreigner. There are a great many ways of making things strange – for instance, adopting the perspectives of aliens and animals; naming directly what is usually couched in euphemisms; or describing in minute detail what is usually summed up in a single word.”
—I really enjoyed this essay about Viktor Shklovsky and his idea of ostranenie, and I am someone who cannot hear the phrase “literary theory” without making the “jerking off” motion so violently that I do damage to my rotator cuff. If you feel strong enough today to make it through something that addresses formalism, “schema-focused therapy” and a bunch of other concepts that require a strong gag reflex, you might want to give it a shot. THIS IS ME RECOMMENDING THIS PIECE BTW. #

Let’s face it, most mornings you feel out of sorts. It’s because life is absurd and the things you do lack all meaning and even the occasional moments in which you are fully conscious of the absurdity and meaningless cannot compete with your brain’s belief that it is better to pretend that the useless things you struggle to do each day won’t be completely erased very shortly after the inevitable end of your journey into nothingness. This morning, however, you have a better reason than usual to feel out of sorts, because the stupid setting of the clocks stole an hour away from your rest. By the end of the week you will have adjusted and the cloud of confusion hovering over your head will once again result from your denial of death, but today you can let yourself feel a little better about being so blurry. Here’s ten minutes of techno that has all the right influences and doesn’t care to disguise them. Enjoy.

★★★★ The view out the open end of the window, next to the winter-bleared pane, seemed like something captured through high-quality optics. The ear felt the acoustics extending out indefinitely. The four-year-old was gratified to be free to wear his hoodie, and then at his heels through the school door came another boy in shorts and sandals. Up in the tops of the trees on 64th Street was the first shimmer of green. The clouds thickened but the sun kept pushing through for long moments. Not long past midday, a few tiny drops of rain fell from the bright and mottled sky. On the back side of Lincoln Center the sidewalk was full of branches and the smell of cut green wood, as a worker trimmed the shrubbery back within its bounds. The third-graders launched paper airplanes along the sidewalk at dismissal. Fresh air floated over the couch where the children were staring into a pixelated artificial world.

It turns out that people don’t like to pay for things, even if those things require another human to drive to a cavernous temple to the global supply chain, quickly dash through lanes upon lanes of infinitely varied merchandise like a rodent to collect dozens of extremely specific items (“no, not Perrier, LaCroix!”) and then drive all of those items over to someone’s house—and even if those people are told that they should be happy to pay so little for such a service, which frees them from the bondage of… shopping for their own groceries. So Instacart has found a new way to get paid:

The grocery delivery startup is working with General Mills Inc., Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc., Unilever NV, and other consumer goods makers to cover the cost of delivery or provide other discounts when customers buy their products. In addition to the coupons, the companies pay Instacart to advertise on its website. Since introducing the program about six months ago, it now accounts for 15 percent of Instacart’s revenue, said Apoorva Mehta, the company’s chief executive officer.

Shoppers can find discounts when filling up their carts with brands such as Degree, Doritos, DiGiorno, Häagen-Dazs, Quaker Oats, and Stella Artois. Instacart ads promise free delivery if you spend $10 on Red Bull, or consumers can get 75 cents off any Dove soap. Mehta compares the ads to those offered on the side of Google search results. “It’s like AdWords for groceries,” he said.

And this is how, future food historians will one day note, after the failed uprising demanding foodstuff neutrality—so that no PepsiCo-owned potato chip brand could be favored over a Kettle brand chip in the transmission from store shelves to pantries—what was left of the middle class was prepared for a life where all food was Soylent, because after years of drinking nothing but Red Bull and eating DiGiorno for every meal, they weren’t just ready, they were willing.

Photo by Tyler Cipriani

You were stupid to think things would get better. You were stupid to even think things wouldn’t get any worse. There is no level so low that once you drop down to it the ground doesn’t sink a few more feet. When you were younger it made more sense to tell yourself that everything would be okay, that the future was bright and the bad parts would fall away. Now you know that the bad parts are the best you’ve got and you should clutch them closely to your heart because whatever happens next can only make them seem comforting. You’re dying slowly and running out the clock, and you’re stuck watching a recital of recrimination and regret. The rest of the show is a series of collisions, concessions and things falling apart, and even though you’re seated way back in the balcony they’re not going to let you get up to go. The good news is come Sunday you get to fast forward through an hour of it. That’s not things getting better, but it’s not nothing either. Take what you can get.

Photo: Shutterstock.com

There’s a curious disparity in the representation of people of color and other marginalized groups in media, and it extends even into the depths of social media. On Tumblr, the most frequently shared artwork and images often reflect the “white ideal”: thin white girls riding dainty bicycles, pale willowy hands drawing paintbrushes across canvas, the whitewashing of fictional characters who were originally people of color. So, last summer, two young, queer artists of color, Mars and Jam—along with a few of their close friends—launched the Art Hoe Collective to bring more exposure to underrepresented young artists making videos, music, and visual art, and to recognize minority artists who often don’t receive credit for their work online.

The collective, which exists almost entirely online, consists of a group of artists led by a dozen young curators who post artwork, poetry, photography, and performance art to its Instagram and Tumblr accounts, which have an audience of more than thirty-seven thousand followers on Instagram and several thousand more on Tumblr, its secondary platform. The collective’s aesthetic skews toward the bold and brightly colored: Painter Justice Dwight’s pop art-esque portraits and Brooklyn White’s LP album art are prime examples of pieces that strike this chord, and the same cohesive vibe is conveyed through the work of its curators, like Anisa McGowan (shown above) and Myles Loftin. The other week, one of the founding members of the collective, Sage Adams, and I spoke about art, racism, self-cyberbullying, and squad goals while she battled pink eye in her Howard University dorm room.

This week encompassed two seasons, so there’s a better reason than usual for why it felt so goddamn endless. And yet here we are, at the end of it. There’s not a lot to be happy about these days but we should for sure be happy about this. Anyway, here’s another track from the forthcoming Bat For Lashes record. Apparently it’s a conceptual bit about “a woman whose fiancé has been killed in a crash on the way to the church for their wedding. She flees the scene to take the honeymoon trip alone, resulting in a dark meditation on love, loss, grief, and celebration,” but it’s probably better for everyone if you don’t pay any attention to that and just listen to it as a song. Enjoy!

★★★★★ Haze stuck to everything, filling the spaces between buildings like smoke. On the walk uphill from the school door, the everyday thick hoodie was suddenly too warm. The northern horizon framed by the buildings along the avenue was ocher. It was time to try a more distant coffee shop—almost time to get the coffee iced. Time to think about it. Fifth Avenue felt like Taipei in December. Light dripped down a blank wall of old irregular brick, exposed and waiting to be covered by new construction. Out came pale bare arms and even paler legs. Smokers savored their cigarettes. People sat out on the blocks of stone in the Broadway pedestrian zone. There was just enough coolness on the afternoon air for a man in shirtsleeves to have given his suit jacket to the woman he was with, in a lightweight dress. Uptown at sunset a warm wind was still blowing. Something was chirping outside on the night air.

Everywhere in New Orleans is hellish in June, but the astonishing thing is what the heat does to the people. Some it makes cordial, like the Korean lady in the shop on Freret, who insisted that I take two, three, four Ozarkas from her cooler. The more I insisted that, really, I was fine, the more she insisted that I was not. I was very thirsty, she said. I would take the water and I would leave and I would enjoy my day.

The papers pen annual columns about the weather’s relationship to the murder rate, which seems to spike whenever the sun lingers, or the Saints are losing, or both. Everyone’s on the edge of something. On the streetcar, you’ll see a gaggle of black kids in too-big shirts beside the middle-aged white woman with FUCK tattooed on her neck, and you can’t guess what either of them is thinking, only that it’s probably Not Good. But it is simply too hot to function, let alone kill someone, so the boys nod at the woman from under their snapbacks and the woman smiles in turn, showing all of her teeth.

There are people who move to New Orleans for the labor, and there are people who move to New Orleans for the movies, and there are people who move here for its jazz and its blackness. I do not think I am alone in that I moved down for Moments. Moments! I’d read about them in books, from Tom Piazza to Tennessee Williams, and I’d seen them on HBO, ferried along by Wendell Pierce, and I knew that mine was precisely the mindset that the locals actively loathe: a young person from Elsewhere looking to drive up rent. But I’d only read so many books, and I’d been broke in Houston, and I never thought to wonder how I’d react when those Moments finally came.

Milking the rest of it


Turn the faucet on
Turn the breast on
Emptied completely of milk
With the tiny hoses in a row
Emptied of when the ships were she
Child of my heart
A dull ache and then
No pain at all
When the muzzle found my mouth
To not let the milk form a crust
Of ice and sugar
On the nipple
And to put the cap on it
Emptied of
The ships where she
Eight tiny roses in a row
Where water goes in
The greenish water
Where the saints
Can grow
You know some will tell you
No you’re already happy
But the trap of your life
Is that you’re trapped in this body
And even though you search
For twenty to eighty years for the demon
In other people
Turn the faucet on
And look in the mirror
The demon
Is you