Liam Julian

Facebook’s News Feed is no place for disagreement. Rather, it’s a place to seek validation, to express approval. As has been repeatedly observed, there is only a “like” button: no “dislike,” no “maybe,” no “more consideration needed.” 

And so posting on Facebook anything that upsets this tepid bath is considered gauche. Especially boorish is posting anything that might challenge sunny dispositions, the prevailing positivity. As children we were all force-fed the notion that “we must stand up for what we believe in, even if we stand alone”; but standing alone on Facebook is emphatically not okay.

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There is something wonderful about Spring Breakers,  a serious film dressed as the pop culture it undermines, art in neon. Its opening sequence is so blazing and color-drenched you might actually feel impelled to squint in the darkened theater. You’re on the beach. There is blinding sand, electric-blue water, and sizzling-brown bodies, sweat-flecked. Everything in an orange haze. It’s all tranquilizingly beautiful.

But the slow-motion gyrations multiply and the dubstep volume rises, discordant notes felt and heard. The camera zooms and fixes on wagging bare breasts washed in beer, on silently-screaming faces and bikini bottoms. Teenagers provocatively tongue popsicles. Bros gargle Natty Light.

Spring break.

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That everyone should vote is one of our strongest secular pieties. Most Americans believe voting in political elections is a “civic duty,” and that any vote is valid and praiseworthy so long as it’s cast in good faith. Such beliefs go largely unexamined. They deserve inspection.

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Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, set in a Mumbai slum, is a marvel of reporting. Its characters are striking, vibrant, and dimensional, not at all the stereotyped, ghostly manifestations of ideas that too often plod through similar works. Boo’s players are unvarnished; they’re un-theorized and real. She records their stories clearly and candidly, tales which are profoundly compelling.

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Last March, the social-networking thickets caught fire, sparked by an online video called Kony 2012. Its creator, founder of the San Diego–based group Invisible Children, Inc., was hoping to broadcast the misdeeds of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. His short film was viewed tens of millions of times in just several days.

Kony 2012 subsequently “started a conversation,” as intended, but the conversation was not about Joseph Kony as much as the ethics involved when a white man distorts ongoing violence in Africa and makes it the basis for a hip viral campaign, complete with red, Livestrong-like wristbands. It was a conversation about what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole called “the White Savior Industrial Complex.” The author Dinaw Mengetsu, an American born in Ethiopia, was one of many to add his voice to the dialogue. He wrote that Kony 2012 

wants to tell us about Joseph Kony and his atrocities, but much more than that, it wants to convince us that there is a solution … That solution, however, only works in the myopic reality of the film, a reality that deliberately eschews depth and complexity, because of course the real star of Kony 2012 isn’t Joseph Kony, it’s us.

All the publicity, perhaps needless to say, did not bring down Joseph Kony. Still he lurks in the Ugandan bush—far, far away from globally conscious Americans and their MacBooks.

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By early Thursday the mercury had swelled and so had the crowds, pushing, from the base of the Supreme Court’s steps, across 1st Street NE and into the Capitol Grounds. Press were everywhere, as were gawkers and activists of all stripes with their bullhorns and sundry signs. Some came in costume (though any nationalized naughty nurses stayed home). The belly dancers, in particular, put on a real show, gamely squirming their way through the masses.

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DAN’S APARTMENT — This minute will be my last minute at Dan’s dinner party.

As a longtime guest of Dan’s gatherings I have come to understand their identity, to comprehend the trajectory of their philosophy on canapés, muted jazz, and white wine served in Cabernet glasses. And I can honestly say that this dinner party, tonight, is the worst dinner party ever.

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To arrive at Rattle is no cinch. The journey begins at a downtown bodega, where commences a Kabuki dance. You ask the man behind the counter the prescribed secret question, and he, whispering, gives you the secret answer, to which you then react with the set secret wisecrack and he, in turn, with the appointed secret pique. Then comes your secret smooth-over, his secret grudging forgiveness, and, finally, the secret laugh-it-off, after which his face turns serious as he beckons you follow him, please, into the kitchen. Back, back into the kitchen you go, now downstairs, upstairs, watch your head, crawling on all fours, was that a skeleton, and finally you emerge into the darkened, serene space that is Rattle.

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The most astonishing thing about Going Solo, the new book by sociologist Eric Klinenberg, is that we’ve heard so little about the decades-long trend it documents: the rocket-like rise in the number of people living alone.

To wit: in 1950 about nine percent of American households comprised only one person. Today the figure is 28 percent, making the single-person household the country’s most common domestic arrangement—more common, even, than the traditional, nuclear family.

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Merce Cunningham, the great modernist dancer and choreographer, died in 2009. His company will die this year.

Its end was Cunningham’s wish, one sanctioned by a board of trustees: after his death there was to be one final world tour—and then that would be that. And on this most-recent New Year’s Eve, having spent two years traveling the globe, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company did put on a final show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City; in April, the studio’s doors will close.

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Not long after picking up William H. Gass’s new book Life Sentences it hits you: the author is not of our time.

That’s because Life Sentences, a compelling compendium of critical essays, showcases the work of a man who is by turns harsh, despairing, rapt, strident, laudatory, angry, haughty, moved, and dyspeptic. And always unapologetically so.

The approach is out of step with much critical writing these days, which, when it dares offer an opinion, tends to smother it in detached balance. The reader desires zesty conjecture but gets instead wan paragraphs by the plateful, desiccated and tasteless.

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When I first tell people that I’m going to start a pierogi food truck here in hell, a lot of them are pretty surprised. I remember Chloe, a foxy little succubus I met outside the boiling-cobra-blood pool locker room, laughing her ass off when I mentioned it. “What the fuck do you know about pierogies?” she cackled. I asphyxiated her with my flip flop before answering, “A whole lot, actually.”

I’ve long had a passion for pierogi, you see. People don’t know that, or when they think, “I wonder what Muammar likes to do?” they think about mutilation and torture and fucking around with mustard gas, which is all true, sure, but I also love to eat and make pierogi.

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When it comes to ascribing motivations to other people’s actions we are, alas, cynics.

“Overly cynical,” that is. So says a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology report of four studies of the issue by Clayton Critcher of UC Berkeley and David Dunning of Cornell. The two psychologists, writing about their findings, “propose that people protect their belief in the norm of self-interest by seeing ‘too much’ self-interest in seemingly selfless acts.”

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Southern California art, architecture, and design supposedly has a chip on its shoulder, and Pacific Standard Time, the months-long parade of some 170 exhibitions at some 130 SoCal museums and galleries, is the result. As Adam Nagourney wrote in the New York Times, the festival is a “statement of self-affirmation by a region that, at times, appears to feel underappreciated as a serious culture center.”

The inferiority angle makes for compelling marketing but is surely overplayed. Southern California has contributed oodles of serious culture and knows it. And in perhaps no area is its strong influence felt more strongly than in modern home design.

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High-speed rail in California, Peter Calthorpe writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, “could catalyze the next generation of growth” and “will breed the kind of economic development and communities California is missing most—urban revitalization along with more walkable, affordable” neighborhoods. 

Alas, this is mythology—the high-speed rail variety, prevalent and potent. Its priests persuade through the appeal of their own zeal. But facts are pesky things, and facts are not with those who wish to start laying bullet-train-track in the Golden State.

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