Capitalism: Wearing clothes and having coffee

Two gay guys discuss feudalism, Twitter, arms dealing and more…

WELCOME TO TALK HOLE, A MONTHLY TOPICAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN COMEDIANS ERIC SCHWARTAU AND STEVEN PHILLIPS-HORST. TALK HOLE BEGAN IN 2015 AS A STANDUP SHOW IN CHINATOWN, THEN A SERIES OF PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGNS AND ART ACTIVATIONS, AND NOW THIS COLUMN.

ERIC: I smell something.

STEVEN: It’s eau de Musk, permeating the Twitterverse.

ERIC: Too much cologne is harassment.

STEVEN: Not anymore, snowflake.

ERIC: Is free smell protected under the constitution?

STEVEN: I think Elon’s free-speech crusade is a little overblown. Just because liberals put Ukraine flags in their bio doesn’t mean your views are being “censored.” You can still say anything you want on Twitter. You can post dick!

ERIC: And hole, depending on the lighting. Continue reading

His work insists we all should

Gary Indiana presumably doesn’t hate me, but I wouldn’t mind if he did. I know it’d be for a good cause, moral or aesthetic or whatever. He’d have his reasons and I’d have a spotlight to burn in. And what a spotlight. Indiana, whose new book Fire Season collects thirty-nine of the author’s essays published between 1984 and 2021, ranks among American literature’s premiere loathers. The novelist, essayist, critic, anti-memoir memoirist, etc., favors descriptive contempt and deploys it as a precision weapon; it detonates across his pages, enfolding woebegone Andy Warhol biographers, “memoir as a literary genre,” celebrity food writing, Nixon and Kissinger, a Missouri tourist trap’s visitors and denizens, Bill Clinton, and existence itself in its sparkling smoke cloud.

If metaphorically associating Indiana’s technique with the US war machine and its propaganda of clean killing scans as wrongheaded, then let me refigure his contempt as a scalpel, or a chisel, an instrument he uses to excise the accursed and reveal the beautiful. Hey: Why not all three? Or more. No one metaphor is equal to the task. But Indiana, a self-described fan of “well-honed malice,” doesn’t merely love to hate. He hates to love. His work presupposes that we all should. Not disdain love and loving, but actually use vitriol and resentment in order that we might better, and more intimately, or at minimum more freely, love our favored objects.

His contempt twists, writhes, morphs, adapts to its target. It scrapes and scratches. It lives. It laughs. Yes, it loves, or leads to love. To wit: In a 2010 review of Pierre Guyotat’s Coma, Indiana observes that much of contemporary memoir sucks. Continue reading

Everyone has one, and they all deserve to be heard in the name of free speech

There have lately been a number of articles, newsletters, Twitter threads, and attempts at jokes about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. This makes sense. It is a big deal, involves a lot of money, and raises questions like, “free speech?” While there are more pressing global developments than a billionaire carnival barker buying arguably the least successful major social media platform, most don’t involve the occupational requirement and begrudging addiction of the domestic media industry. The fallout is that, for a time, the New York Times homepage had two live-update tickers — one was for the war in Ukraine; the other was for Twitter.

If you have been ignoring these updates, the gist is this: Musk started to buy up Twitter shares in January. By March, he owned 9.1 percent of its stock. In April, he announced that he was the company’s largest shareholder, which sent Twitter’s stock surging. Twitter invited him to join their board of directors. Elon accepted, then tweeted some stupid stuff about Twitter, and very quickly backed out. He came back with an offer to buy Twitter outright for $54.20 a share — this was a weed joke — and take it private.

Musk, who often makes bold offers without the cash to back them up, didn’t have the funding to actually follow through. Twitter adopted a “poison pill” plan, a defense strategy companies can implement to fend off hostile takeovers. Then Musk got the money. Earlier this week, Twitter accepted Musk’s proposal. The merger agreement dropped on Tuesday. Now they’re hashing out the details, which could take months.

What does it mean? A lot of people have been trying to answer that question, and because of Musk’s signature unpredictability, no out-of-the-box theory can be immediately ruled out. Let’s explore. Continue reading

Kanye retrieves a hard drive and Khloé leads a prayer

This week on Hulu’s The Kardashians, Khloé Kardashian led a prayer for her sister Kimberly on the morning of the most important day of the mogul/comedian’s life — the day she hosted SNL —in the immediate afterglow of her estranged ex-husband Kanye West flying from New York to Los Angeles and back in the span of 12 hours to retrieve a desktop computer and hard drive from the rapper/former Kim-lover/extortionist Ray J, that was purported to contain unseen sex tape footage. (It turned out to just be nightclub footage – “Nothing sexual, nothing weird.”)

“Please give us all the love and grace and let us be covered in the blood of Jesus Christ,” Khloé said to the prayer circle filled out mostly by miscellaneous Kardashian-Jenner assistants.

Kim, in a protective hot-pink hazmat suit that would likely allow her to be covered in the blood of Jesus Christ without needing to take a body shower before SNL, interrupted Khloé’s mega-violent soliloquy.

“And please let us have a sense of humor and no one take anything personally that I say,” she pled to God, holding hands with Kanye and the sex tape suitcase. Continue reading

The director was handed a manila envelope while presenting her new movie

Film conventions have long stood as pillars of the motion picture industry, a safe space for filmmakers to show trailers of their movies to only positive reactions, or to compare their forthcoming comic book movie adaptation to a beloved 1970s classic in a way that makes no sense upon release. These conventions are a celebration of the art form, a joyful gathering of movie magic makers and lovers. Until Tuesday, that is, when Olivia Wilde was served with custody papers in the midst of her presentation at CinemaCon.

Wilde was at the convention to debut the trailer of her sophomore feature Don’t Worry Darling starring Florence Pugh and Wilde’s boyfriend Harry Styles. The film is both erotic and a thriller — though seemingly not an “erotic thriller” — about a marriage gone awry. Wilde was up on stage when someone approached and handed a mysterious manila envelope marked “personal and confidential” (now neither) with what Deadline has referred to as “Jason Sudeikis legal papers” (industry term). Continue reading