A heartbreaking work of unrelenting glibness

First, go to the party

It’s a party weekend for America, which means it’s time for some tough talk: Social anxiety is not a legitimate reason to skip a party. We only have a few days left on earth. We’re not even sure what we’re commemorating, but it’s going to matter. Socializing, like eating vegetables and exercising, is good for you.

I know it’s hard. But I’ve accumulated tips since high school to manipulate people into thinking I’m a lot of fun. They work. And in my capacity as a professional blogger and Royals correspondent for Gawker.com, I am here to share them with you. 

DO NOT PREGAME

Last Memorial Day, I was so nervous to go to a barbecue thrown by a person I adore and respect in personal and professional capacities that I drank three vodka-lambrusco cocktails called “The Vino Bambino” (I’d learned about the drink here, but it seems to have been taken off the menu, maybe for safety reasons) in my apartment before I left. I hadn’t socialized in two years. Then I drank an assorted four pack of Loverboy hard teas at the party because the Vino Bambino had me in a mindspace of awe and gratitude for the variety of flavors. I performed beautifully socially at the party, but then I barfed 30 seconds after exiting an Uber home and fell asleep before sunset. Continue reading

'Happy-Go-Lucky', the latest book from the antsy everyman, has a tone problem

In his short essay “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain describes the difference between humor and comedy: while comedy looks for laughs in inherently funny subjects and events, the humorous story “bubbles gently along.” Comedy is about jokes, in other words, while humor is about tone. If the idea of funny without jokes strikes you as impossible, I invite you to consider the dominant mode of prose humor for the last 30 years — the New Yorker stuff, the gossip-blog stuff, the read-aloud-on-NPR stuff, whose tone has so thoroughly suffused the upper middle class of print and web media that we don’t even recognize it as a tone anymore.

This tone has a few defining qualities. It is selectively irreverent, willing to make catty remarks about what people are wearing to the funeral but dead serious about the importance of, for example, voting for Joe Biden. It is strongly influenced by camp, both in its use of self-deprecation — the voice of 21st-century humor is anxious and assumes that we are, too — and in its gleeful substitution of aesthetics for the discredited values of the past. Nobody attends church anymore, but we all still have to go to the gym.

Above all, it is glib. I have selected this word for its denotative meaning — i.e. fluent, voluble, and suspicious of sentiment in all but the most abbreviated expressions — but I also wish to levy the connotative assessment. The institutional tone in 21st-century humor is unequipped to deal with anything that matters. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of essays about the pandemic, aging, and the slow but inevitable death of his father, David Sedaris simultaneously asserts himself as the undisputed past master of this tone and captures its fundamental weakness, applying the style he has developed for the last 30 years to a subject matter for which it is almost eerily unsuited. Continue reading

MomTokker extraordinaire Taylor Paul stepped out on her "soft swinger" covenant

Over Memorial Day weekend, you might have heard the eerie echo of a tabernacle choir or the haunting cries of a baby named Ashtyn over your killer party playlist. A certain corner of TikTok, one that guides the aesthetic and liturgical tastes of millennial and Gen Z Mormons in elite suburbs of the Utah Valley, was exploding into the national consciousness.

Taylor Frankie Paul, a certain smokin’ hot Mormon mommy in Draper, Utah who has become a major TikTok influencer, started posting videos in the last few weeks about moving out of her dream house with her perfect Mormon husband Tate Taylor and beginning a new chapter as a single mom.

This, of course, shattered the image of domestic bliss and physical/emotional fitness she had cultivated on her page. What would happen to the kids Indy and Ocean? And her marble kitchen island? Continue reading

From the dick swinging of 'Top Gun' to the sentimentalism of 'Top Gun: Maverick'

At my screening of Top Gun: Maverick on Thursday night, I was surrounded by military types. Retired government contractors, former pilots, extended family of veterans, some of them wearing promo t-shirts reading “It’s because I was inverted” and “Maverick” that looked too worn and faded not to be original to 1986. Before the ads started, these people were trading stories, listing aircraft they’d flown or seen at air show over at the Nellis Air Force base nearby, the amiability akin to parents milling about before their kids’ soccer game. By the time the movie finally started, the entire theater was full. It’s the most packed I’ve seen a theater since the last Harry Potter movie came out.

If they came looking for something specific, they probably found it. Both films have nearly identical openings, with wordless, evocative, sun-drenched images of jets taking off from an aircraft carrier, personnel running around the deck, hand signals, high fives, gear, smoke, wind, a ballet of machinery and the people needed to make it function set to wailing guitars. But the sweaty, throbbing masculinity, horniness, and arrogance of the first film is gone, replaced by bigger cameras, snappier dialogue, diversity, even more visceral, immersive photography, genuine pathos, and an overall sheen that the original, with all its latent silliness and unabashed jingoism, didn’t have. If 1986’s Top Gun was a glorified advertisement for the armed forces — brash, both hot-blooded and cool — Top Gun: Maverick is the glossy prestige adaptation of the recruitment poster. Never has a movie, and every single thing in it, looked so clean. Continue reading

Women be yearning

Recently at The Atlantic, reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany profiled a movement led by women who call themselves “femcels.” These are involuntarily celibate women — distinguished thereby from “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men. But, as Tiffany shows in the article, “femcel" has been adopted by many cheerfully partnered women who simply want to express some form of heterosexual dissatisfaction. “Tumblr users,” she writes, “are adding #femcel to images of antisocial icons like the super-skinny and delusional Natalie Portman in Black Swan, the Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides, and of course Lana Del Rey, from whom they learned of the joys of cigarettes and cherry schnapps.”

I think this is unfair — not to mention rude. “Incel,” as a term, was a woman’s invention in the first place, meant to describe the situation of both women and men who were “lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time.” Then that word, for obvious reasons, became less enticing to the lovelorn ladies. Now the new one is being taken up by girls with boyfriends. Much like when Kate Bolick, also a reporter for The Atlantic, published a book called Spinster, which focused on five literary figures who were all married, the girls who have everything want this too.

Luckily, the true femcel has resources at her disposal beyond the caprices of internet slang. She has, indeed, a noble if only dimly recognized literary tradition at her disposal. But it is possible that nobody has pointed her in this direction. Introducing — here — the first notes toward a femcel canon. 

For the purposes of this list, something is femcel if it involves 1) being a woman 2) who is experiencing romantic and sexual rejection 3) and does not want to be. Continue reading