Gawker - A case of the Tuesdays

Joan Didion, Ross Douthat, and conservative alienation.

Joan Didion, who died last month, embodied cool in its multifarious meanings: stylishness, reserve, aplomb, proportion, idiosyncrasy and poise. Cool always has its superficial aspects, like the “iconic” photographs of an unimpressed Joan with a cigarette that stand in as a substitute for her writing. But cool is also a virtue and one that’s being lost by the contemporary cultural demand to emote, to declaim, or to comment incessantly. Didion’s cool also involved intellectual virtues like skepticism, disinterested observation and judgment, and the distrust and even hatred of cant. This last quality is where Didion’s writing reveals the passion that always underwrites genuine cool: where one can detect some anger or even disgust at the abuse and degradation of language, of the replacement of the complex matter — the “irreducible ambiguities'' — of individual experience with the meager stuffing of clichés and slogans.

Whether it’s possible for an author to rise above ideology and become a truly disinterested observer of their times is not for me to say, but at the very least Didion credibly represented this aspiration. When so much writing seems to be the industrial-scale production of cant and cliché, it is notable that Didion triumphed as an individual: through her own particular sensibility, talent, and industriousness. She worked as a writer, producing everything from magazine articles to screenplays.

Like most writers, she had to work for places that were either highly commercial (Vogue) or ideological (National Review), but that fact didn’t diminish her artistic reputation. She wore her celebrity without seeming gaudy or crass. Nor did wealth or fame seem to corrupt her. In these ways, she represents a variation on the American dream in so far as it applies to writers. She made it. And she embodies a time when a certain form of being an individual — a successful artist, if not exactly on your one’s own terms, or at least reasonably negotiable ones — was a real possibility.

Her 1987 memoir 'I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie' is a testament to just how much this woman loved terrible men

Do women who like men have fun anymore? The married ones who write essays about their marriages don’t seem to be, and the single ones are famously pessimistic about their heterosexuality. Trad girls certainly claim to adore their men, but it’s hard to have too much fun in a full-length prairie dress. Even Sex and the City, once emblematic of a particular sort of carefree lifestyle, has now returned stripped of any real joy, or much sex for that matter.

All of which makes reading I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie for the first time feel like science fiction. In 1987, Pamela Des Barres — the very hot, very famous groupie — wrote a memoir of her time in the ’60s and ’70s. What feels striking about the book now is its premise: One woman sleeps with hordes of terrible men, and has a wonderful time doing so.

To call the young Pamela’s taste in men not great is like calling the Palace of Versailles a decent starter home. Early on, she describes “a perfectly stunning specimen”: a man in a top hat who asks her for some spare change outside the “Psychedelic Supermarket” in San Francisco. After they get talking, they go for donuts and he reads his poetry to her by candlelight before a passionate make-out session ensues. Moved by his intensity, teenage Pamela wonders if he will become a second Keats or Byron, maybe? Since the man in question turns out to be Bobby Beausoleil, instead he becomes one of the Manson murderers.

It's easy to take for granted how remarkable he is

Lately, I’ve been trying to dig out the artifacts that matter to me in an effort to understand why they do. A new year is a good time to take stock, figure out what you wish to take with you and what you prefer to consign to the past. The things that stick, I’m finding, are the ones that stand up to a bit of embarrassment. Take Pearl Jam. Not exactly the coolest band in the world to love — maybe never, but certainly not at this point. While the ’90s have been pilfered and dissected for the parts that are still saleable or “obscure” enough to be repackaged, in that specific arena, you don’t get much more mainstream than Pearl Jam.

Everyone has their own low-effort Eddie Vedder impression, which garners the kind of chuckle that comes from having an immediate familiarity with what’s being made fun of. Far removed from their pissed-off early days, when they boycotted Ticketmaster and refused to make music videos for MTV, the band is more normie than transgressive. What they do have, even through all the impersonations and sanded-down, lib dad rock they churn out these days, is Vedder himself, the real deal.

The ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ spouse has reached depths of depravity the Bravo universe has not yet seen.

Bad husbands are as plentiful in Real Housewives franchises as middle-aged women doing shots at dinner. The uninitiated might be surprised to learn one of the worst Real Housewives husbands is Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer. Other horrible husbands: David Beador, Michael Darby, David Foster, Jim Edmonds, Mario Singer. Honestly, almost all of them are breathtakingly bad. But a newbie has trotted up to the front of the bad husband line, and I can no longer hold my tongue about his depravity.

The second season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is jam-packed with plot lines about women who are actual criminals, which makes the conspicuousness of Seth’s wickedness all the more impressive. There are many other places to look: Jen Shah’s wire fraud, Mary Cosby’s cult, Lisa Barlow’s speech patterns and personality. And yet we are looking at Seth, horrible Seth, loudly performing the character of “sex-obsessed husband who loves golf, guy’s night, and boobs” to the obvious uncomfortableness of his wife Meredith. We are watching him tell the guys at guy’s night, "My deal with Meredith is I can have sex with her anytime I want … as long as I don't wake her up.” Ha-ha!

Free these social media editors

The internet is filled with ghost towns, haunted by forgotten GeoCities sites, Craigslist ads for apartments that have already been rented, and long-shuttered blogs that someone is still paying to keep online. And yet there is a disturbing alternative, which can be found mostly on Twitter. I am speaking, of course, about active social media accounts for television shows that have not been on the air for years.

These reanimated corpses continue to churn out content (mostly in the form of GIFs), presumably to get people to watch the show on whichever streaming service it calls home. I don’t know how effective this tactic is. I don’t think I would ever watch Parks & Recreation just because I saw someone engage with a picture of Rob Lowe taking a nap with a dog.

As an example, here is a smattering of recent, depressing tweets from the official account for 30 Rock, a show that ended in 2013.

And then there is the account’s magnum opus. Every single Wednesday the poor soul behind this account tweets “What a week, huh,” at 9 a.m. and has been since August of 2019. It is a quote from the show spoken by its protagonist Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), to which her boss Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), responds, “Lemon, it’s Wednesday.” Someone always quotes that part back in the replies.