Viral In My Mind, 2023
An Annual Post, Given That I’m Doing A Second One
A few items of the popular culture that’s popular in my imaginarium, but that may not be on other lists. Not all brand new, by any means, and none of it bound to time. Just a list of things that clicked for me, since the last time I played this game:
- Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven. The indie auteur Nathan Silver works fast; his twelfth film since 2009 comes out next year. I haven’t caught up with them all. The one that obsesses me is 2015’s Stinking Heaven, the portrayal of a small domestic cult posing as a recovery program. It’s a movie that, for me, in its beauty and hilarity and horror, encircles and makes redundant all the endless cult documentaries stacking up on YouTube.
- Nick Drake and the Sad Beads
Available on Bandcamp. Simple idea: Cover Nick Drake’s songs in the style of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It hits.
3. Comedians influenced by Charles Portis.
As I’m trying — with difficulty — to write something that hasn’t already been said about the brilliant Charles Portis (there are so many brilliant tributes written both before and after his death), I’ve also been steeping myself all year in the results by the comedians who have made a particular cult of his novels, especially The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis. That’s to say that along with old clips of Mr. Show, I’ve been watching the sufficiently-acclaimed and super peculiar television show Barry (which I went through once happily, but don’t imagine I’d watch a second time) and the astonishing and less-well-publicized television show Lodge 49 (which I’ve already looked at twice and might go back again to study its wrinkles and rhythms), but also the unfairly-overlooked debut film by director Clark Duke, called Arkansas. I suspect this movie simply had the misfortune to come out in a year when nothing felt okay enough to be funny (2020, although we’ve had a few like that). All three have helped me think about what in Portis can actually be viable as an influence in the 21st century, although they hasn’t so far written my piece for me.
4. ecologyhomestones Instagram page.
Perhaps not for the faint of stomach. These Instagram artists’ video offerings stand far outside the range of Instagram’s “house tone”. So, part of the magic is seeing how these posts chafe up against the rest of your feed — no matter what it might be — and then relishing how unsuspecting commentators deliver the thousands of variations on “WTF am I seeing?”, while the ecologystonehomes’ faithful deepen the mystery with their so-called explanations.
Matt Bucher’s excellent tiny book is overtly in the style of his hero David Markson. In making itself worthy of that iconoclast’s unforgettable example, Bucher proves, like his hero, how much less can be how much more. It is a common reaction, in other writers, to Markson to think: why couldn’t I just do this? Bucher’s novel plays out in the San Francisco Airport in the interval of waiting for a delayed and rebooked flight, and it occurs to me it makes itself a small spiritual cousin of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, too — and if I’m not mistaken there’s a nod to Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks, if you can imagine Agent Cooper worrying that Diane may be an AI, since they’ve never met in person. On the subject of AI, this book manages to do so much useful thinking in such an economical style that it makes reams of other stuff seem redundant — much as the Nathan Silver film, above, did to the television documentaries about cults. I love when fiction shows its capacity that way.
There are illuminating reviews and interviews about Bucher’s novel here and here. I should say, if it isn’t too obvious, that every topic on this list is something than in a world where I had more hours or hands or both, these artifacts are things I’d write about further (and therefore think about harder on my own). It’s a blessing when I find exciting writing on exciting writing (or music or film or websites).
6. Robot Making Up Some Random Shit.
Speaking of AI, the weird flooding of the internet’s basement with machine-generated wrong guesses reached my doorstep this year. The site “Bookey” offered me some alternative biographical facts to consider. While the quotes it attributes to me are insultingly banal, some of the additions to the plot of Gun, With Occasional Music are pretty good (“a form of musical conditioning known as ‘Make My Day’ legislation”) and I truly wish I had lived in the commune called the Red Sun School of Thoughts.
