week 25: work it out on the remix
Hello from rainy Baltimore! I woke up early this morning, got on the plane from LA, and the time difference took away my entire afternoon. The jet lag remains though, so I am wide awake, and I hope I adjust quickly. I am here because I receive funding for my PhD from a program that is based out of Johns Hopkins University, and one of the only strings attached, if you can even call it that, is that we are required to take an all expenses paid trip to Baltimore for one week every summer for four years.
It is a joy and a treat every time. This is my second summer here. It is a convening that is highly scheduled, and it is often exhausting, but this is one of those spaces with programming designed to make us stop and reflect about our careers.
Last year, I met another PhD student here, who told me about his experience doing similar academic work at another institution. He told me about how institutionally supported and mentored he is in the type of writing he wants to do. Hearing him talk about how much he loves writing, and seeing how much writing he is doing in such a short amount of time immediately set me off. I vividly remember coming home last year, setting my suitcase down, going on my phone, and scrolling through his CV, feeling this pit in my stomach, and knowing that I’m not as prolific and self-motivated as he is. A couple of hours ago, I bumped into him at our welcome gathering. We said hello to each other, and the pit came back.
The best way I can describe this feeling is a misplaced, indirect form of jealousy— I don’t want what he has; I want to be able to want what he has. It’s a strange feeling, because I can easily think my way out of it. Watch me do it: I know I don’t need to love the things that he loves, because I have my own work and support system that I talk about in the way that he talks about academic writing. I am curious to see whether thinking my way out of this feeling will be enough.
This week, I’ve been simultaneously obsessing over two pop culture moments. Charli Xcx (forgive me for the moments where I have previously misstylized it) released a song called “Girl so confusing” on her album BRAT, a song about how Charli feels as though there are people in the industry who everyone expects her to be friends with, how she feels similar to them on paper, and yet, there’s something keeping them from collaborating and being close in the way that everyone expects them to be (she also does the very classic girl thing—we’ve all done it—of insisting that someone who you don’t feel close to must just be jealous of you). For two weeks, the Internet speculated about whether this song was about Marina Diamandis, Rina Sawayama, or Lorde. Two weeks later, Charli releases a remix, where Lorde responds by basically saying, “hey, sorry, nothing personal at all, I was just working through an eating disorder and had no idea this was upsetting you, it’s all love!”.
I like the position that this article in Pitchfork takes for why this feels so fresh:
It’s always a little performance when you write about someone else… I wonder if songwriters who write surreptitiously about exes and frenemies and haters feel…there is something inherently untruthful about putting another person in their music without giving them space to respond.
This song gives Lorde that space, and she takes it beautifully (I love that she proposes that the song itself can serve as the mode of conflict resolution— “let's work it out on the remix”). As people have been joking online, I bet Charli felt terrible after first hearing her point-of-view. The beautiful thing about how this all played out is that there could have been a world where Charli wrote this song, revealed it was about Lorde, who could have come out publicly and said, “well, I had an eating disorder,” and everyone turned on Charli for her selfishness. I love that this entire exchange, orchestrated by them cooperatively, allowed them to prevent that from happening to the other in the public eye, while also getting the chance to express these complicated and vulnerable feelings about what it is like to be compared to your peers in the pop industry.
I am holding “let’s work it out on the remix” right next to Kendrick Lamar uniting members from rival gangs (allegedly) to dance together onstage while getting an arena full of people to call Drake a pedophile six times, back to back, on Juneteenth. There’s something so compelling about seeing both of these incredibly different and unprecedented public strategies to address conflict with another artist, as they unfold at the same time right next to each other, and feeling equally invested in watching each of them play out. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of believing that one of these is more right than the other, and I refuse to do that.
Links for this week:
Erin Schwartz wrote this article in The Cut this week (“In Defense of Calling Everything an Aesthetic”). A quote I enjoyed:
I don’t think the phenomenon is frivolous, let alone deranged. In fact, it’s pretty fun and useful. The mania is not for things but for categorizing things — cataloguing what they mean and what hangs together. The pictures and phrases that, when combined, sing like a tuning fork. In naming aesthetics, you appoint yourself art historian of the mundane stuff that populates your life…The pleasure of calling things an aesthetic is also a social one: assembling a set of references to see what you and other people can collectively recognize as coherent.
It’s easy to clown on young women on the Internet for developing a vernacular and immediately write it off as vapid or consumerist. I’m glad Erin pushes us to think beyond that mentality and wonder what this new language is functionally doing for us.
I liked this piece in the Los Angeles Times about personal injury lawyer Ann Phoong, and more broadly, the fan culture around personal injury lawyers in Los Angeles. The parody billboards for Netflix’s Hit Man starring Glen Powell were really fun, so I’m glad to see those getting their flowers in this article as well.
This exchange between Ari Shapiro (NPR) and David Simon (creator of The Wire) has been going viral because it shows how fundamentally people misunderstand what it is that writers actually do and what they struggle with. It was also personally meaningful for me, in the face of thinking my aforementioned misplaced jealousy away, to realize that I relate far more to the people who are dunking on Shapiro because the parts he thinks AI can do away with are the best parts, and that yes, I actually do love writing.
Speaking of AI, I really, really enjoyed this article from a data scientist ("I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”). This is approximately where I stand as well (from my few experiences with data science). I also love his palpable anger.
I also enjoyed this essay (“The Internet Was a Place”), reflecting on the benefits of the world we lived in when the Internet was not embedded into everything we do.
In general, I need to do more thinking about the concept of “place”. I have a lot more that I have been wanting to say about place in relation to organizing, but I fear my thoughts are still too uncooked to share just yet. What I’ll say for now is that it is interesting what expanding our traditional definition of “place” allows us to do when we think about organizing and how it is legislated (for example, floating bubble zone laws, which force me to ask if my car is a place, or if I am a place, and what the designation of place means when applied to other objects).
This also reminds me of the stanley brouwn retrospective that I recently saw at the Hammer Museum, a set of conceptual works about distance, walking, and place. He does not allow his work to be photographed in exhibitions, but I guess people took some photos for this article, and you can read more about it here.
Kelly Hayes (one half of Let This Radicalize You) has a newsletter called Organizing My Thoughts. I found out about it because they offered to interview Kitchen Committee for it. You can read the interview here— I’m incredibly honored that we got the opportunity to speak with them, and they introduced our work beautifully.
Beyond the interview, I strongly recommend subscribing. They did a great round-up of relevant news and links, and in it, they linked to a piece by Mariame Kaba (the other half of Let This Radicalize You) on why we still need conferences.
I did not know that either of them had newsletters, or I would have subscribed and plugged them sooner. Let This Radicalize You is a sacred text to me, and I am so glad that I get to continue to absorb knowledge from these two people I trust and respect.
Kitchen Committee just released our very first zine!!! Here’s a quote from Sienna, chair of the Zine Sub-Committee, on what we hope to accomplish (from our interview with Kelly):
Through the zine, we aim to think about how food, and the process of making it, is not just about bodily survival—like Ibrahim and the cakes that he creates for the children of Gaza, food is nourishing and joyful, a form of meeting community needs outside of the terms of the state or institution and turning towards one another instead.
It’s beautifully done, so please check it out!! I am also thrilled with how the spread for my strawberry rose cake recipe looks.
On the Rick Rubin to Julia Cameron spectrum of self-help approaches to creativity, I definitely fall on the Julia Cameron side of things. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good quote from Rick Rubin:
One thing I would suggest is finding a way to make a lot of things and put them out, just to get a cycle going, without even thinking that it’s for anybody or that it’s going to accomplish anything. But every time you put something out, it makes it that much easier to put something else out. So you’re creating a sense of freedom in making things and putting them out.
I definitely joke to some of you about how Detective Work primarily serves as a space for me to yap tirelessly into the void, but reading that quote validated the initial impulse for this project. It has meant a lot to me to put this together every week and see this thematic cohesion emerge out of a project that began with no guardrails. This has been a fruitful way to weed out the noise and listen more closely to the types of questions and problems that are interesting to me. As we near the halfway mark, I want to express my gratitude to you all for sticking around.
Glad I got all of that off my chest. Chat next week!
Take care,
Samyu 🔎