I was up late reading Sontag (exhales a plume of cigarillo smoke obscuring the spectacular spectacles and affects a nonchalance calibrated like a magazine Rolodex, conferring an atmosphere of cool, the elusive and wayward adjective noun verb, tragicomic, useless, and since 1967 (sub-parentheses: dates are not vetted, checked or historically accurate, they may not have actually happened, like the one we are in now, a completely made up year) the word forever at the centre of the culture, drawing Gen X under its cold comfort blanket in a mood of passive anxiety, the figure a wholly detached and essential contemporary intellectual) specifically, her Notes on Camp.
I bought the book at the art store of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens of London, mistaking it for some humorous treatise on summer camp that might inform or at least compete with a recent Next Play which portrayed the evacuation of children from the responsibility of the nuclear family and into the arms of hormonally-stuffed teenagers. I was mistaken, an act so common to me that it almost loses meaning. The pamphlet turns out to be a smashing intellectual elevator going down into the dimly lamped basement of popular culture where reference loses meaning and becomes the ineluctable experience of camp, the victory of surface over depth, culture walking on water. As someone who puts the super in superficial, I was intrigued. And so there was I, reading Sontag (plume of smoke etc).
So, not camp, trees and drowned kids; camp, Pulp Fiction, in a book assembled before the birth of the creature Uma.
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My attorney insisted upon seeing the movie F1 upon its opening, under the threat of withholding pro bono legal services. With so many concurrent lawsuits threatening incarceration, it seemed best to maintain at least a facsimile of representation, in the style of the Pres-indent, and so here we are in Toronto’s downtown Imax theatre, temple of bland furniture, a great place to sit through the apocalypse, and the boys to men next to us are amped, they clearly have a car in this race and understand the machinations of this machine language, the sport of cars, maybe the most harmful activity (and thereby the most thrilling, activating the human repression response, the forbidden and its fifty shades, all Ray-Bans and Persols) on Earth, exceeded only in its environmental harm by the act of filmmaking and the processors of AI, so here we are at a tri-juncture of exquisite destruction that Oppenheimer himself would have to be at least a little impressed by while he was under Florence Pugh (Barbenheimer manifested) reading Sanskrit; motor racing, film making and reality creation, with their terrible impact upon the air we breathe, the culture we swim in and the hijacking of our fading last neurons.
The apocalypse is air conditioned.
F1,the two and half hour advertisement for both car racing and going to the movies (it is nothing if not self-referential and we won’t say meta because Zuckerberg, that gross, fatuous Gen Xident, Oppenheimer of facebook, the least camp thing in the known universe, because camp is inconsequential, and social media is fatal) is a manifestation of camp, according to edicts proscribed by the ghost Sontag, durable and inevitable, while we duly note that history will be the judge, even though Next Play doesn’t particularly enjoy that metaphor (history is indifferent, like Earth, no matter how badly we mistreat it).
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At some point in its pointless history, Gen X is sitting in a movie theatre, joyfully avoiding everything, attending the new offering from the director of Alien (what Next Play calls “A perfect movie! Run, don’t walk, to die horribly in space!”). This time, instead of a xenomorph, the able auteur has discovered a duo of women. Their names are Thelma and Louise and they are escaping in a convertible, which, if you are escaping, is what you should do that in. I suspect Thelma is back in the name-game these days, next to Hazel and Mabel (maybe; this is not a research facility and the use of AI is massively destructive so we’ll just have to plough on in mutual ignorance and what could be finer, dear friend) and these Midwest mid-wives (it kinda works, go with it) transform -like Charlie Angels from administrative beauties to sexy detectives (doesn’t work) - on the (really hot) open road to nowhere into golden tanned leather goddesses, Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma bonding in rebellious sisterhood. The camp-ish movie released a lot of hot air from the cooler heads, especially about the ending, full of cops out.
In the course of the doomed journey, Thelma and the audience of slouching Gen Xers come upon a figure, manly in blue jeans, the handsome xenomorph, an apparition heretofore unknown in these cinematic parts, an actor struggling to make a name for himself and when he does, the name will be the pithy and abrupt Brad Pitt, a perfect American moniker, Brad involving some kind of underserved privilege and Pitt an ironic countermeasure, a Pitt stop, if you will and holy fuck will we, as does she, and yes they do, much to the eventual regret of Thelma and her exasperated buddy, Louise.
In the midst of a Hollywood feminist screenplay, Brad Pitt and his Gen X smile full of welcoming irony, had arrived.
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Gen X, popcorning in the Imax theatre (the X isn’t an accident and it belongs to all of us and Elon can still fuck off to hell) comes to gauge the state of our rhythm nation in the form of the still breathing Mr. Pitt. This is the summer blockbuster - tentpole, to go inside baseball – the attorney waits for, sipping their cold rum concoction like they’re on some damn beach somewhere under a sunhat, boozing next to the boys who just can’t shut the fuck up until the attorney turns to them and over the extraordinary motor noise tells them politely in perfectly calibrated Canadian to shut the actual fuck up and they do because respect must be paid to this living Gen Xer, the same age as the star of the vehicle (there is no escaping the pun, there is only walking into the trap, letting it spring and carrying on without your missing limbs) and we give our attention back to Brad as he reappears in blue jeans.
Joe Kosinski, the Gen X erector of these recent tentpoles, one for Cruise one for Pitt, has the damn good sense to cast a love interest at least in her forties (Kerry Condon, from Ireland with love) and more interesting than these man children. The F in the title is for Formula, and like Coke or E=mc2, it stands up. The USA can still make a hot property that people with jobs want to go to.
Susan Sontag, who would be appalled to have her good name misused by a publication so tawdry - and Next Play is the first (and second and third) to admit that Sontag’s writings are fucking miles (like, 8 laps in Monaco) beyond our understanding but she’s dead so what’s she gonna do - in her exquisite Notes on Camp which is definitively not about children bad at archery (medic! Medic!!), maps out the search for camp and identifies it as a work that has clearly been made with great effort and enthusiasm, and misses. If it misses on purpose, the camp is diminished, like a rainy day with no fucking sailing, kids. And F1 believes.
Gen X, from our forgotten beginnings, has experienced our, um, art, as infinite layers of purpose and intent, so we ponder: is the camp actually camp? and as we always do, we stop thinking about it, microdose a mushroom and try and enjoy ourselves while the racing guys drink the world’s riches and the rich guys race the world to the finish line.
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As always, Next Play, without endorsement or acknowledgement from the Hollywood abattoir says if you are planning an escape and have no convertible, hide in front of the biggest screen in your hood. There may not be a lot of reasons left to live in a city as hopelessly broken as Toronto but we got a badass Imax, bitches.
Sontag would be offended (we seek to offend) by the preposterous presumption that dropping $50 to see a movie about fucking car racing is an act of cultural subversion. Instead, we find ourselves lost in myths of money, excess and heroism, the screen a beguiling vista from the convertible as we cruise off the cliff and freeze in the air, forever.
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
· Between the Ferns, when Zach Galifianakis introduced his hapless guest as Bradley Pitts.
· Brad’s fab in Tarantino’s last film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s all so ironic and campy.
· Zohran! How fucking fun is that to say.
· Kyla synthesizes like a fine glass of Moog.
· Diva is camp. Check out Model/Actriz.