Storytime
Have you heard the scariest story of 2021?
Supply and demand! Inflation! Expensive cookies, even the store-brand kind! Try as you may, there’s no outsmarting the marketplace this time around.
And what on earth could be scarier than not being able to have exactly what you want, when you want it, at a price that makes practical sense? (As if exchanging money for goods ever made practical or ethical sense!)
I’m not sure how many times I will hear this particular story leading up to the holidays, but I do know that it’s a real winner for the people and the people’s people.
To be clear, I’m approaching this now from the vantage point of material desire, which is how the stories I’m hearing are framed. It’s the package on a doorstep, not the abject need, labor conditions, or environmental costs.
In all of this, one economic equation remains very clear to me: there will never be a supply chain crisis of stories.
We want ‘em and we’re hungry for ‘em! Any day, any night, we’ll take that yummy-yum in then regurgitate it as caption, interpretive TikTok dance, or bus designed to politically snag and drag.
We’re all a bunch of story ho’s, story fiends. And so, my Internet comrades, welcome to the Storytime issue!
Before I say more on this, a bit of HTF || HTS news.
HTF || HTS is now a RADDDDDDDDIIIIIOOOOOO SHOW streaming on Moon Glow Radio! That’s right, you can now catch me celebrating these playlists every other Sunday, 2 pm EST / 11 am PST for an hour of curatorial mayhem. It’s been really, really fun to make, and I’m so excited to now be able to audibly tee hee hee and boo hoo hoo with you - all in a Baltimore accent :’)
First episode is archived here!
You can also stream the playlist sans jokes and hard “O” sounds here:
So why, other than Santa’s storied supply chain meltdown, is now the time for Storytime? To start, Mitski is back and making me cry sweat and sweat tears.
“Working for the Knife” is the first single off Mitski’s forthcoming album Laurel Hell, scheduled for release Feb. 4 with Dead Oceans. The opening verses paint the absolutely tragic romance of devoting a life to storytelling, feeling like the pursuit is, more accurately, an imperative that will all but kill you, and that any other alternative is a fate worse than death. I relate to this!
Second, I’m experiencing a weird conflict around storytelling, conflated, as most everything else in the physical realm is, with the vast, fast and furious hellscape that is social media. I’m catching myself saying things, writing things, posting posting and posting things that seem, to put it bluntly? SUS.
It’s a theme explored in the sludgy and feedback-heavy Seafoam Walls track “Program,” which centers around an omnipotent computer character that controls everything from punching the clock to ego, supplying, erasing and then altogether replacing our emotions and memories. The band says the downtrodden “run program don’t die” chant came from a YouTube comment suggesting that humans are actually just computers running on a programmed feedback loop called, yep, “don’t die.”
While we’re busy not dying and instead compulsively taking in and generating content, how do we maintain that the stories we’re telling are, indeed, our own? And is that even an issue?
I realize this is kind of a quotidian question and notion, that we’ve all been talking about the “uh oh’s” of information processing, manufactured desire, outrage, or what-have-you forever, since advertising, propaganda, and really all of our methods of communicating information and stories have existed … for fucking ever.
I’m just saying the rapidity and blurriness of it now warrants a perversely high level of media literacy, and I’m also picturing something of a cartoon-like, full-coverage body and brain shield that can pop out at an instant and offer protection from and/or detection between the currents - stories, content, branded content, documentary, representation, witness, and ultimately, surveillance.
In practical purposes, what’ll happen for me is I’ll catch myself expressing something, maybe even verbatim, that I imagine I must have more passively, though not necessarily so, taken in at some point during my infinitely generous and regenerative scroll. I’ll catch myself mid-sentence or completely after-the-fact, struck with the sudden awareness that I’ve spit out the words, maybe the punchline, of a filter-faced human canine I do not, myself, personally know … and I think it’s terrifying!
The sincere insincerity of it is funny to me, since I’ve been encountering a lot of talk about a widespread cultural and literary shift away from irony to sincerity, especially in comedy. This can be seen in the success of shows like Ted Lasso, which seems to have hooked all different types of audiences with its transparent and direct sincerity. (Disclaimer: I’ve only seen one episode of it so I can’t really say more than that. It’s just mentioned in everything I’ve read about the subject.)
This kind of storytelling would seem a safe reprieve from the often confusing, insincere sincerity of unscripted living. It’s even like an active rebellion against the more conscious performance of Internet shit starters and edgelord-dom, which at its best is tiring, and worst, incendiary and violent.
For some reason, an “elephant in the room” visual is coming to mind.
Lots and lots of elephants in a room.
In what seems like an infinite stampede, each elephant tries desperately to squeeze its body through a square window that simply does not provide enough space for the physical majesty or mythical lore that an elephant is. An elephant cannot gracefully squeeze itself out the window of a room that was never intended to house such commotion.
But the foundation of this building is exactly programmed for commotion and chaos, so the herd continues to grow, and the elephants, one by one, continue, out of physical or psychic stress, to try and squeeze through the window and make more room for something else.
And that’s kind of the intake/output conundrum of this particular construction. Space for something else only becomes available once the last exit point gets claimed, practically sealed shut and stamped as one thing or another: humble brag, selfie, worthy cause, kissy kiss with sexy husband.
In sleep, I’m still relatively untethered to this feedback loop.
From what I can remember and interpret, social media has yet to infiltrate the stories of my dream world, but I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time. I expect that collectively, in addition to the majestic Freudian whales and teeth falling out (I always accidentally swallow mine), we’ll begin dreaming reward and fear in the form of tiny, candy-apple-red dots. I think I’ll know I’ll have hit middle age when notifications and hashtag optimization usurp the high school stress dreams of my young adulthood.
Back to the playlist and some lyrics that get straight to it.
No is the greatest resistance
No to your nothing existence
No is a walk // No small talk
No, I don't think it looks better
Yes, we are stronger together
but No is a power // anytime // anyplace 🔥-Billy Nomates, “No”
Something I’m conscientiously practicing in my waking life is utilizing the word “no.” It’s a special skill I picked up and honed throughout the most isolating points of quarantine, saying no to ideas, to people and to demands, to call out bullshit and assert a new path when the stories I’d wish to play out for myself and for the world start veering off in a direction that feels neither genuine nor kind.
More typically I have been inclined to issue a compulsory “yes” to everything out of this feeling of being indebted to everything and everyone, to close up this massive gap separating me from even just neutral territory.
It doesn’t bode well in the end, though, to always typecast No as negative. Because when pushed to operate on a falsely premised yes, outcomes usually aren’t that pretty.
I think the more we can say “no” honestly, the more oriented we become toward extending yes’s whose outcomes will be all the more beautiful and generative, as demonstrated by our own presence and follow through.
And that’s why Billy Nomates’ track “No” pretty much became my anthem throughout this entire time, and one I’ll keep screaming in my head for the rest of my life.
I’ll consciously and from the heart best try to say the things I mean when I mean them and when I can, and otherwise, project some insidious, mutant diarrhea that seems right in the moment and hopefully does little harm beyond making me question, oh, just the where’s what’s, who’s, how’s, and why’s of every second of existence.
It’s quite the economy, different from the one built on production lines and people working in warehouses, but an economy all the same. And it’s simply how this chapter feels and sounds for me right now!
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