Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 49.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
This is one of those Mondays when…I feel something, and didn’t realize until today it was the feeling of a species member protected only by a ‘flimsy panda umbrella.’
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
What is LA? I don’t get it. I’ve never actually been to the city, or to California, but it's one of those cities that is so represented in media that it has a special aura of wonder around it. Kids flock to LA like they do to New York to audition for its movie and television studios, and RuPaul’s Drag Race has recreated West Hollywood as a mecca of glitzy television drag.
The most common portrait of LA is the hollywood glitz and glamour, and its foil of vapid self-absorbed silicon materialism. Songs like St. Vincent’s Los Ageless and Carley Rae Jepsen’s LA Hallucinations as well as the characters in Arrested Development play off this idea. Where New York has it’s (racialized) “seedy underbelly” and Paris has the ring of down-and-out suburbs, LA is supposedly just layers and layers of illusion with a vacuum at the center.
Still from St. Vincent’s Los Ageless: A plastic surgery office on a film set. Layers and layers of illusion.
The issue I have with all these portrayals is that they rarely take time to acknowledge the physical space of the city. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s “love letter to LA,” teases us with the texture of the city - showing us a couple of apartment courtyards and the view from Mulholland’s cliff down to the city center below, but normally the only physical places that are portrayed are the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Blvd.
I think this physical disconnect stems primarily from the stranglehold that automobile infrastructure has on the city. The image of the city is less a unified texture than a series of islands jump-cut together by automobile travel. Works that take the physical city as their subject then, necessarily interact with and interrogate the city’s car culture. In Karen Tei Yameshita’s book Tropic Of Orange, a series of unrelated events lead to a homeless encampment relocating onto I-5, bringing the entire city to a halt. The iconic film Tangerine, directed by Sean Baker, is stitched together with clips of trans sex workers Sin-Dee and Alexandra, played by Kitana Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, endlessly walking through a city that resists both pedestrianism and street walking. Leilah Weinraub’s documentary Shakedown interrogates the city’s fabric in a different way, instead of connecting the city’s texture it shows the Mid-City lesbian club night as an physical and temporal island of relative safety within a hostile city.
This brings me to Jurgen Teller’s photos for W Magazine. The photographer’s simple lightly edited shots of celebs in LA have been memed this past week for their defying what we expect of fashion and celebrity photography. To me it sounds like the folks who look at a Lee Krasner painting and say “my kid could have made that,” and I quite like the photos. The photos are purposely posed and composed, they’re not the candid shots we expect from TMZ - though that comparison has been drawn - but they’re not studio glamour shots either.
Part of the appeal is that they show celebs as “like the rest of us,” just being goofy in the city. But the bigger thing for me is that they show the most normal and public parts of LA, its sidewalks, side streets, parked cars, and street trees that are so rarely depicted. I know some readers of this newsletter are big fans of tree photography, and Teller’s photos give trees and sidewalks as much of a place in the frame as the actors and designers.
Honorable mention to Brian Joseph Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig’s weird LA funnyness. I didn’t know how to fit it in here but they’re great.
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
Monday 3.1.2021
WHEWWWWWWWWWWW. This is gonna be a whirlwind of a week folks.
Over the weekend, CBS dropped two teasers for Oprah Winfrey's upcoming tell-all interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The two-hour special has been very much hyped up in recent weeks, attracting the ire of the British Royal Family and the royal rota as well. This will also be the Sussexes first interview after they formally withdrew from being working royals so there are many people waiting with bated breath to see just how revelatory Harry and Meghan will be this Sunday.
One of the teasers that was released shows Harry talking about his late mother, Princess Diana, and drawing parallels with what she went through and what the Sussexes have been going through for the last several years.
The context is probably around how harshly the British press treated his mother -- something Meghan has had to contend with as well. In fact, the press has already honed in on her in these teasers, despite the fact that both clips so far have only shown Harry speaking. So I'm sure the response to this interview next week is going to be completely measured and reasonable! Anyway, if you're interested in tuning in to the Super Bowl of celebrity gossip, 8PM Sunday on CBS is where it's at. I know I'll be on time for this one!