1
You guys have three days! Until I destroy the earth! I am the Sun God! Perfect! Release! Perfect! Release! Perfect! Release! He counts aloud to thirteen and stops. A man selling shirts by the Washington Square Arch mocks him—Why stop at thirteen?—and starts to count jeeringly from fourteen. The Sun God stands in the dead fountain, flipping him off. Nearby a woman dances on a large white piece of paper, smearing and swirling black ink with her feet and hands.
2
A red car drives through the snow in Hokkaido and suddenly there is no sound. You can barely hear people breathing, as if it’s snowing in the theater too, as if we are all awaiting the same thing. We cannot be but we are. Time is no match for the cinema. The car comes to a stop and reverses and rolls back down the road. The film is long and not nearly over. When it does end I feel stunned, like my whole body is holding back tears. We step back out into the cold City. I am tired, I have survived something, I am no match for the cinema.
3
The first song is a cover, an incantation: Big city / Everybody I know can be found here / Everybody I know can be found here. . . The stage is full of people hunched between amps and synthesizers. As they play I remember how many of their songs are wrapped tight around my heart. We set controls for the heart of the sun / One of the ways we show our age. . . The “All My Friends” encore goes on forever and when it ends I step back out into the cold City. I used to live around here. Waiting for my friends, I watch a man inhale an entire balloon’s worth of whippets in one breath. You think over and over / Hey I’m finally dead. . . The balloon is purple and then it is empty and then we are gone.
ben tapeworm1
on the turntable
on the screen
Season 2 of How To With John Wilson is airing now on HBO and it’s the best thing on TV.
Drive My Car (2021) is a gorgeous, long, and aching adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name.
from the discourse
The xenobots are here. So are AI antibiotics. So is… metaverse horseracing. (What will you wear to the metaverse horserace?) Amazon isn’t protecting your data. Life360 is selling it. Crime prediction software shows bias. The mining industry is mining minds on Minecraft. Cuomo’s crisis team in crisis. Should documentaries re-record tapes? What’s with web3? You don’t need a reason to hate stuff. The permacrisis begins.
from my incoming texts
“the only thing more fun than figuring out how to do something relatively difficult professionally is figuring out how to do that thing while also fully depleted of sleep and serotonin”
“Do you think there’s any teeth to vibes?”
“What do you think he did when he left the bang house”
“The trespasser has become a fatality”
weekly wiki
Join us on Discord and Twitter. Read back about the death of storytelling, the end of 2020, and our age of disasters. Grab a print issue.
1 — Saturday morning / Washington Square Park / sitting with Michael
2 — Sunday night / Film Forum / Drive My Car (2021) screening
3 — Tuesday night / Brooklyn Steel / LCD Soundsystem concert