'Hey bitches, it's Dakota'
Neat stuff from the first few months of the year
Hours pass, days flow, we drift apart only for the waves of time to smash us back together again. Greetings readers. Can you match my energy? Maybe even surpass it?
To have stuff to write about, you need to consume. Not just the yeoman writer’s diet of meatloaf and mashed potatoes either. You need to consume art, movies, literature, smells, sights, sounds. You need to consume content. Let’s review some from the first part the year.
Madonna’s New Face
Like swallowed gum, some content you consume stays with you for a while. Such is the case with Madonna’s new face:
In her piece, “Madonna’s Face is Not Subversive,” Jessica Defino quickly dispenses superficial takes about Madonna’s new face to reveal the circular logic of a beauty industry which traps people into never feeling good about their own presentation:
Women are encouraged to participate in the system but also, to make it appear as if they aren’t participating in the system at all.
As with all of Jessica’s writing, the post is ostensibly about the beauty industry, but has broad applicability to all sorts of other stuff—clothing, cars, work, social media, etc. Nobody likes a try-hard, but also nobody likes someone who doesn’t try.
“Hey Bitches, it’s Dakota…”
Dakota Wright, ‘the unapologetic ForToDrink Carolina qween’, is a joy to watch. Most of his posts are short videos of himself, his husband, and usually some of their friends, listing off what they ordered at a particular restaurant. Watching Dakota and his husband Jackson list off their orders is like repeating the same word over and over in your head; after you hear enough, the words which form the names of the menu items lose meaning and are reduced to nothing more than noise and intonations. Reluctantly, it makes me appreciate the work whoever has to name a chain’s version of a spicy chicken sandwich; there’s a beauty in the economy of their words.
Jackson, the second lead for most of the videos, is equal parts refreshing and unhinged. Despite co-starring in just about everything, he isn’t tagged in a single video. He’s just there to support Dakota, eat his favorite treats, and have fun. He plays his part with a choppy, manic energy that contrasts perfectly with Dakota’s sly and playful demeanor. As he shares his orders with wide eyes and a furrowed brow, you don’t know if he’s going to break out into laughter to let us in on the joke, or sprint out of the car into an intersection, hollering puns at oncoming traffic about his sweet tooth.
It’s Nuclear Fashion, not Fission
I’m late to this but in December, Sam Brinton a nuclear engineer and (at the time) the deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, stood accused of stealing luggage from airports and then wearing the contents.
Best of all, a Tanzanian designer named Asyakhamsin had their luggage stolen and went on to match photos of Brinton wearing her outfits with her own photos:
https://twitter.com/asyakhamsin1/status/1627541483245936642?s=20
Cultivating a personal brand is hard. Someone’s packed luggage is a sample of their brand: It contains their entire outward presentation and maybe even some other juicy, revelatory stuff. I don’t blame Brinton for wanting to nibble at the many buffet lines presented by our world’s luggage carousels—getting dressed up as someone else is an escape. Nonetheless, it appears Brinton’s chosen route to such scintillation is a bit too easy to be legally feasible. Next time, I’d suggest an estate sale.
Space Death
A while back, I wrote about stupid new ways millennials are dealing with the afterlife. It appears I hadn’t scraped the entire barrel, because I’ve learned there are now ways to launch your deceased loved ones into the vast darkness which will someday swallow our earth whole without so much as a burp. It is not your mother of which I speak, but of space.
Dolly Church, the essay’s author, puts it well:
Opting for this kind of burial, you can avoid archiving your loved ones in the past (the cemetery) by projecting them outwards into the ultimate metonymy for the future (outer space).
Does the creation of this market represent the end of possibilities for disposing of loved ones? Unlikely. When Elon Musk’s 26th child terraforms Mars in 2177, there’ll be a gold rush for funeral plots on the red planet. Get in now to secure the financial future of your children.
I leave you with a song, ‘Bunny is a Rider’ from Caroline Polachek:
You captured a mantra of my life: “ Women are encouraged to participate in the system but also, to make it appear as if they aren’t participating in the system at all.” I still have not figured this out despite my business and life success. Thanks for this…
I'm depressingly curious about Dakota and Jackson’s culinary adventures. I'm not sure what lures me more, the churro/meat stick/deep-fried-something-or-other in his hand or the condition of his skin despite consuming a meal made entirely of preservatives and red #40. In his case, youth is certainly not wasted on the young - Jackson is livin', dammit!