Fake Accents and Bummer Psychedelic Clinics
The week in things I read
I’ve been working on what I think, hope, and pray, will be my next non-fiction book for the last few weeks. Obviously there aren’t many details I can share, and this has nothing to do with the book, but I found a 1990 Spy magazine NBC special hosted by Jerry Seinfeld that includes Jerry talking about Buster Poindexter and Billy Joel. If you’ve got 48 minutes to spare, it’s worth watching.
What else have I got? How about the young people in America using British accents? That seems to be a thing. “Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect, using obviously fake, theatrical voices to make light of low-grade daily dramas,” according to the Guardian.
Read: “Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?” by Alaina Demopoulos at The Guardian
Getting 30,000 feet up in the air was the last place you could go and have the option of being unconnected. You could have wi-fi…but you didn’t need to. With free wi-fi becoming more commonplace on commercial airline flights, Yair Rosenberg argues that we need less wi-fi. “Rather than revamping airplanes to be like everywhere else, we should look to them as a model for what we might preserve elsewhere,” so we can have a tiny bit of freedom from our phones and computers.
Read: “No Refuge From Free Wi-Fi” by Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic
This week I found out Steven Wright has a novel out. Do you know how great that is? Steven Wright is one of the great living Americans. A hilarious genius who I never assumed would write a novel, but I guess that’s my fault for assuming something.
Read: “Steven Wright, Master of the One-Liner, Tries His Hand at a Novel” by Jason Zinoman at the New York Times
A tribute to the last of the actors to play “Universal Monsters,” Ricou Browning. You might not know his name like you do Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi, but Steve Macfarlane makes the case that the guy who played the creature that crawls out of the Black Lagoon had a fascinating career and deserves to be admired as representing “a high point of Modernist kitsch.”
Read: “Creature’s Pet” by Steve Macfarlane at The Baffler
I’m not a fan of anything labeled “Millenial aesthetic,” so if I walk into a ketamine clinic and it looks like one of the ones I read about this week, then I know I’m probably about to have a bum trip, man.
Read: “The New Psychedelic Aesthetic” by Tara Kenny at Dirt
Do you know what I do like? Paul Schrader answered some questions for Director Fits. It’s a short little Instagram post, but now I know about his Rolex and rings.