Never News: can you hear me now?
Hello and happy Friday to all you beautiful newsletter readers who live in my computer. It's me, Producer Georgia, here to tell you before anything else that WE HAVE T-SHIRTS AND YOU SHOULD BUY THEM! Now fly! Fly to bigcartel and buy these shirts!!!
I also come to your inbox newly resurrected from my post-Halloween exhaustion by one of the most exciting political events of my lived memory. I, like many of you, have been libbing out this week after the blue wave/blunami/bluclear bomb did an Arc of the Covenant skeleton blast straight to the Republican Party. Tuesday night was one of the best nights to be online in a long time. I hope you enjoyed it.
The work starts now, of course, and we're sure to see more foolishness. But! I'm hopeful, and it feels good to be so. Woke 3.0 is here and I, for one, am looking forward to giving you all state-mandated septum piercings.
Anyway! Here's the news bits I've been pondering:
THE CUT: on the Met Gala and whether this kind of cultural spectacle has a place anymore
The Met Gala has been in the cultural dog house for a while by this point. Most recently, the fashionably-inclined online were furious about 2027's original theme honoring frothing racist and antisemite Jon Galliano. That idea was quickly scraped in favor of the newly announced "extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday." Unsurprisingly, people are very upset at this too for being perhaps the most milquetoast option the Met Gala could have ever picked. Personally, I find this to be a fabulous excuse to get a do-over of the Camp theme from 2019, but that's not why I chose this piece. All this anger and frustration at the Gala itself reminds me of this piece from the New York Times that Robin Givhan wrote shortly after the Jon Galliano theme was cancelled, and which declares that actually, the Met Gala itself should just be canceled as a whole. The piece actually critiques the choice to scrap the Galliano exhibit because it would have – according to Givhan – offered an interesting moment to examine fashion as a tool of identity construction, and to question how Galliano himself constructed his identity. I get that, but I also don't really think that's what the Met Gala is for, certainly not now.
The Met Gala of the last few years is an event meant to create more events. Or more specifically, scuttlebutt that is sure to generate a lot of conversation online, thus making the institutions attached to this chatter feel more important than they are. The ur example to me is Kim Kardashian's much-discussed choice to wear Marilyn Monroe's dress for 2022's "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" theme. It's something made in a lab to generate online discussion – anger, defensiveness, apathy toward the whole Kardashian clan, cynicism...rinse and repeat for a few days and then we move on. This, more than the fashion, more than the guest list, is the currency that the Met Gala trades in now.
And that sucks! Call me foolish but I do think there could be a world where a celebration of fashion could be a useful, educational, incisive, and, yes, entertaining thing for the culture. Look no further than 2018's Heavenly Bodies Gala in which we saw, I believe, the most stunning, varied, and altogether flawless execution of a theme that the Gala has ever done. That year was the ideal use of fashion as an excuse to discuss history, religion, culture, and modern life – the gold standard. But what can we even say about those things if the Bezos's are the ones running the whole operation? When another well-known piece of shit Karl Lagerfeld got his own theme in 2023? And at that point, like, level with me - we really that surprised by the Galliano choice? Anyway, if nothing else, I hope that someone shows up to the red carpet as a giant pair of jeans this year.
GAMER GIRL DISPATCH: join me on my Nancy Drew journey!!!
In case you've missed it, I have been playing Nancy Drew: The Ghost of Thorton Hall on our Twitch channel and having the time of my life. Puzzles! Ghosts! A tiny pink Nikon CoolPix with MYSTERIES IMAGES TO DECODE! And since Friday the 13th is coming up, I figured why not get spooky on it and stream that very night? I'll be on twitch.tv/theneverpost at 8 pm EST and I need YOU to help me find the solved puzzles so I can speedrun them--I MEAN PLAY THE GAME THE NORMAL WAY. Mark my words: one day I'll shell out for those kitty ear headphones!
THE NEW YORKER: on the telephone, the intimacy of the voice, and what gums up the works
This is technically a book review for The Telephone: A New History by James Gleick. It is also incredibly long, and I would not fault you for skimming, or choosing to only read the first bits. But I choose it today because we had a really interesting our livestreamed editorial meeting this morning that kind of exists alongside the topics covered in this review (and, seemingly, this book).
This review focuses staunchly on phone calls – the intimacy brought by hearing someone's voice, but also the ominous question of who else might be listening (big corporations, the U.S. government, etc). And that alone is an interesting enough topic to warrant a discussion. But what was missing from this examination of the intimacy of the voice as heard through the phone...was voice notes.
Today, the NP team discussed our relationship to voice notes as an alternate to the text message, and how we feel about them. Most everyone didn't like them – voice memos insist upon themselves, they make you have to sit down and listen to them, which isn't always possible. And they often implicitly insist that you respond with a voice memo of your own, which can feel exhausting and presumptuous. I get that. But I was overwhelmingly in the minority in that I really like them, kind of for the reasons that this review describes the initial marvel of the telephone: I love being able to hear my friends' voices, especially if that friend doesn't live in the same city as me. We can't always get on the phone, and sometimes texting out a big update is exhausting. So, the next best thing is sending a voice memo, usually while one of us is walking to or from some appointment, some gig, or some other thing making us unable to actually call each other up. And the result, I find, is very sweet. I can hear my friend Megan walk down the street among the sounds of her neighborhood in my headphones as I walk through my neighborhood. It makes her feel closer.
But I find our different reactions to voice notes to be very interesting. It might be something for Never Post HQ to explore in a more meaningful way, because I think everyone's feelings about this technology make perfect sense. I'm also curious how you, dear reader, feel about these. In the chat during our livestream, I saw most respondents were in the anti-voice note camp. And if you have thoughts about this in one direction or another, I'd love to hear about it.
Anyway, that's all from me this week. I'm trying a new format here, with fewer articles, and more cultural analysis. I hope you like it! Smoochies!
And here is my favorite song performed during Stop Making Sense, which I finally - finally! - watched this past week. Shoutout to my dad for introducing me to Talking Heads with the song And She Was when I was very young - I have loved them ever since. Go Dad!