'Get Good Or Go Away'
Today in dystopia, the painful irony of witnessing female Olympic Trial brilliance, the latest source of Gen X angst, and it's finally Bear Week!
I’m not someone who gravitates toward sports. As someone whose body usually finds a way to fail her, I never had hope of competing, physically, for anything, save parallel parking into impossible spots. If there’s ever a parallel parking competition anywhere, sign me up, give me a number, and bet on me—you’ll make money. But the other night, we flipped to the Women’s Track and Field Olympic Trials just as my edible kicked in and I have to say, I was riveted.
Just take a moment to behold the stunningly beautiful Anna Hall, who won the Heptathlon. And before you think I’ve traded in my obsession with culture for the jock life, please bear with me.
At the age of 23, she’s gloriously ripped. She could probably deadlift you and your car. She’s FCKNG fast. She can scale huge hurdles, throw spears, and hurl items of great weight, and does it like it’s a day at work because, for her, it is. She’s mentored by one of the all-time great American athletes, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. In college, she broke a tiny bone in her foot that takes forever and ever to heal (I broke the same bone in my wrist once) and she still managed to shatter records before making her way to these trials.
In watching the race, I was struck by the mental and emotional stamina, strength, determination, and confidence it must take to dedicate yourself to the development of such physical power and prowess. These women, each in their own way, have overcome overwhelming odds and challenges to reach their Olympic potential. Is there anything they can’t do?
Yes, there is something they can’t do and that’s have control over their uteruses. As strong, capable, and miraculous as these women are, some of them won’t be able to decide when and where to give birth if they get pregnant. It struck me that they can practically deadlift cars, but they might live in states where they DON’T EVEN HAVE CONTROL OVER THEIR OWN BODIES. Let me say it out loud, for the people in the back: TWENTY-SEVEN AMERICAN STATES NOW HAVE WHAT ARE CONSIDERED “RESTRICTIVE” ABORTION LAWS. These gals could probably snap DeSantis’ neck with their bare hands and casually file their nails afterward, yet that crusty white guy in lifts somehow wields the power to dictate when they can have children, whether or not they could marry each other, or transition into manhood if they wanted.
Ironic, isn’t it? While we’re out here overwhelmed by the day-to-day of the post-Covid, post-Roe, wildly expensive dystopia we’ve been living in, we’ve somehow let our country get to the point where a 6-foot Olympian, who can make her body do anything, could still be forced to carry and give birth to a child she may not want or be ready for, even if doing so might kill her.
THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT I MEAN BY MUTHR, FCKD. AND WE OWE IT TO OURSELVES TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THIS NOVEMBER.
Want Your MTV? Too FCKN Bad.
Image: The Wrap
In other dystopian news, Gen X was erased from culture, yet once again. Paramount deleted MTV News archives enriched with writing and reporting that spanned over 20 years.
Here’s the tea, according to The Wrap:
MTV News launched in 1987 with a weekly show hosted on the then-music video channel by Kurt Loder. It was soon expanded into nightly installments and continued as a hugely featured aspect of MTV programming during the 1990s, but with MTV’s sudden shift in focus to reality programming in the early 2000s, it was relegated to occasional late-night airings and eventually pulled.
The news operation continued with an online presence, including a notable rebrand in 2016 in an attempt to compete with the likes of Buzzfeed, followed a year later by an abrupt about-face and the termination of nearly its entire staff.
Paramount pulled the plug on the MTV News organization for good in May 2023 as part of a company-wide restructuring that included laying off 25% of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios/Paramount Media staff.
Think about it: Historical moments like Kurt Loder’s announcement of the death of Kurt Cobain, wiped off the internet as if it never happened. The outrage was palpable when I reposted my friend Nik’s post about this travesty on Facebook (aka every Geezer’s water cooler). From a biz POV, would we live on an MTV News site anyway? Only if it were rebranded as a nostalgic Gen X water cooler of its own (hire me for such brilliant advice), but I digress.
As Gen Xers, we’re highly sensitive to erasure because we’re always erased. The kids call us Boomers for FCKS sake. As far as Zennials (with a Z) are concerned, we are dead and buried. Yet, we brought music the world is STILL obsessed with today (I can personally guarantee your Gen Z kid has at least 10 Gen X tracks on any given playlist), made transformational contributions to literature Zennials are obsessed with like American Psycho, Fight Club, Slaves of New York, and Less Than Zero; created films we still can’t stop yapping about if the success of Brats is indicative of our insatiable thirst for nostalgia, and maintain a stronghold influence on new TV (without Gen X, there would be no Real Housewives franchise and Stranger Things). Our problem is that our voices remain muffled due to apathy (well, we are Slackers), or gatekeeping. Unfortunately, Facebook is no longer a loud enough bullhorn to magnify our war cries, so we’re forced to scream into mirrors instead.
ON THE UPSIDE
Some things to look forward to….
To Do: Pride Weekend in NYC
Quite simply, nothing beats it. With a plethora of phenomenal events going on you’ll wish you were ten people. Get to Googling, this isn’t Time Out New York (though it could be).
TV: The Bear
After Carmy’s walk-in fridge melt down in last season’s finale, we are bound to face the aftermath in episode one of the new season. Will Carmy and Syd get their Michelin star? Will Carmy get back together with Claire after FCKNG that relationship up so royally? Will Sugar ever explode with child? Will Cousin Richie or Neil inevitably FCK something up that will push our collective BPs up above normal? Will Marcus be able to manage his unrequited (or requited) feelings for Syd? Will he be able to sell his glorious cakes? Will Tina come into her own as the top-tier chef we all know she is? Well, Hulu pushed up the premiere date of the first three episodes of The Bear to last night, the first is called “Tomorrow.”
Below is my recap, so SPOILERS AHEAD for episode one if you didn’t watch.
The Bear, “Tomorrow”
Creator/director Christopher Storer ushers us into this season with vagaries about how the nightmare night of the end of season two resolved. We walk through the labyrinth of Carmy’s interiority in a this-is-your-life flashback sequence that goes on for the entire episode, triggered by an occasional gaze at the scar on his hand, scored to the vaguely ominous sounds you might hear in a slightly menacing yoga studio (thanks to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). We are meant to empathize with how Carmy became the self-punishing, obsessive, brilliant chef prone to imploding in such a cliffhanger of a way by giving us a full 12-and-a-half minutes by inviting us through a portal into his brain. He’s retreated so deeply into his head he can’t come out, so we go in with him.
We see how he moved to New York to work for Daniel Boulud (complete with Boulud cameo); we see him donning his French Laundry whites and fully engaged with the arduous, repetitive tedium of plucking flowers into garnish bowls as if he were playing a high stakes game of Operation. He hyperfixates on perfection; the perfect meat and potatoes and peas and putting his whole life into these dishes, scrawling perfectionistic mantras in the form of “pursuit of excellence” onto a sheet of paper, over and over. Between the scrubbing of carrots and the scoring of mushrooms and the mandolining of veggies and oh, the salting! (don’t watch hungry), we see Carmy painstakingly illustrate teeny tiny platings, almost as PT, to gain control of his hands.
Now that we get the discipline and tedium involved in chef mastery, we see flashbacks to Olivia Coleman (good boss) and Joel McHale (bad boss) as each mentor him, informing his professional sense of self and how it affects the people around him. We see John Mulaney as his New York roommate, tucking in a passed out in full clothes Carmy and spraying his unconscious body with deodorant. We see Sugar cry as she calls him and calls him to no avail (he’s at work) after Richie finds Mikey, echoing what just happened to Marcus because, remember, his mother died in the hospital while he was stuck at work. We see flashpoints of the love between Carmy and Claire rekindle and evolve as we see them somehow continue to live without each other.
Twelve-and-a-half minutes later, maybe six after Syd comes in and hands Carmy a cup of coffee, Syd and Carmy address the aftermath of his fridge implosion and Carmy is full of apologies because what the FCK else can he do. Syd is also full of apologies to Marcus, who we see grieve his mom alone in various scenes, in agony because he wasn’t there when she died. As it is revealed, during this mental haze of Carmy’s we swam in, he spent the previous who-knows-how-many hours redoing every dish on the menu, perfecting and “subtract)-ing, as McHale instilled in him. Syd’s not really into that. Apologies are given, contracts between Syd and Carmy have been drawn, seemingly during this feverdream that allowed him to accomplish multiple time-consuming feats in a single bound. Toward the end of the episode Richie walks in and Claire is considered, yet nothing is resolved because that’s for the rest of the season.
What I love about The Bear is how strives to explore interiority in a way we don’t see that much, drawing out both the high-stakes moments and tedious daily rituals that form its characters. Visually, this is done through massive close-ups to depict emotional processing and cinematic arthouse pullbacks shots, which I appreciate. I only saw episode one and part of two (which seems to focus on Syd’s POV) so I don’t know if this happened while you all binged but I, for one, would like to see Sugar stray from being such an endlessly martyred feminine archetype; the one who says I love you, the one who strives to keep her family together, the one who sneaks money into your pocket. I want to see her get pissed and throw some cutlery more often because, quite frankly, every MUTHR should once in a while. They’re all, in their own way, ticking time bombs and that’s why we love to watch. Besides, she’s going to have to stop MUTHRing them and start MUTHRing her kid.
“Get good or go away” is something McHale’s character says to Carmy dismissively, but it also ties into the Olympic and MTV portions of this post. I’m thinking of doing more of these recaps—what do you guys think? I’m into writing them but I’d love to know if you’re into reading them. Should I continue with them? Or should they go away?
What are YOU excited about this summer? Will you travel? Seek local adventures? Contemplate your navel? What will you do? Be sure to share in the comments below, too!
That’s it for now! Stay gold and remember to share and subscribe to this labor of love if any of it resonates, mmmmmn ‘kay?
TYLY
xo
another great piece of writing. wonderful slide from femme athletes to abortion. brilliant!
If we’re ever in the same city/town consider the parallel parking gauntlet thrown down. It’s my go to random fact about myself. 😉