You Murdured My Durdur
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Arsenio, Westlake Dermatology and the selling of class, and how I was wrong about something (gasp!)
ta-nehisi.com on Arsenio Hall
I've been delving into the archives of Ta-Nehisi Coates's pre-Atlantic personal blog, which he launched (I think) in January of 2008, in anticipation of the May 2008 release of his memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
It's strange to read Coates, whose mature voice became so profoundly influential, sounding like any other young writer on the make. There are flashes of the prose that would become legend, but for the most part he reads like a standard issue bright young political journalist of that era, still in the process of figuring out what he has to add to the discourse that was distinctive.
Here he is, for instance, writing about how big a deal Arsenio Hall's talk show was to him and his friends during its five year run, from 1989-1994, when he was in high school.
So I've decided to include in this blog, along with random political observations, some thoughts on the influences of my my debut memoir, The Beautiful Struggle (hereto forth known as TBS). At the very least, it should break up the monotony of hearing the kid drone on and on about the greatness of Barack Obama. I'll be posting video/audio/text which I think really shaped my world-view during the period of the memoir (roughly 86-93, post-Good Times, pre-Illmatic).
...One of the things that I hope comes across in TBS is the chaos of the early 80s and early 90s in black inner-cities. On the one level this is crack and the attendant rise of violence, but it's also the culture, which seemed to be changing every other year. It's nice, every once in awhile, to revisit those moments when the weirdest things imaginable, actually happened.
Item: The Arsenio Hall Show.Arsenio was like what late-night talk would look like had it been black people who sailed out from the coasts of West Africa and colonized the larger world. It was Johnny Carson done, not just in a black way, but in the way of our generation. I usually was sleep, and thus missed most of Arsenio's greatest moments, but the next day at school all everyone talked about was what happened on his show the night before. There was always an allure of danger and mayhem to what he was doing--this dude interviewed Farrakhan--that matched how we, as young black people, saw the world.
I'm a year younger than Coates, and was watching Arsenio too. I wasn't clueless to the fact that a black guy being successful on late night television was a big deal—it was discussed in these terms at the time—but I had no idea how important Hall was (if Coates is to be trusted on this, which I imagine he is) to my black contemporaries. I mean, I had no idea until just now, reading old school Coates.
On the one hand, this isn't surprising. I'm sure it's still the case that most black and white teenagers are living in substantially different pop cultural worlds, particularly in the nuances. What I'm pretty sure is different now, though, is that journalism as an institution has become dramatically more attuned to the people and media and cultural symbols that are the most significant to black Americans, particularly young black Americans. So if Hall were doing his thing now, it would be discussed and deconstructed in dramatically more thorough terms, in particular by many black journalists and critics working for mainstream publications, to the extent that it would be visible to a relatively culturally attuned white kid like I was back then.
Coates, of course, has played a significant role in this shift, both through his own writing on these topics and as a result of the influence his extraordinary success had on the increase in the the hiring of black journalists and critics.
In Which I Cop to Getting One Thing Utterly Wrong, Though I Still Think I Was Basically Right
Last week I wrote: "Those of us who came of age as writers after David Foster Wallace published his seminal collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, are living in a world shaped profoundly by his voice. Pretending otherwise is an evasion."
My point was that Lauren Oyler didn't take Wallace seriously enough when writing her recent essay on taking a cruise. She was too dismissive of the gravitational force of Wallace's legendary cruise essay.
Here's Oyler, in an interview she did with the Washington Post after her piece came out, explaining how she feels about Wallace:
I love him. My editor was trying to get me to make a direct statement that I loved him, and I resisted saying too much directly. I think it’s really clear, if you read my other writing as well, that he’s hugely influential. But he’s one of these writers that if you go back and read the stuff, you think, “Oh, it has flaws, it’s not totally perfect.” And the cruise piece was certainly like that for me. I don’t love the beginning. ... Obviously [the essay] is fantastic.
I don't think this changes my basic analysis of what she got wrong, but it does make me more sympathetic. She was fighting the right fight, trying to hold Wallace’s weight with the proper tension, even if she lost.
The Klosterman Cruise Piece
My older brother, the writer and podcaster Mark Oppenheimer, pointed me toward a cruise essay I hadn't read before, Chuck Klosterman's 2010 piece, "That '70s Cruise." It's a nice light piece that deals with the Wallace problem by a) acknowledging it candidly, and b) politely declining to accept the challenge. Here he is near the beginning:
Klosterman has been an exceptionally influential figure in his own right, particularly on the way we write about pop culture. At some point I’ll have to see if I can take his measure.
The Oppenheimer Newsletter
Speaking of Mark, I admire the chutzpah of trying to draft off the attention (and SEO juice) that the movie Oppenheimer is likely to get over the next year by naming his own newsletter simply Oppenheimer. Bold move, brother.
A recent post from Mark sent me down a rabbit hole the other day with his discussion of the Philadelphia accent and why it's so rarely attempted on TV and in the movies, even though there is no shortage of cultural production that is explicitly set in Philly.
Our mother grew up in Philadelphia, and it was by far the most visited city on our family itinerary. We have a whole sub-mythology around that city (mostly around its cheesesteaks, to be honest). The accent, which in a typically considered a working class accent, was exceptionally strong in many of our middle-class Jewish relatives, so there's a deep warmth I feel listening to it, e.g. in this video Mark embeds of Bradley Cooper (who grew up outside Philly) doing a bit on a local Philadelphia news show:
This of course eventually landed me at this great SNL riff, which my younger brother Jonathan put me onto, on the "very specific whites" depicted in Mare of Easttown. It's not precisely a Philly accent, but it's close enough to give me that buzz. Also it's very funny.
Comment of the Week
My old colleague Eileen Nehme writes, in response to my post on the young writer Grazie Sophia Christie:
Christie’s essay made me look at the Westlake Dermatology billboards a little differently. Rather than a promise of beauty, what they seem to be selling is class.
Eileen's referring to what are perhaps the most visually striking billboards in the Austin area, from the high end plastic surgery outfit Westlake Dermatology. The ads are so iconic that when Yeti launched it's flagship store in Austin, they ran a whole bear-based billboard campaign in affectionate homage to the Westlake Dermatology billboards. Most plastic surgery ads show stunning young women in no or few clothes, which is the Westlake Dermatology way, but as Eileen says the Westlake Dermatology ads operate at a higher level of sophistication when it comes to their class signaling. Their photography (which is done by serious fashion photographers) is simply better—more striking—and more evocative of high class vibes than what’s typical in this kind of advertising.
I was looking around the web for more info on Westlake Dermatology, and came across this article about their new offices in Houston, which were designed by award-winning architect Michael Hsu and look like a mix between a Prada store and a summer house in Monterey. The company's CEO explains: "To me, it’s a commitment to the environment and the esthetic not only in the results (of the medical procedures) but in the place where the work is being done.” Or to paraphrase Christie in her essay on the end of the Instagram face, when in history have rich women ever wanted to get their cosmetic surgery in spaces that look like the spaces where poor women get their cosmetic surgery? They want to get their work done here: