Post-Pourri: April 2k24

This month's scents include new Vampire Weekend, newer McDonald’s, and yours truly successfully changing a flat tire on the side of one of the busiest freeways in America

WARNING: This post might cut off in your email, so click the title to read on Substack

How are you? Everyone good? We’re firmly in Q2 of what can no longer be called the New Year, just… the year, this year, same as last but one digit bigger. Things feel dire, generally, on levels both macro (war in Gaza) and micro (my bank account; A24 releasing ‘Civil War’ posters generated by AI). There’s a US presidential election coming up in six months, allegedly, but no one has the energy to even pretend to be into it. Not even the candidates, one of whom is literally sequestered in a Manhattan courtroom right now. Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen! Make that one of the nominees’ campaign slogans. Make it both of theirs, who cares!

I think a lot, with what few brain cells I have left, about this Substack; about what I like writing, what you might like reading. Ideally they’re sort of the same thing, but I don’t know — are you into my deep dives on micro-budget indies playing in like 8 theaters nationwide? My aborted pitches for NHL mascots? Far and away my most-read¹ post remains the one I wrote about getting scammed…

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…but it’s not affordable for me to get scammed on a regular basis, no matter how good the ensuing essay. I think my overall goal with Lifting Fog remains… well, figuring out what it is, first of all, but also defining some easy regularity to it, such that I’m not starting (completely) fresh each week. Movie reviews — I’ve felt compelled to write them for almost twenty years now, pro-bono, so whether on here or Letterboxd (PLUG), that’s not leaving my system anytime soon². But I’ve been wondering if I might cut that Pure Hollywood with, idk, more personal pieces, more regularly, achieving that perfect balance between public and private we all long for but struggle to achieve. MAYBE HENDOG’S THE ONE TO FINALLY PULL IT OFF.

All of which is just me warming up, Marc-Maron-talking-about-his-cats-style, before getting to today’s post, a format I’ve done before and will now CONFIRM as a monthly feature³: Post-Pourri. “Potpourri,” no “s,” is of course that mixture of dried, naturally fragrant plant materials used to provide a gentle, natural scent, frequently placed in a decorative bowl. This is the same thing, with Posts. If you hate it, let me know in the poll I’ll be including at the end!

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LISTEN: Vampire Weekend’s ‘Only God Was Above Us’

We are, as they say, so back.

Vampire Weekend just released their fifth studio album, ‘Only God Was Above Us’, a poppy, punky⁴ examination of capitalism, defeatism, inter-generational responsibility, and so much more that feels simultaneously like a “return to form” after the jammier, some might say bloated ‘Father of the Bride’⁵, and also the culmination of all their musical and lyrical themes to date, with songs that feel in direct conversation with their earlier work. There are maybe two skips on the album (YOU DECIDE) and even those remain incredibly listenable, to the point that I’ve probably burned through ‘God’ six times already. I think it’s their second-best LP, behind ‘Modern Vampires of the City’.

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I’ve never been… let’s say thrilled with the fact that my favorite band consists of three white guys (Rostam Batmanglij, the only POC member, left the group in 2016) who all went to the same college as me, and quote many of the classical texts we would have read as part of our shared curriculum. But I also think they’ve been around long enough, they’ve proven their musical bona fides enough, that the boat shoes and shoulder-sweaters imagery of their early days can be properly contextualized as performance. Anyway, it’s important for fellow Jersey boys to support one another. Garden State representation matters, guys, it just does!

What really stands out to me on ‘God’ is its world-weariness. My guys feel older to me, a little more cynical, which makes sense considering both

1. the state of the world, which this album is very much preoccupied with

2. the fact that they, like me, are rapidly approaching middle age, if not there already

You hear the harder edges of that in songs like “Gen-X Cops.”

“It wasn’t built for me / It’s your academy / But in my time, you taught me how to see / each generation makes it own apology.”

Like I said, the boat shoes are GONE! Other songs, like “Mary Boone,” trade anger for lamentation.

“Oh, my love, was it all in vain? / We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same / In a quiet moment at the theater, I could feel your pain / Deep inside the city, your memory remains.”

Umm, Tay Tay? I think there’s a new chair of the Tortured Poets Department, and his name’s Ezra friggin’ Koenig.

VW has always known how to close out their albums with tracks that feel like musical summations (“The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” and “Young Lion” among them) and “Hope” is no different.

But there’s a minor key quality to it now (read: the song is in minor key), the narrator aiming for some kind of hard-won, non-’Lasso’ earnestness after an album of wading through dirty snow. Hope is always there, however hard it can be to give it to yourself.

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LOOK: A sketch I made on my 2-year-old niece’s erasable art tablet

The above work is entitled “Impermanence (Groove),” which feels appropriate considering my niece used the trash button to erase it almost immediately. Oh, but when I erase her stuff, she cries to her gd parents? My next work will be entitled “Double Standard (Snowflake)” and it WILL be locked for paid readers.

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PONDER: The Robot-ification of Mickey D’s

About a month ago, my phone encouraged me to journal about McDonald’s.

First of all, how dare you. Second, fine, here goes:

I’m guessing it’s unlikely that you, the casual Lifting Fog reader, have spent much time inside a fast food joint these past few years. COVID flipped in-house dining upside-down, obviously, but even before that — not the most inviting spaces, you know? If you’re gonna sit down, do it at an actual restaurant; McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, I think we might all agree these are better experienced through comfort of your car. Or have it delivered! That’s an option, too, if you prefer your fast food lukewarm, with a 20% up-charge.

Me, I just can’t keep my ass out of the Golden Arches. Am I thrilled at the Mickey D’s numbers I continue to put up well into my 30s, so much so that my phone is now roasting me with them? No! Most of these stops I justify as Lyfting bathroom breaks, where I’ll have you know I only occasionally order a Spicy McCrispy chicken sandwich. But the point remains: I’m… familiar with the house that Ronald McDonald built⁶. SO familiar, in fact, that I’ve been there, physically there, watching these spaces transform into something unrecognizable in almost real-time.

It starts, as most things do, with a touchscreen. Increasingly, McDonald’s keeps the registers unstaffed. Employees are back there, obviously, many/most focused on drive-thru orders, but the lack of front-facing staff not-so-subtly steers you to the (massive) touchscreens, designed to mimic the UI of the McDonald’s app. Endless customization! Points! Rewards! Cash isn’t forbidden — you can take your printed receipt to the register and pay there — but certainly disincentivized. Remember how there’s no one at the counter? If you want to pay cash, you might as well be ringing a bell to do so.

The guiding principle here is of course “efficiency,” re-allocating resources (…including human employees) to where they might provide the quickest service. But I don’t know — wasn’t it easy enough to walk up to the register, tell someone you wanted a cheeseburger, and then pay them for the cheeseburger? By the time you’ve undertaken the same task via touchscreen, you’ve clicked at least 37 times and scanned your phone. Oh, and you’ve taken a table number, which the employees no longer working the register now use to deliver your food. At a McDonald’s. Where, it should be said, you are encouraged to GTFO ASAP.

Far be it for me to romanticize fucking MCDONALD’S but, like, none of these vibes feel right!

SIDE NOTE: Underscoring a lot of these bad vibes seems, to me anyway, a pretty clear anti-homeless initiative. As more and more… I guess we’ll say housed people, certainly car drivers have taken to either drive-thru or delivery over the years, fast food restaurants have become one of the few places homeless people can sit for any length of time. But guess who, statistically, have less access to smart phones or credit cards?

I see more and more Waymo cars on the streets of Los Angeles, driver-less vehicles that more often than not don’t have any passengers in them, either, not unlike the buildings that lay unfinished (and awe-inspiringly tagged, IMO) downtown, a slap in the face to one of the biggest unhoused populations in the country, blocks away. We’re architecting a future that barely works, and when it does work only further isolates us from each other, all in the name of seamlessness or whatever. We’re creating spaces for nobody; restaurants for ghosts. Who, aside from the Silicon Valley set, actually wants that? Maybe Zuckerberg is into that shit, but NOT me.

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WATCH: This guy changed a flat tire in an emergency situation and we have to stan

Clearly Lifting Fog is in an experimental mood today, and I’m going to keep that up here — showing you something with sexy video instead of telling you with creepy words. Maybe I’m just trying to get comfortable deploying the HBF face card; maybe I’m lazy. Maybe both! I have nothing to add to the below account except to say my ability to change a tire is, perhaps, my only true transferrable skill.

“I am very rarely a… font of unflappability, but in this one very specific avenue of my life, I know exactly what the hell I’m doing.”

1. and, I’m assuming… loved 🥰

2. “Lifting Fog: 20% movie reviews!”

3. Until I stop doing it

4. but not pop-punky!! This isn’t Blink-182 (who I also love)

5. Which nevertheless produced perfect songs ‘How Long?’, ‘Bambina’, and remains the only album I’ve ever listened to that samples the Melanesian choir from ‘The Thin Red Line’. So there’s that!

6. not to be confused with the, umm, Ronald McDonald House