Photo courtesy of the author

Gillian Goodman on selling baby food, and the American dream.

⭐ This story was the winner of our “the way we work” essay contest in collaboration with Lux. This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. ⭐

It was dark when I reached hour ten of casting the babies. The auditions came one after the other in a steady loop. “Nice eyes,” I said, nodding to the screen, “But the head. Is the shape right?” 

My art director shrugged. We didn’t have to worry about offending the talent—none of them could hear us. They were in Canada, delivered to us on a large monitor. Babies in the United States are unionized and, therefore, less budget-friendly. So we usually outsourced the babies—casting in Mexico, Poland, or in this case, Toronto, where actors under two were less likely to have a SAG card. Our advertising agency was tasked with the almost religious duty of selecting Gerber babies, and I had been involved in that process for four years, ever since I joined the agency in 2018. 

Besides casting babies, my job was to write these campaigns and their associated social media ads, billboards, and television commercials—more writing than you’d expect given the talent can’t talk. 

I still have my casting notes from this time. The most cutting comments, like which babies might have weird feet or a drooping lip, were never recorded. We didn’t need to write those down—those babies were never getting the gig. But for our favorite babies, we noted their strengths, pried into their weaknesses, and gathered ammunition for the eventual negotiation between the agency, the director, and the clients:

Laniyah: Not great self-feeder, but the LICKS. 

Ethan: I’m pro-bald.

Ivy: Good feeder, but not convinced on the look

There’s an unwritten rule in baby commercials that you never put the babies in socks. Their little feet are too cute to be covered up. So of course, I was also scanning for any malformed toes. Almost all the talent was fine in this category. 

Baby commercials are about families, and families are about mothers. When the strategy departments in my agency descended on the creatives to kick off a new campaign, they came armed with data about the consumers we were speaking to. Women were unilaterally the decision-makers in the baby category, and that influence correlated directly to profits. The agency created mother “personas”—strategic frameworks for our typical consumers. They gave these mothers names like Caitlyn and calculated which other brands they liked, where they went to school, what excited and agitated them. Women determined what was aspirational and, therefore, what was purchased. 

SEASONAL READS

Aug 27, 2025 Life and death at Balthazar

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Oct 19, 2022 On Spookiness

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Oct 19, 2023 Celebrity Death

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Oct 27, 2023 Straitjacket fashion

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Dec 15, 2023 How much wood?

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Jan 31, 2024 Rewatching Deadwood

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Source

Daisy Alioto introduces our October issue.

Hello, and welcome to Dirt’s second monthly issue, an experiment in consolidating your attention. We have four stories, one in each category: Entertainment, Technology, Culture and Collecting.

More about Dirt Media here 👁️‍🗨️

If you’re looking for quick hits from Dirt Media, Clone is an hourly glance at our open tabs, with an audio integration that lets you listen to our affiliated podcasts. Later this month we’ll launch Creative Complaint, hosted by Dani Loftus. It’s a podcast about taste informed by distaste.

Artwork by Dominique Saiegh

Two of the pieces in this issue were commissioned and edited in collaboration with Are.na, a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge. Are.na is a place to save content, create collections over time and connect ideas. Privately or with other people.

In this issue, Are.na’s cofounder and CEO Charles Broskoski (aka Cab) draws on the film You’ve Got Mail to talk about why business is personal after all. “A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic,” he writes.

“Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so,” he continues. Like Cab, I am not very money motivated. It seems to me that the best reason to accumulate cultural power is to redistribute opportunities to people with talent. Money can’t buy you taste, but it is often the price of survival.

I thought about this delicate negotiation as I read Ruby Justice Thelot’s tribute to the Hedi (Slimane) Boy. “On cooler evenings, I layered a distressed wool cardigan and a midnight blue scarf. I was, in my mind, the sexiest man alive.” I thought about this negotiation as I wrote about two wonderful new novels on marriage and infidelity. From Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory:  "He wanted to divorce her so they could meet by chance ten years from now and do everything they'd ever done a second time."

Taste and money. Money and taste. Where would we be without them? Perhaps back in the era of Factory Pomo, a short-lived, but influential, aesthetic of the Information Age. Design nerds will love reading Evan Collins’ deep dive into this design history, which rounds out this October issue.

Enjoy!!!

TECHNOLOGY

Personal Business

Charles Broskoski on building a company that doesn’t fake sincerity.

The last time I watched You’ve Got Mail, I shed a tear. Not for the love story (definitely not), but for the large portion of the movie dedicated to the respective businesses of Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (played by Tom Hanks).

If you haven’t seen You’ve Got Mail, I’m really very happy to outline it for you.

Kathleen Kelly runs a small independent bookstore she inherited from her mother called The Shop Around the Corner (a reference to a 1940 movie of the same name, which You’ve Got Mail is based on). The Shop Around the Corner is a children’s bookstore with large windows, good lighting, and at least four employees. It has an enthusiastic customer base and a strong community, where everyone knows each other’s name. Kathleen Kelly sees books—and, by extension, her shop—as a vehicle to help people discover who they really are. 

Joe Fox runs a different variety of book store called Fox Books, which is more like a combination of Barnes & Noble and Walmart, in so far as it’s a big corporation controlled by a single family. The word “discount” is thrown around a lot, but they also talk about cappuccinos and big comfy chairs. There’s a scene where Kathleen Kelly, in an effort to see what the competition is like, enters the store and witnesses a customer inconvenience an employee with a fuzzy query about a book. As the employee struggles to answer, she steps in with expert guidance. Joe Fox, in contrast to Kathleen Kelly, seems to not really care about books in particular. For the Fox family, books are just a vehicle for profit. Their goal is not just to become the biggest bookstore, it’s to become the only bookstore.

COLLECTING

Hedi Boys

Ruby Justice Thelot on growing in and out of Slimane.

In the summer of 2018, I set out to be the sexiest man alive. Every day, I ventured into the streets of Toronto to observe the vagations of a wide range of men discovering or, in some instances, affirming their own sex appeal. I developed a taxonomy of male sexiness across four axes.

Outside of the chart was the abyss, or a complete lack: the hunched shoulders, the ill-fitting clothes, eyes angled towards the pavement, the definition of “Not It”. Then, there was cocaine-core: think Tony Montana, white suit, shirt unbuttoned, collar worn boldly over the jacket’s lapel. There was Sopranos-core: picture a velvet tracksuit worn in New Jersey’s best suburbs, a middle-aged confidence, dabbed with opulent jewelry, the floral-laden Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt. There was also Kramer-core: imagine a man in a luxurious shearling jacket layered atop a quirky lobster shirt, an irreverent self-assuredness, the gait of a “hipster doofus” (in the words of Elaine).

ENTERTAINMENT

The Reconciliation Plot

Daisy Alioto on two new novels in which marriage survives an affair.

I remember sitting by the lake when my friend told me his father had left their family, placing his wedding band on the kitchen counter. When his father came back, he denied ever doing that. To me this story represented the mystery of adults—it still does.

We are at the tail end of a series of divorce novels, the most memorable of which are thinly veiled autofiction. Nested inside the divorce novel is the open marriage plot or perhaps the affair plot, like a house inside another house (a friend’s version of the secret room dream). 

Some of these books even speak to each other. In Liars by Sarah Manguso, the narrator throws bricks at the concrete wall in her yard to cope after her husband leaves her for a family friend. This affair is preceded by years of what the narrator comes to admit to herself was mistreatment (hence, Liars). 

“Before I could write, before I could even speak…I threw bricks. And so I wrote on that wall the first document of my rage.” In the non-fiction half of The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (which also begins with an act of betrayal) we get this brick-throwing ritual from another angle when Lacey goes to visit Manguso: “We took turns throwing them that morning, then she watched me, newer to the wreckage, commenting on my form, handing me brick after brick.” 

Now, a new slate of books has entered the literary fray, ones with affairs that don’t end in divorces. Most notably, Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian and The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers. They fall in to what I am calling the Reconciliation Plot. A category of novel that asks: What if the affair was, to the continuous marriage, simply, a house inside another house?

CULTURE

The Brief Reign of Factory Pomo

Evan Collins on forging an aesthetic of the Information Age.

In the early 1990s, the now-defunct technology distribution company Access Graphics released a brochure promoting their “Ultimedia Tools Series,” a media and digital design software package. For a cutting edge product in an emerging field, the brochure’s graphic design was surprisingly retro: On the cover, a burly factory worker “forges” CDs, letters, film strips, and music notes as if he’s metalworking. The style is reminiscent of Depression-era WPA posters and Diego Rivera murals, and the typeface follows suit—the tall, closely-spaced lettering with heavy slab serifs look almost like metal signage on a factory’s exterior. 

Inside the brochure, CDs merge with gears while technical arrows and jagged, sharp forms are overlaid onto simple figures similar to those seen in commercial illustration of the time. As a piece of design, this brochure is pure “Factory Pomo,” a short-lived aesthetic in the 1980s and 1990s associated with the transition into the Information Age and the integration of personal computing into our everyday lives.

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Personal Business and Factory POMO were edited by Meg Miller. Hedi Boys was edited by Ross Scarano.

“The Fox and the Pomegranate” by Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto introduces our September issue.

Hello, and welcome to Dirt’s first monthly issue, an experiment in consolidating your attention. We have four stories, one in each category: Entertainment, Technology, Culture and Collecting.

If you’re looking for quick hits from Dirt Media, Clone is an hourly glance at our open tabs, with a new audio integration that lets you listen to Tasteland and the latest livestream from our friends at Boys Club while you scroll.

More info on our other media properties here 👁️‍🗨️

This issue doesn’t really have a theme, although this line from Louise Glück has been rattling around in my brain: “I acquitted myself, but I moved like a sleepwalker.” She’s talking about love, or something like it. I’m wondering whether we are sleepwalking into another culture war. Whether it’s possible to be passionate about the internet without turning into a zombie.

The pieces in this issue involve questions of passion or lack thereof. Emily Jensen’s exploration of matcha notes in perfume begins with the stupefying overheard line: “It’s like coffee, but matcha.” Francis Zierer asks if farmers and venture capitalists can ever be bedfellows. Zach Schonfeld reports that the dream of smooth jazz is alive in Toronto and Madeleine Adams reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man: “No ketamine autofiction, no chronic masturbation, no braindead posts as sentences.”

We recommend reading everything in one sitting. But first, a word from our sponsor.

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ENTERTAINMENT

Kaputt-core

Zach Schonfeld on the Toronto indie scene that's making smooth-jazz sound radical.

In the late 2000s, Joseph Shabason was, by his own account, a self-loathing saxophonist. The multi-instrumentalist had studied jazz performance at the University of Toronto, but now he wanted nothing to do with the genre. He yearned to be in a successful band and play cool festivals. “I thought jazz was this thing that was stale and dead and not vital,” Shabason says. “The way forward was to go and play pop music.”

Then Dan Bejar, lead singer of Destroyer, invited him to play on the Canadian band’s landmark 2011 album, Kaputt. Bejar asked him to bring his saxophone to the studio, Shabason recalls, “and then essentially got me to improvise for, like, three hours.”

When Kaputt came out, it was unlike any previous Destroyer album: a glossy immersion in the jazz-rock and sophisti-pop textures of the 1980s. It sounded perversely, irresistibly slick, like its creators had found a Midnight in Paris-esque portal that lets you snort cocaine with Roxy Music in 1982, and Shabason’s sultry sax solos were central to this new sound, luxuriating in the velvety grooves of tunes like “Downtown” and “Song for America.”

TECHNOLOGY

Venture agriculturalism

Francis Zierer on farming returns.

There’s a romance to farming. Every yuppie has been party to a conversation about leaving whatever city behind and buying a farm. This romance is most often idle fantasy: The United States has lost some 286,780 farms since the turn of the century—a 13.2% total loss.

My family are farmers. I grew up on a small farm in Northern California, which is still my 70-plus-year-old parents’ sole source of income. It’s around eight acres and employee count (besides them) peaks around five in the spring-summer growing season. They’ve been in the field for over 40 years. Since the early 2000s, their annual “gross cash farm income” (GCFI) has usually landed them in midsize family farm status (between $350,000 and $1 million), sometimes dipping into the smaller tier.

According to a 2021 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, small family farms—smallholdings—make up 89% of American farms. The USDA defines this category by income: a small family farm has a GCFI less than $350,000. Small family farms make up 45% of agricultural land and contribute 18% of national production value. 

Large-scale family farms ($1 million-plus GCFI) make up 3% of all farms nationally, use 27% of agricultural land, and contribute 46% of production value. Nonfamily farms make up 2% of farms, 10% of agricultural land, and 17% of production value—the smallest share in all three categories, though with an outsize production contribution rate.

I once asked my parents why they became farmers: because that’s what they were doing when they decided to get married and start a family. Baby on the way; need to feed and clothe it.

CULTURE

Muscle meme

Madeleine Adams on Jordan Castro.

In Muscle Man, out now from Catapult, Jordan Castro burrows into the muscled mind of a Dostoevskian malcontent. Castro’s protagonist Harold is an English professor at fictional Shepherd College who likes three things: lifting, literature, and his lifting buddy Casey, who also happens to be his only friend in the department.

Harold is Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov if he lurked on weightlifting meme accounts. “Power,” says Raskolnikov, “is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it.” Change “stoop” to “deadlift” and you have Harold’s philosophy. Smuggling a half-serious body fascist manifesto into an uncanny thriller, Castro produces a “sincere” satire in the tradition of novelist, bodybuilder, and ultranationalist Yukio Mishima.

Harold’s resentment feeds on imagined conflict, recalling Dostoevsky’s creations—the embittered “Underground Man” of Notes from Underground and the scheming Raskolnikov. Like them, Harold embodies ressentiment, the condition described by critic René Girard—Peter Thiel’s former teacher and a frequent touchstone in Castro’s essays—whose work on the “underground man” also surfaces in Muscle Man. As in Girard’s reading, Harold is a thwarted romantic, soured by envy and paralyzed in action.

Before the faculty meeting that takes up the first half of the novel, Harold does take a sort of action: a glinting object he sees in the hallway near the meeting appears to be a knife. When he steals an unattended backpack that he thinks contains the knife, the reader begins to wonder whether Harold’s paranoia is justified. But there has been a spate of stabbings on campus, reframed by “ALERT TO INSPIRE” emails as “opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand each other.” The wannabe Übermensch professor isn’t Muscle Man’s only target of satire. The nanny-state liberal arts college, in fact, holds much of the blame.

COLLECTING 

Matcha madness

Emily Jensen on matcha in the perfume aisle.

In 2018, I was having my lunch at the Soho Dig Inn and doing what many pre-Covid Manhattan office workers did on their lunch break: eating my $20 slop bowl while eavesdropping on the tables next to me. Seated to my left were a man and a woman who seemed to be on the acquaintance side of the friendship spectrum, so naturally I was all ears trying to understand the nature of their relationship. She was telling him about how hard it was to eat raw in a world committed to the tyranny of cooked, a.k.a. toxic, food before she invited him to a matcha at the MatchaBar downstairs. He did not know what matcha was.

“It’s like coffee,” she explained, “but matcha.”

I was both stumped and fascinated by the simplicity of her explanation which both did nothing to elucidate what in fact matcha is, while also succinctly hitting on all you really need to know to understand matcha’s appeal—at least the kind of matcha they were serving at the Soho MatchaBar in 2018.

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Additional illustrations by Kyle Knapp

Artwork by Christine Shan Shan Hou

Amelia Granger on the 2006 event that still haunts her.

One night during dinner rush, I heard the phone ring below the host stand. Our landline phone didn’t ring often.  

“Hello, Balthazar.” I said, plugging my other ear with my finger to drown out the dining room hubbub that ricocheted off our tile floor. Calls to the restaurant usually went to reservations. But occasionally reservations would call us to give us a heads up about a major VIP emergency, like Stevie Wonder coming with 11 people in five minutes.  

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then a pained British voice replied: “It’s Balthazar. Not Balthazar’s.”  

I knew instantly who was calling: it was Keith McNally, the owner. The grouchy impresario who made this room the vortex of fame and flash that it was, especially in those heady, early-2000s days.  

I froze. How should I answer? I had said the restaurant’s name correctly, but some stray syllable of the cacophony swirling around me must have distorted my words, making me appear to have fucked up—even if, for once, I had not.  

“Um, I said ‘Balthazar’,” I answered, desperately hoping my tone conveyed reassurance, and not back talk. 

“You need to be careful, yeah? It’s important.” 

“Of course.” I said, chastened.  

“Let me speak to the maître d’,” he said. I passed him off with relief to someone who was paid to think, unlike me, who was just an 18-year-old girl paid to help people sit down.  

It was clear to me that I was just a detail of the scene Keith McNally had created, no more individual or important than any other. We were all parts that added up to a sleek and impressive whole: the ruby red leather of the banquettes, the buttery yellow of the walls, the cascade of a flower arrangement by the windows, the seafood towers with their crushed ice and crustaceans, and me.  Though I didn’t feel beautiful compared to the other hostesses, I was young, thin and tall—meeting the requirements of the job, as far as I could tell.

Even now, more than 20 years later, and post-MeToo and everything else, I see McNally giving a quote to a magazine about how expensive it is to buy out Balthazar for a party. After listing off some impressive sums, he quipped: “For $200,000, you can go home with one of my servers.” We were ornaments: not quite human, ripe for humiliation.  

The fact that I found myself working at Balthazar at all was unlikely. When I got the job, I’d moved to New York City from Michigan just a few months before to go to The New School. My plans for my future were vague, but I steered myself towards the dream of living in the city and becoming a writer. It wasn’t that I imagined I would find some kind of literary scene, so much as I believed the city was the most fascinating subject, and I wanted to soak it all up.

During my first few weeks living in the New School dorms, I’d gotten myself a job stocking CDs at the Union Square Virgin Megastore. But then the older sister of a guy I played in a band with got me hired at Balthazar. I quit the Megastore mid-shift, ditching dusting jewel cases and watching people shoplift to start making $12 an hour, plus tips (bribes people gave us for tables). I was suddenly in a room, night after night, with people like Bono, Anna Wintour, Bruce Springsteen, and too many more A-listers and power players to remember. Not to mention the people I shudder to remember when their names pop up in the news: Diddy, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein. 

The glitziness of Balthazar left me feeling disoriented and lost, like I was just a pair of eyes floating over the busy dining room. The other hostesses were doing things like playing unreliable witnesses on Law & Order, or going on tour as an understudy for the hot new musical Wicked, or being the subject of obsessive and creepy affections from Moby. That was the kind of person who was meant to have this job: professional actresses, models, or heartbreakers. 

OUR TENNIS READING LIST

May 15, 2025 In defense of the underhand serve

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Mar 26, 2025 The Djokovicverse

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Sep 11, 2023 TennisTok

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Jan 27, 2025 Social game

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Jun 27, 2025 Pope Leo serves

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Jan 31, 2025 Attack racket

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Miri Gordis on Materialists, Too Much and alienated women. This post is syndicated from Small Wire.

Early on in 3 Women by Robert Altman (1977), Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek decide to become roommates. They work together at a health spa and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) has developed a hopeless infatuation with Milly (Shelley Duvall). As Milly drives her home, Pinky wonders what it would be like to have a twin: would you know which one you are? What if you got confused? What if you woke up one day and decided to switch your identity the way you change your dress? Milly is annoyed by the line of questioning. When Pinky reveals that her real name, like Milly’s, is Mildred, Milly snaps at her as if she has committed an unimaginable sin. 

Milly seems to live in her own sheltered fantasy world. She reads lifestyle magazines religiously, dresses glamorously, and imparts breathless wisdom on how to do things like make a tuna melt. She is convinced that every man around her is in love with her even though they all mock her behind her back. Her life is studiously picture perfect, in its specific ‘70s Southern California, lower middle class kind of way. But she is socially awkward, impersonal, and hopelessly self-involved. She cannot break out of her shell long enough to really talk to anyone else, let alone listen.

Pinky idolizes Milly but she is in many ways her opposite. She is a pupil of other people, intimately attuned to their quirks and mannerisms and to what makes them likable. When she develops amnesia and takes on Milly’s identity, she instantly conquers the neighborhood in much the way Milly imagines herself doing. Much has been made in criticism about the film of the ways the women rotate through more submissive and more dominant roles, but perhaps the largest difference between Pinky and Milly is that Pinky models herself after other people while Milly models herself after magazines, their lifeless counterpart.

Milly’s particular kind of strangeness portends something about our present world. It is not especially rare anymore to meet someone who seems to have drawn all their ideas about how to be in the world from media consumption. It is a morbid symptom of our chronically online and disconnected world. A few weeks ago, crossing Houston Street in Manhattan, I saw an amateur photoshoot happening in the middle of the street, ignoring the repeated blare of an ambulance waiting to turn. On social media, cookie cutter fashion, uncanny valley plastic surgery, and ridiculous standards for interpersonal communication are generally a ticket to success. In the real world, they read more as bizarre and delusional, even embarrassing.

I thought about this, and about Milly, when I was watching Celine Song’s Materialists over the summer. It is a film that is so wholly drawn from an anxious TikTok scroll that it washed over me like a blurry, vaguely offensive haze. It seemed fitting that Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova was cast in it, in a totally unmemorable and unnecessary role, like a nod to the dating discourse obsessed viewer for whom it is intended. It feels like the artistic equivalent of a Milly, a piece of media that is entirely modeled off of things you might see in a glossy and that is strangely out of step with the actual world.

Most strikingly, all the class signifiers feel slightly off. John (Chris Evans), one part of the film’s central love triangle, is a struggling stage actor in his late ‘30s, with a crippling commitment to artistic purity and no seeming interest in actual paid work. He lives in a shared apartment with a series of disgusting male roommates and works part-time shifts as a cater waiter. He comes off less as a poor person struggling to make it in a rich person’s industry, but hampered by the time suck and constraints of making a living, and more like Adam from Girls, who is snobbish about the theater and who gets monthly checks from his grandmother.

John’s romantic rival is Harry (Pedro Pascal), the wealthy businessman so concerned about his short stature that he apparently opted for disabling leg-lengthening surgery. It has worked out well for him. He can now date a whole range of women who would apparently not have previously considered him for his charming personality, otherwise good looks, and obscene wealth.

I would have wanted Lucy (Dakota Johnson) to cut off both of these men and walk off into the sunset alone at the end of the film, except that she was also so profoundly unlikeable. Her only quirk, which was in the first trailer I saw for the movie, was drinking beer and coke mixed as her drink of choice. What distinguishes the 19th century heroines who agitate for love over money from their materialistic peers is that they really earnestly believe in inherent human dignity. “Do you think,” Jane Eyre famously demands of Rochester, “because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennett have no choice but to marry or to live ignominiously, forever financially dependent on relatives. It is impossible to recreate the stakes of this in our contemporary world, which does not resemble Victorian England in this particular way. Marriage may still be a woman’s easiest route to financial stability, to life-changing healthcare access, or to the freedom and comfort to pursue artistic dreams, but it is generally not her only route and it does not have the same prevailing valence that it once did.

Materialists then is less a work of social critique and more a film entirely built out of received perceptions of the world. It treads the same thin, tired ground as Bridgerton, as regurgitated Austen fare, as Fifty Shades of Grey. It asks the pointless question: what if a billionaire threw himself at you but he was kind of messed up in the head and you didn’t really love him? Does any of this actually matter?

CLONE.FYI HEADLINES WE’RE FOLLOWING

• Won’t someone please think of the Groomzillas (Bustle)

• Laura Loomer and the limits of posting everything (The Verge)

• “The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic.” (The New Yorker)

• AI, Orality, and the Golden Age of Grift (Bloomberg)

• You can now lease an EV for less than $100 a month (Los Angeles Times)
  

Holly Beddingfield, editor of Capsule, on slipping through the cracks of two generations—with two very different media landscapes.

Over the past few years, trend forecasters and marketers have been obsessed with categorizing things as either Millennial (cringe) or Gen Z (cooler, depending on who you ask). Jeans are a big battleground: Millennial denim is skinny or straight leg, a style born out of striving for modernity and forward progression. By contrast, the Gen Z preference is low-slung, baggy, or embellished with 90s motifs, a callback to a time they romanticize as more analogue and somehow simpler.

The prevalence of this debate and its infiltration into marketing efforts means that most people know which generation they fall into, and a few of the core identifiers. We know that millennials love Harry Potter, remember 9/11, and had childhoods without cell phones or social media. Gen Z grew up in digital space, lived their formative years through a pandemic, and generally have a preference for messy authenticity. 

But for cuspers, or Zillennials, a microgeneration born between 1993-1998, the neat categorizations dissolve. Instead, we’re stuck in the awkward middle, arriving too late to properly contribute to Millennial culture, yet feeling too old to fully embrace Gen Z trends. Many of us spent our childhoods idolizing millennials, and had older siblings which made us feel like we got it. We watched millennials upload photo albums of nights out taken with point-and-shoot cameras and dutifully copied the aesthetic—peace signs and pouts galore—confined to our bedrooms or nearby parks because we were too young to actually go out. And when the pendulum swung to Gen Z dominance in recent years, much of it felt fresh and fun (watching Addison Rae on TikTok, customizing your bag with charms, resurrecting the digital camera to create nostalgia-flushed photos), but ultimately, a bit childish—something of a regression. 

It’s difficult to properly define Zillennial culture because brands and marketers have neglected it in favor of our sibling generations. To me, it’s growing up watching Hannah Montana but leaving the Disney Channel behind at the same time Miley did, and being sat for each release of the High School Musical films. It’s wearing American Apparel disco pants to house parties but not the club. It’s painting your face with Dream Matte Mousse as a teen before graduating to Glossier as a young adult. It’s listening to Lorde whilst being the same age as her and being the first money in on Phoebe Bridgers. It’s being too young for Sex and The City, slightly immature for Girls but still enjoying it, and engrossed by Broad City but cringing at the Hillary cameo. It’s Blackberry BBM before iMessage. It’s being the youngest girl in the Topshop fitting rooms and pretending to relate to Mean Girls before you get to high school.

Camouflaging oneself into neighboring generations is a distinctly Zillennial experience, especially when it comes to digital publishing. In 2010, when I was on the verge of turning 14, two platforms that would become important to my life debuted: Man Repeller and Instagram. Suddenly, the internet was my direct line to the American fashion journalism scene, with people writing about style, life, and culture in a way that felt utterly new—casual, sassy, smart, provocative. Man Repeller staff felt like the Big Sisters of the internet, going beyond the “in/out” declarations of most fashion media and instead teaching you how to think, not just what to think. 

For the next few years, I was obsessed with this world of magazines. Physical copies of NYLON and V magazine. Scrolling for hours on Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie mag. Bookmarking every article on Man Repeller, Broadly, The Pool, The Debrief, and xoJane. The early days of The Cut, one of the only digital outlets from the 2010s era that has survived. I found articles by directly typing in the URL, or clicking a link from the author on Twitter, who I reliably followed. Although I didn’t have this language for it at the time, my favorite writers were using platforms like Twitter to build their personal brands in collaboration with the masthead they fell under.

I was younger than the target audience of most of these publications, but it felt right for me to be reading them, like prepping for a future self. I would write quotes I liked from articles on flash cards (I remember one distinctly: “Notice the traits you like in other people, and use these to think about the type of person you’d like to be yourself”), treating them as a mini Bible that coached me through my teenage years. 

Like they did for thousands of girls my age, these publications, alongside reality TV shows like The Hills and The City, made me want to work in digital media. This desire pushed me towards an English degree, and compelled me to start a Blogspot blog where I could compile evidence of my writing to show a future employer. 

But by the time I graduated in 2018, most of the outlets that inspired me as a teenager were gone. Website archives either stayed live for a few months with an ominous “this site is no longer being updated” banner or, worse, disappeared overnight. I’d also witnessed dozens of rounds of layoffs at the publications that somehow survived, and watched the general mood on Twitter shift from “check out my work” to “we’re all doomed.” I’d grown up hearing that print media was dying, but digital would be eternal, that the internet was forever. Before long, though, digital was failing too. I entered the job market facing a real scarcity of positions, and found that most junior roles demanded impossible experience. 

The nail in the coffin came in 2020. The pandemic accelerated the trend of media layoffs and outlets closing. There was also the great reckoning of (white) women’s media in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and nationwide demonstrations in the U.S., which ultimately led to Man Repeller’s closure (founder Leandra Medine was criticized for her publication’s lack of diversity and laying off Black employees). And of course, the rise of TikTok, fracturing attention spans and deprioritizing the written word. The Millennial media era of the 2010s (article-focused, masthead-driven, fostering writers' personal brands within an editorial structure) felt definitively over. 

Suddenly, everything was about Gen Z: short-form video, solo creators, microtrends. Millennials were now in their 30s, and Zoomers were shaping the next wave of culture. Gen Zers even started using TikTok to poke fun at Millennial culture (see: side parts and the “millennial pause”). To cope, millennials who’d started in digital publishing migrated their audiences over to Substack, with many building financially-stable media brands of their own without the infrastructure of traditional outlets (Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby, Hunter Harris’s Hung Up). Gen Z creators began their own direct relationships with their audiences through TikTok and YouTube. (Mr. Beast and Emma Chamberlain were already popular at this point.)

But for those of us sitting at the cusp of two generations, everything felt awkward. Too late for the media golden age we were raised on, too old to be throwing it back on camera or making get ready with me videos. There was a sense of grief, too. Losing a publication wasn't just losing content; it was losing that curated constellation of voices talking to each other and to us, under a shared banner. They reflected a specific sensibility and created places for people who shared that sensibility to engage with the world. When they vanished, it felt like a part of that identity and the cultural touchstones that helped define our cohort vanished too.

One of the hardest blows was the realization that the dream these publications inspired—a fulfilling career in digital media, shaping culture, writing essays that mattered—was largely built on shaky ground. The collapses and endless layoffs suggested the path we'd been preparing for didn't really exist, or at least not in the form we'd imagined. We discovered that the adult world was harsher and more precarious than the glossy pages and sharp voices had led us to believe.

Much of the writing on Substack is excellent, and the levity of TikTok culture cuts through the stodgy formalism of traditional media. But a media landscape made up of either legacy players or direct-to-reader relationships poses other problems. Substack allows individual voices to thrive, but it atomizes the conversation. The shared context, the editorial frame, and the accidental discovery of a new favorite writer within a trusted publication is much harder to replicate.

This atomization also poses issues for creators: reader algorithms can be so different that only the top writers are paid well. Siloed discovery results in fewer opportunities to connect over media, which Millennial-era sites were particularly good for. Man Repeller worked because there was space for each writer to carve out their own niche or personality, but they all huddled together under a shared general philosophy. The current landscape fosters individual brands but weakens the connective tissue of a shared media culture. 

And there’s the looming worry about how stable it all is. On Substack and other creator platforms, writers depend on readers for revenue, be it from their paid monthly subscriptions or affiliate links, and there’s no guaranteed monthly salary if it starts to dwindle. The precarity feels very real when some Substackers struggle to take maternity leave or worry more about pausing the flow of content than they would in traditional employment. And although media outlets like New York Magazine and brands like TheRealReal and American Eagle have recently joined the platform, “successful Substacker” isn’t really a job young writers who are starting out can apply to. 

The siloed algorithm experience of today also mirrors what’s happening with AI adoption. Millennials currently show a greater overall comfort and understanding of AI, especially in a professional context, and are more actively driving its adoption and integration into their work lives. Gen Zers are more skeptical: while they are more likely to use AI for creative means, they are also more fearful about job security and being replaced. Gen Z and now Gen Alpha also see AI more like an education tool, the thing they use to speed up homework and reach word counts in a quicker time frame. We await the full impact of this shift, but early signals (like the type of quick-hit content that goes viral on TikTok) suggest that the next generation may not prize essay writing or deep reading in the same way cuspers or millennials do. 

As Embedded recently summarized: “it’s not lonely Gen Zers who are championing AI use. It’s burned-out millennials.” As you might expect, the Zillennial experience is somewhere in the middle. We dabble in doomerism and don’t love the idea of AI replacing creatives, but because we’ve entered adulthood and the workplace before widespread AI adoption, we feel more equipped to cope with a transition. Many of us are already part of companies using AI, so the question is not whether we should use it but how. 

Forget jeans; our relationship to AI delivers the ultimate metaphor for being a cusper: a constant negotiation of what came before and what is emerging. From navigating the volatility of digital media to forging an identity in a cultural landscape that has disillusioned and overlooked us, cuspers are adept at existing in liminal space. But when you’re raised without rigid divides or established norms, you become skilled at inventing your own. The more I think about it, the more I see that the Zillennial experience is exactly that: an attempt to fill a gap. 🕳️

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Artwork by Greta Rainbow

Ben Firke on the Twin Peaks drapes that reveal the organizing principle of David Lynch’s work.

This is the fourth in a series of dispatches called Peak Objects, from Dirt x MUBI. Authors writing about a single object of their choice from the world of Twin Peaks. Prior dispatches were by Terry Nguyen, Geoff Rickly and Isle McElroy.

To understand Twin Peaks, you have to start with the curtains. They’re the most iconic draperies in television history. They’ve been parodied on The Simpsons and Scooby-Doo! and Joe Rogan’s red-curtained set has drawn comparisons to the Red Room. 

Like much of David Lynch’s imagery, it would be easy to over-interpret the red curtains. Perhaps they simply look cool. Lynch liked drapes on a basic aesthetic level and used them over and over in his work (Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet). With their texture and color they appear both soft and rigid—a painterly quality that doesn’t eat up too much of the set design budget. One could stop there if one wants. 

But the curtains resonated with audiences because of their context within the show. They’re not just red curtains—they’re the backdrop to some of the most important scenes and dialogue. So beyond their basic aesthetic appeal, the curtains must say or mean something. Right? 

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SPONSORED BY MUBI

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking TWIN PEAKS, the complete original series plus its 2017 follow-up THE RETURN are now available for the first time on MUBI. Dirt readers get two months free to enjoy this show, plus everything else streaming on the platform for incredible cinema. Start watching here.

Lying just five miles south of the Canadian border, and twelve miles west of the state line, is a sleepy little town filled with intriguing characters, a damn fine cup of coffee, and cherry pie so sweet it’ll kill you. While you’re visiting, you may ask yourself, “Who killed Laura Palmer? Is it all a dream? Or are the owls really not what they seem…” Welcome to the town of Twin Peaks.

Since DL’s films often contain dreamlike imagery and logic, a psychoanalytic approach may help us. There’s even an entire book of essays called Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain. Maybe it’s all a simple metaphor, signifying that “far beyond appearances lies a hidden reality.” (Page xxii.) This fits with the hidden desires, secrets, and truths that Lynch’s characters are inexorably drawn to figure out. 

However, Jamie Ruers and Stefan Marianski, the editors of the book, warn us that Lynch shouldn’t be reduced to lazy Freudian tropes: “Although there is nothing behind it, the curtain engages each of us as spectators with the traces of our own peculiar nothing: a nothing which enables us to find and lose ourselves in Lynch’s films, just as we do in the analytic transference.” 

Another possible interpretation is the “imageless image,” as posed in Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape by the podcasting collective Acid Horizon. The TL;DR definition of this term is “an image that’s not reducible to a simple metaphor.” It signifies nothing but itself. Instead of searching for meaning, we should look at what the image is doing, and consider it as more than a static object. (Page 182.) This is a better approach than simple metaphorical analysis, because it lets us examine these objects within the context of the story, and not as curtains in general.

So what do the curtains do? Simply put, they hide things, until Cooper or another character pulls them aside. This action is simultaneously another action, an attempt to answer the question, “Hey, what’s behind this damn curtain?” In the second episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, Coop pulls them aside to reveal a room with more curtains. And then another one. What’s behind this damn curtain? It’s curtains all the way down… 

This fruitless questioning—this method, as FBI Agent Rosenfield would say—encapsulates the experiences of both the characters and the audience. As they (and we) learn about the Laura Palmer case, the town residents, and the arcane secrets of the FBI, each new revelation fails to truly satisfy us, leading to even more wonder and curiosity and, yes, questions. The series even ends with Cooper asking a question (“What year is it?”) and receiving no answer. For every thread that’s resolved, two more become undone.

The curtains aren’t really props or set pieces. They are a process of discovery, of looking closer, searching for answers and finding none. And yet, like Agent Cooper, we keep on pulling them back, knowing there’s nothing but another sea of red behind them. They are a demonstration of Lynch’s world, both inside the story and out.

Here, we finally understand David Lynch’s entire game. Pull back a curtain; find a new one. That’s both human existence and Lynch in a nutshell. “It is happening again,” indeed. We will never find the answers we want, but must look anyway. Who cares about meaning? We can’t stop looking, and that’s the point.

OBJECTION

Nov 20, 2024 The Sleep Mask

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Oct 17, 2024 The Sanrio Machete

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Oct 3, 2024 The Bakelite Bag

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Oct 31, 2024 The Fox Skull

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Nov 7, 2024 The Milk Pan

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Dani Loftus of This Outfit Does Not Exist on what happens when anyone can wear anything.

Envy tastes like stale milk. When I scroll through @sitabellan’s feed I taste it, and immediately understand why being stunned is colloquialized as gagging. Across Sita Abellán’s grid the multi-hyphenate techno-princess smizes through a pane of synthetic hair, dressed in clothes so outlandish that even her Uddenberg-coded contortions fail to eclipse them.

As an astrologically-fated attention seeker (I’m a Leo, duh) I’ve gleaned inspiration from Abellán for years. Yet her clothes still nudge my little green monster to skitter on screen by virtue of their inaccessibility. Haute couture, archive or custom, most of Abellán’s outfits cannot be bought—only gifted. But now a slew of virtual try-on technologies are upending fashion’s exclusivity in ways formerly unprecedented, by allowing anyone to wear anything online. 

This disruption ramped up late last year when ‘fash-tech’ (that’s fashion technology) startup Doji came to market with a slew of gloat-posts from invited beta-testers. The app allows users to create an AI likeness to try on real luxury products and eventually shop within the app. While it’s raised $14 million by selling the dream of increasing e-comm conversion rates, and reducing returns, Doji’s real appeal lies in its promise of digitally democratized glow-ups. 

By simply copy-pasting the URL of a fashion product into the app's expectant search bar you can dress your Doji avatar (a hotter version of you) in any fashion piece found on the internet. No matter if its physical counterpart is on a rail in Zendaya’s bathroom or swathed in tissue paper in the archives of The Met. 

When Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world back in 2011, few luxury execs expected to feel teeth in the back of their Prada blazers. Fashion is a notoriously hypocritical industry, embracing novelty-obsessed hacks while turning up its nose at true innovation. Fourteen years after Andreessen’s declaration, fashionistas love to wax lyrical about the importance of tangibility whilst intermediating the world through the latest iPhone camera. After all, once you cut through the propaganda that attributes fashion’s value to its craftsmanship, the viscid core of this $471 billion luxury industry is conveying clout.

Over the past decade, the resident anthropologists at LVMH and Kering have found that nothing powers the buy-share-repeat cycle like social media. “Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also in 2011. Rex Woodbury, who writes the weekly newsletter Digital Native, says Instagram’s deadly sin is Envy. 

At first, Instagram was every luxury CMO’s wet dream. Who wouldn’t want to leverage the putrid stench of aspiration to transfer the onus of image making from fashion creators to fashion consumers? Every insta-girly could become a sales assistant sans commission. As Ana Kinsella writes in her piece on flat fashion, “When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.” 

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A band. A myth. A brilliant mess.

Watch Alex Ross Perry’s PAVEMENTS now on MUBI.

From Alex Ross Perry, a wickedly inventive take on indie rock legends Pavement—part documentary, part mockumentary, part outright fabrication. Featuring the actual band alongside Joe Keery, Jason Schwartzman, and Tim Heidecker, this genre-scrambling experiment asks: what happens when nostalgia becomes performance, and performance becomes truth?

Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. Get a free month to watch here.

Then came COVID. When a pandemic plunged the world into a shared state of digital dependence, this focus on the image took an inauspicious turn. As isolated consumers went all in on buying clothing “on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions,” to paraphrase Kinsella, a host of designers realized that materiality no longer mattered. They proffered a new form of fashion, one that only existed digitally, known as Instagram Couture.

Charli XCX hard-launched Carolina Herrera’s foray into Instagram Couture in 2022. Scared shitless of the revolution to come, CH’s creative director Wes Gordon enlisted Vogue to publish a gushing interview about his collaboration with Tribute Brand that transformed the season’s look 45 into a piece of virtual fashion. 

Fortunately for Wes and co, the first crop of virtual clothes were not adequate challengers to their physical counterparts. For one thing, they were designed with digital tools, for digital natives, and so resembled balloons filled to burst, iridescent fins or upchucks of slime. For another, technological limitations hampered pieces with clear visual tells. An AR trouser leg disappearing mid-motion was akin to the misspellings on a shanzhai shirt bearing the slogan Dolce & Banana. 

Unfortunately for the 215,000+ LVMH employees who thought they were in the clear, Doji’s different. The pieces that elevate its AI avatars into an army of SSENSIFIED it-boys and girls are indiscernible from their physical counterparts. In his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin challenges such a reality. He argues that the mechanical reproduction of artworks diminishes their aura—the unique presence they hold in a particular time and place. 

Reproduced art is detached from tradition and ritual, shifting its value from cultic reverence to political utility. While mechanically created works lose the singular authenticity of the original, they are not entirely without value; instead, they represent a new mode of engagement with art in modern society, one that potentially democratizes access. 

Benjamin questioned whether there can be such a thing as “art for art’s sake” without eventually serving regressive ends. By the time Kinsella concludes her exploration of flat fashion, “fashion for fashion’s sake” becomes an appropriate diagnosis. But when apps like Doji jam exclusivity’s cogs with the wrench of digital abundance, what can still be described as fashion? Where are the gluten-free breadcrumbs leading the hordes of fashion victims to the safe havens that status builds? 

Right now I’m unsure. One possible answer: status accrues to curation, as in Daisy Alioto’s Taste Economy. The industry will laud those best at filtering through infinite digital closets to construct ‘a look’ in a franchise of Dress to Impress where the R15 doll is you. It would then be more appropriate to remark that taste is eating the world. 

Perhaps consumers will be pushed to become creators—upcycling with OpenAI (or even digitally thrifting) to ensure an original fit. We could see a future where IRL fashion experiences once again subsume images. A regression I envision beginning with Abellán blown up like a Macy’s balloon, her pixel flesh flushed with oxygen, her clothes distending to the crunch of a broken screen protector. 

If something similar to Robin Dunbar’s theory that humans can only have 150 meaningful relationships is applied to fashion, the opportunity cost of sharing our style—that Instagram has set to zero—will once again become a signal. And those we curate to ‘witness’ us will become as significant as the looks we pull. 👯‍♀️

Artwork by Greta Rainbow

Isle McElroy on Freddie Sykes’s gardening glove.

This is the third in a series of dispatches called Peak Objects, from Dirt x MUBI. Authors writing about a single object of their choice from the world of Twin Peaks. Prior dispatches were by Terry Nguyen and Geoff Rickly.

Near the end of the second episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, a young British man, Freddie Sykes, joins original Twin Peaks mainstay James Hurley for a drink at The Road House. The men stand side-by-side, looking out into the crowd. Freddie clutches a beer to his chest. On his free hand is a dark green gardening glove. The scene rushes away to the stage; The Chromatics perform through the credits. 

It requires a bit of an effort to notice the glove—I missed it the first two times I watched this episode. Freddie keeps his hand at his side; no one mentions the glove. It has the makings of a throwaway detail, the kind of specific but frivolous accessory that Lynch is so good at adding into his worlds. 

When the glove reappears, twelve episodes later, Freddie and James are sitting at the edge of a loading dock behind the Great Northern hotel, where the two men work as security guards. Freddie pinches a walnut between his gloved forefinger and thumb, gently squeezes. The walnut bursts into dust. He tries again. Same result. Freddie sighs, exasperated, as he wipes the dust off his pants. James opens the next one using a nutcracker and passes the nut into Freddie’s ungloved hand. The scene is unexpectedly tender, Freddie’s frustration especially moving. All this man wants is a walnut! 

James asks the question on everyone’s mind—what’s up with the glove? The quick version: One drunken night, Freddie was sucked into the sky, where he came face to face with the Fireman and was instructed to purchase a single green gardening glove from his local hardware store. The glove will give him the power of an enormous pile driver. Once he obtains it, he must go to Twin Peaks, where he will find his destiny.

The brilliance of this scene lies not in the story’s absurd metaphysical details. If you’ve hit episode 14 of The Return, you’ve seen far weirder things than drunk Londoners getting sucked into space by the Fireman. Rather, what makes this scene stand out—what makes it so remarkably Lynchian—are the mundane frustrations in Freddie’s story. 

Newsletter continues below 

SPONSORED BY MUBI

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking TWIN PEAKS, the complete original series plus its 2017 follow-up THE RETURN are now available for the first time on MUBI. Dirt readers get two months free to enjoy this show, plus everything else streaming on the platform for incredible cinema. Start watching here.

Lying just five miles south of the Canadian border, and twelve miles west of the state line, is a sleepy little town filled with intriguing characters, a damn fine cup of coffee, and cherry pie so sweet it’ll kill you. While you’re visiting, you may ask yourself, “Who killed Laura Palmer? Is it all a dream? Or are the owls really not what they seem…” Welcome to the town of Twin Peaks.

He finds the single glove at the hardware store, in an open package, exactly as the Fireman predicted—but the cashier won’t sell him the glove. What stands between Freddie and destiny is a salty cashier. What stands between Freddie and an unsalted walnut is destiny. The mundane and the transcendent are locked in standoffs, not as opposite forces but as coterminous forces, each one giving rise to each other. 

“Why you?” James asks Freddie, when he ends his story. Freddie asked the same thing to the Fireman. “Why not you?” the Fireman replied.

Watching this scene now, it offers an unintentional counterpoint to the ongoing John Wickification of Hollywood action films. In those movies, the everyman intent on living his life in peace is actually a secret assassin, attempting to put hundreds of murders behind him. Freddie is no assassin. He suffers not from a violent past but from a meaningless past congested with benders. He’s right to question what makes him worthy of the destiny foretold by the Fireman. 

After all, Freddie is a quintessential Lynchian everyman. He wants to do good. He is not a hero, because he isn’t acting out of an egotistical, singular force. He is a participant more than a leader, a “team player,” to borrow from sports cliches, staying ready to clobber Bob when the occasion arises. 

The occasion comes in the Twin Peaks police department. Bob, growling from inside a dense black orb, pinballs around Sheriff Truman’s office, and Freddie, begloved, is the only one capable of destroying the orb. This isn’t the first time we see Freddie using the glove. He attacks a man who goes after James, he uses it to knock out a corrupt cop. But this is the culmination of his destiny. And in the aftermath of this Manichean face-off, the story continues without him.

The glove is a symbol of Freddie’s humanity—that is, of what is most confounding and beautiful and silly about being alive. It’s silly that a garden glove is required to destroy the purest embodiment of evil. But for Lynch, silliness is not a sign of weakness or frivolity. The glove is a parallel object to Margaret Lanterman’s log. Both characters understand the importance of the objects they possess. Their objects are expressions of trust, which radiate outwardly as love. Through both the glove and the log, Freddie and Margaret—albeit through wildly different means—protect the people they care about. Why them? Because it could have been anyone, though it could not have been anyone else.

OBJECTION

Nov 20, 2024 The Sleep Mask

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Oct 17, 2024 The Sanrio Machete

---

Oct 3, 2024 The Bakelite Bag

---

Oct 31, 2024 The Fox Skull

---

Nov 7, 2024 The Milk Pan

---

This edition of The Nightlife Review is called Invisible Nightlife Review. It was created in collaboration with The New School.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this collection gathers rhythmic, philosophical, and imagined essays that drift through the hidden, surreal, and often overlooked dimensions of nightlife. The entries fall into four moods: Neverending Nights, White Nights, Blood Nights, and Buried Nights.

   '               +  ' +                        o       +          o  +  *    .   

'                 .                        ' '.      .+ .          '           '

The Smoking Lounge by Celia Rose

ONE

My mother forks into her lobster as she watches me mow my filet mignon into slices, “They undercooked it. I can have them take it back,” she insists, her first bite sits plump and upright on her fork, butter and juices running down and through the prongs. The yellow inching toward her palm.

I suck in a deep breath and land my bite between my teeth, staring back and nodding as the first taste passes my tongue. “It’s medium. Like I asked.”

She lets out one impassioned scoff, “If you say so.” She bites down and continues her eye contact. “Yesterday, your dad’s steak was tough. I couldn’t even listen to him eat it.”

Alienation by Dakota Levitt

Test subject #1, patient zero, the guinea pig. They advertised it as ‘beta-tester,’ which has a nicer ring to it than the only idiot lonely enough to let us blast him off into the unknown. At this point in my too long, too unfulfilling life I had two options: succumb to its demise or forge a new path, the path they gave me. While both intriguing, kinda, (not really), I chose the latter.

I stuffed the little belongings I had left into my shallow pockets and prepared for my midnight departure. They said no human would be able to survive this. 60 seconds to 120 seconds max was the estimated time I would endure, but I am not human, nor am I one to abide by the chains of confinement others have placed on me. Onwards and upwards, I ascended 666,666,666 miles, straight up past the clouds, through the stars, breaking the sound barrier and gasping for air as I rose above the Kármán line.

DIY Econ by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

The punk with the mullet clutches me in their hand, sweating against me. Their sweat mixes with the condensation from the tall can of Modelo they’re swigging from and they ball their fist between sips, wiggling their damp fingers into me to dry them off. Beside them, their tall, combat boot-clad girlfriend mimes a two-step.

The three of us stand in a funny kind of line in the hallway of a brownstone’s basement apartment. We’re waiting for the (affectionately named) door bitch to check everyone's suggested donations for this DIY show. They’re friendly, greeting everyone with a warmth that suggests this venue is actually their home, and one they like hosting in. I peek around from inside mullet’s hand to take in the fancifully named Magic Mountain.

As far as I can tell, it’s just the lower level of a deteriorating pre-war Brooklyn apartment, decorated with desktop printouts of defunct Six Flags attractions. Not that this matters to me, or to anyone else in line. This show is so small practically everyone on line was personally invited.

Get Home Safe by Mandy Kim

The silence of night was eerie, almost deafening. It always unnerved me—the stillness of night. Hearing the unfiltered sounds of my surroundings made me feel disoriented, like I was hallucinating. Maybe it was paranoia or anxiety, but my wired headphones helped. Even with the world drowned out, I knew better than to let my guard down completely.

The High Priestess of Paradise by Gabriel Chavez

Of the events that led to her confinement she can only speculate: Had the three-legged stools the nightclub stored beneath the DJ booth been any color but the black that matched the darkness perhaps she’d be free—chastised for trespassing, yes, and steered out to the street—but free.

Had she only left a trace of her presence above, a bottle or a handbag set like bait beside the decks, perhaps a barback would have seen her trembling shadow and removed her from this self-made isolation. Had she been clumsier, drunker, slower to catch the fire extinguisher she knocked over, the echo of metal on plywood would have revealed her to security, whose impatient glance around the curtained dance floor could not discern her.

What froze her to the spot, she wondered, what instinct kept her still and quiet against the promise of detection? She felt no thrill in her trespass, no fear even but rather the tranquility of having discovered an unmarked cave by a familiar sea. The star-shaped earring her boyfriend wanted back lured her under, its broken clasp a fated beckoning to the sticky cables and hardened limes beneath the DJ booth at Amulet.

Traveling Spark by Pete Reilly

Things have social lives. They pass from hand to hand, vanish into pockets, and reappear in places they were never intended to be. The red Bic lighter was one such thing—plastic and butane molded in a French factory, shipped across the Atlantic as part of a shipment, not as an individual but as a unit of commerce. It arrived in New York City, displayed behind scratched bodega glass on 119th Street, a disposable object meant to be used and lost. Its purpose was simple: to spark a brief flame, then disappear.

Through the city, dusk settled, and lights bled into the sky. Inside the bodega, the red lighter rested beside gum, condoms, and mini whiskey bottles—objects of impulse. Outside, beneath a flickering streetlamp, a woman lingered, a cigarette balanced between her fingers.

“Anyone have a light?” she asked.

A man at the counter turned. He didn’t smoke, but saw a chance to connect. He placed a few bills on the counter. The clerk handed him the Bic, shifting it from the world of commerce to something more intimate.

Four Kinds of Night by Mikayla Emerson

You don’t necessarily believe everything your memory says when it describes five years passing like nothing. Each night piles on top of another like smoke down a sewer drain, not wanting to seep away. Rising back to the boots and bile, curling around an ankle, a wrist. Though, certainly, they must hold a truth if they end with you here.

Neverending Nights
Before

Because you were once five years old. Because you once also believed in disappearing acts. And miracles. And the Fool’s Journey. Because you fell for it. Because a blinking light at the center of town is goodbye. And a gas station means you have a long way to go. Because home is the first Hell. A dirt road. A big car going nowhere. Because it’s your right to be left. Because every scenario ends with you on a sidewalk. And every night begins with why.

Blood Nights
East Village

Because you kissed the girl who left blood confetti in the snow. Because you can’t hate her for it. Because mouth to mouth feels like resuscitation. IV drip bag and marred cuticles. Because the iron-tang tastes like the other side of a trapdoor. The street numbers turn to letters turn to wasted postage. Think of the red on your bottom lip as a souvenir, an I wish you were here.

The Big Light by Lillian Heckler

This morning, Mark Lord awoke as a fly. The morning before, he also awoke as a fly. In fact, there had never been a morning when he hadn’t awoken as a fly, and there would never be a morning when he wouldn’t awake as a fly, except for the morning after the day that he would eventually die, because then he wouldn’t be much of anything except for dead.

Mark enjoys being a fly. Buzzing. Darting. Licking windows. Sleeping in rotten wood. The human who owns the house that he lives in leaves enough food scraps in the kitchen to feed Mark for several lifetimes, which isn’t saying much for a fly because he probably won’t make it until next autumn.

Before this house, Mark lived in a different house in another place. He didn’t like that house as much. There was less to do and fewer flies to do it with. He’d cross paths with the same three insects every few hours, and they weren’t what Mark would consider talkative. The human living there seemed not to, well, live there, which meant there weren’t as many flesh particles or condensation droplets on the windows and the walls and the tiles in the bathroom. This made the surfaces less ripe for licking, which was quite unsatisfying for Mark. He would lie in a dark, damp corner of decaying baseboard in the attic, restless, and think about dying. By palm, by book, by swatter, by tissue, by car.

                                .  .      . '   +                          o   '        * .    .

    '                          '                                            .   

     +'        +'         '       '   o     '*                      

 '                   .               +     o    .                               

     o  '                                             +                  '      

                           .                                 .               

 .                     '       '       '             '        .   +            .

Artwork by Greta Rainbow

Terry Nguyen on Laura Palmer’s heart necklace.

This is the second in a series of dispatches called Peak Objects, from Dirt x MUBI. Authors writing about a single object of their choice from the world of Twin Peaks. You can read the first dispatch, from Geoff Rickly, here.

“I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside.” —David Lynch

The final scene of the Twin Peaks pilot unfolds as a vision. Sarah Palmer, Laura’s mother, lies on the living room couch with her eyes closed, drained by the day’s events. Cut to jittery, handheld footage of someone moving through the woods. Sarah jerks awake, screaming at the sight of a gloved hand unearthing a buried necklace from a rock.

On the day that Laura Palmer’s body is discovered, investigators find a necklace at the scene of the crime: half of a gold heart engraved with the word “BEST.” Police believe it to be Laura’s necklace. They suspect that the owner of the other half—the one that says “FRIENDS”—is her killer.

The heart necklace was given to Laura by James Hurley, her secret motorcycle-riding beau. And while James was one of the last people to see Laura alive, he was a benign, if not boring, figure in her life. “I really believe that you love me,” Laura tells James when he gives her the pendant. “Now my heart belongs to you,” she says, then breaks it in two.

Twin Peaks begins as a murder mystery, but as the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that the real enigma is Laura herself. The search for Laura’s killer is a kind of red herring in the first few episodes. It briefly distracts the investigators and the audience from the question that surrounds Laura’s death: Who was Laura Palmer?

David Lynch was a master purveyor of symbols. He was never direct or didactic, and his inclination for Americana imbued his work with an errant familiarity. There are layers to Lynch’s symbolic registers, and his imagery can feel impenetrable at times, no matter how familiar the object initially seems. 

On its surface, the heart necklace reflects Laura’s dueling intentions—a covert token of her allegiance towards James. She wears it while in her public relationship with Bobby, the high school quarterback, who also deals her cocaine. The necklace is both innocent and incriminating, an iconic symbol of teenage love that simultaneously encodes a betrayal. Its seemingly platonic inscription offers Laura plausible deniability about who owns the other half.

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SPONSORED BY MUBI

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking TWIN PEAKS, the complete original series plus its 2017 follow-up THE RETURN are now available for the first time on MUBI. Dirt readers get two months free to enjoy this show, plus everything else streaming on the platform for incredible cinema. Start watching here.

Lying just five miles south of the Canadian border, and twelve miles west of the state line, is a sleepy little town filled with intriguing characters, a damn fine cup of coffee, and cherry pie so sweet it’ll kill you. While you’re visiting, you may ask yourself, “Who killed Laura Palmer? Is it all a dream? Or are the owls really not what they seem…” Welcome to the town of Twin Peaks.

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