The other day, I watched Richard Kelly’s 2006 film Southland Tales for the first time. Southland Tales is set in a near-future Los Angeles, aka Southland, where disturbances in the Pacific Ocean and the recent outbreak of World War Three have plunged city residents into a state of collective insanity. These include Boxer Santaros, played by Dwayne Johnson in his first performance not as The Rock, and Seann William Scott’s Ronald/Roland Taverner, twins who turn out to be the same guy (not a spoiler, at least if you’re paying attention before the reveal.)
The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but in broad strokes, Boxer is a movie star with ties to leading right-wing politicians; the story begins when he wakes up on Santa Monica Beach with no memory of how he got there or of his marriage to Madeline (Mandy Moore), the daughter of Republican senator Mark Frost. Boxer starts a fling with porn actress / reality TV host Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who’s secretly colluding with a left-wing terrorist group known as The Neo-Marxists in a bid to implicate Boxer and Frost in a racially motivated murder. The scheme goes awry and chaos ensues, including plotlines that involve the installation of a high-tech surveillance complex called USIDENT; an evil scientist brewing infinitely-renewable energy off the Santa Monica coast; Justin Timberlake as narrator Pilot Abilene, who gives us an excessively theatrical rendition of The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” for no apparent reason; and rifts in the fabric of space-time, one of Kelly’s favorite tropes (he also wrote and directed Donnie Darko.)
Southland Tales pairs nicely with Camper van Beethoven’s terribly underappreciated 2004 concept album New Roman Times, which is also set in a dystopian, war-ravaged California. New Roman Times’ unnamed protagonist could easily be Southland Tales’ Ronald/Roland: both are disillusioned former combat soldiers who find themselves in California by way of Texas and Iraq; neither seems to fully grasp the scope or rationale of the violence they’ve enacted; they are basically just sweet normal dudes who’d be chasing girls and studying for exams if the world made any sense.
Both works nail the gonzoism of the post-9/11 / Weapons of Mass Destruction era of mediatized warfare, aka the brief moment where 90s irreverence overlapped with 21st century doom, also precisely when I hit adolescence and what comes to mind when I pine for simpler times. I’ve been obsessed with New Roman Times for many years and Southland Tales for two weeks now. Just wanted to tell you about them.
News
Starting next month, I’m teaching “Theory of the Digital” for NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. The position came together quickly, which means I’m busy preparing the syllabus under short notice. It’s a lot of work, but I’m excited. “Theory of the Digital” is in the same academic niche that I’ve been writing about here - see this conference and a short essay related to it. This means my teaching and writing will be more thematically unified than ever - such luxuries I have not known…
We’ve released several episodes of LEPHT HAND since I last posted about it. Last week, it was “AI as Anti-Politics,” an interview with Daniel Stanley, Executive Director of Future Narratives Lab. I’ll also highlight the newest ep, “Scandal, Shadow, and the Underworld,” where my co-host SEREPTIE and Robert Langan (aka Wrath Mania 🌪️ ) address the problem of transphobia in analytical psychology and media about Carl Jung.
If you’re new to LEPHT HAND, I hope you’ll try it out. I’ve been co-hosting since January, and while it’s hard to pick a favorite episode, a good one to start with would be Logging Off, Opting Out, and Not Texting Back: The Ethics of Non-Response with political theorist Jana Bacevic. Next week, we’ll be talking about astrology, with some discussion of gendered patterns in astrology’s cultural impact that doesn’t fall into the trap of gender essentialism or reactionary woo. All of our discussions are unscripted, and I like to think I’ve become a better conversationalist as a result, but probably the only real side effect is that I’m very self-conscious about vocal fry and uptalk now.
On Thursday September 3rd, I’m giving an expanded version of the talk I delivered in June as part of The Lenox Institute’s launch event. This time it’s online, in collaboration with the Weirdosphere learning platform. The new version is titled “The Rebirth of Language: LLMs as a Lens on Style,” and it starts at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register at the link!
If you happen to have a New School affiliation, I’ll be speaking at Convenings, an event held by the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design. This will be the first week of September, date and time TBA. I’ll share more as it comes together.
Plans for Lenox’s next IRL event and our first course (!) are underway. Both will take place in New York City in coming months. I’ll post updates here as they arrive, but as always, if you’re interested in Lenox-specific news, please sign up for the newsletter at our website.
Mark Fisher vs. AI
For a recent subscriber-only LEPHT HAND episode, I offered a monologue that examines cultural theorist Mark Fisher's lifelong argument against the notion of a private, individual consciousness, with close attention to theoretical arguments in The Weird and The Eerie and the rhetorical approach of Acid Communism. The piece looks at how Fisher’s writing style reinforces his beliefs about mental health and mind-in-world, and I contrast it with the characteristic style of corporate LLMs. As a thank you to paid Elf Theory subscribers, I’m sharing the downloadable mp3 here, too.
I don’t love paywalls, but they make my work possible. I hope that one day I won’t have to use them. Since Substack’s lowest tier is frustratingly high, I’m running another discount: through September 22nd, subscriptions to Elf Theory via this link will be locked in at a rate of $2/month forever.
Thanks for reading and understanding the business side of all this work.
Big big thanks for listening, and I don’t just mean to me …
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