Attention (or our lack thereof): Opening our fall issue, assistant editor Charlie Phelan tackles a subject that will lay the groundwork for this issue: attention, refracted through the life and writing of David Foster Wallace.
Emily Sun, senior editor
Earl’s sonic toolkit on this album is largely identical to his previous works, just employed differently. His writing has always felt very intentional, a deliberate construction of ideas he previously used for gut-punches of realization. On Live Laugh Love, he paints optimistic vignettes, drawing meaning out of the mundane. He embraces a reverence towards simplicity—a childlike whimsy that probably owes no small debt to his new fatherhood. The thick, smog-like sample loops he’s made a staple of his works also feel different, replacing an oppressive blanket of hopelessness with a hazy gratitude. But that’s not to say he doesn’t try anything new on this project. Earl plays with the tone of his delivery, rapping with a gleeful indulgence on “gsw vs sac,” dipping into subtlety on “WELL DONE!”, and even singing on “TOURMALINE.” For a rapper mocked for his adherence to monotone, there’s quite a bit of variety crammed into the 24-minute runtime.
Earl’s past records were riddled with anxiety—the title of his 2019 EP Feet of Clay references a Biblical kingdom, crumbling. That fear isn’t gone, but it no longer dominates his music. Ten years ago, Earl reluctantly described himself as “the oldest young man that you know.” It seems he’s finally accepted that title: this time, with dignity.
Charlie Phelan, assistant editor
Revolution, untelevised: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, released this September, is not the film that everyone’s talking about. The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis raves that the film is “a big-screen no —a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny.” The National Review’s Armond White asserts, on the contrary, that it “undeniably romanticizes political assassination” (like that of the recently slain Charlie Kirk) and “provokes the bloodlust of [Anderson’s] woke confreres.” These reviews, with all their propaganda poster-ready, Twitter-brain conclusions, make one thing clear: America has a new dead language, and that language is irony.
The real One Battle After Another, based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and conceived over the course of ten years, has something far more interesting to say. For one, the film spends the bulk of its 162-minute runtime focusing not on any oppressive government or evil political leader (who remain offscreen throughout) but on the revolutionaries of the French 75. This vantage is a critical one: we feel the catharsis of their violence, but we also see its irresponsibility. These are not our heroes. The revolutionaries claim to live for their cause, doing whatever it requires of them. Instead, we witness them fasten their identities to their means. They are revolutionaries… which is why they run or sink into weed smoke and The Battle of Algiers-watching purgatory when their new end becomes parenthood. I venture that the image of a rifle stock recoiling at automatic fire pace against one’s pregnant belly is not meant as a rally cry. And I venture that an audience who sees it as one is too lost in ideological rigidity to appreciate a good laugh: a real shame, because the movie’s awful funny.
Declan Rexer, managing editor