TPO#2: What Wine Goes with the Apocalypse?
The Life Philosophy in YouTube Channels
Adam Ragusea's success feels delightfully old school. Ragusea is a former reporter, and is now a journalism professor at Mercer University. After dabbling in posting content to YouTube, Ragusea decided to put up a video unrelated to his work: how to make New York style pizza at home. It went viral in March of this year, and it has since amassed 6.3M views. Now he posts conspicuously sponsored food videos about once a week.
Ragusea's recipe vids are solid: to the point, and a pleasing mix of knowledgeable yet unfussy — though, based on his recent forays into Indian cuisine, Adam I think you need to learn what garam masala is, and also that no Punjabi in their right mind would cook tandoori chicken with the skin on, you MONSTER.
Ahem.
But Ragusea's presence in TPO is less about his food than for the way his videos oddly amount to something like a life philosophy. Scattered throughout his videos are instructions not just about how to roast a chicken or sharpen a knife, but how to approach life.
Some of it is incredibly basic but still useful stuff, like prepping a roast chicken in the pan you're cooking it in to cut down on cleanup or the number of times you wash your hands during prep. Some of it is more abstract, like his insistence that "I think my possessions should serve me, not the other way round." Taken as a whole, however, his YouTube channel puts forth a rough set of guidelines for life: focus on what works, not on received wisdom; science matters, and can actually help; you can be pragmatic about maximizing pleasure, rather than pragmatism and pleasure being opposed; and just don't fuss too much.
What I think Ragusea's YouTube channel does is crystallize the way in which food media, and chef profiles in particular each express a sort of philosophy expressed through how one chooses to approach food. It makes sense. For me, when I'm cooking for pleasure I feel like I'm living my life as I should: immersed in the aesthetic; creating something; and doing something that nourishes both soul and body for me and others. And I think it can help to find that grounding thing — the hobby or activity or art that returns to you to who you think should be and what your life should look like. At the risk of sounding like a self-help guru: What's yours?
The Post-Apocalypse
On that optimistic note, let's talk about how everything's going to hell. Almost everyone I know walks around with some degree of climate despair. For me, it often expresses itself through thinking about what comes next after capitalism.
The trouble I run into is that I don't actually know what a post-industrial, internet-y communism or whatever might actually look like. It's a tricky question because, you know, it involves the small issue of how to organize all of human relations.
One idea I can't shake is Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway. In it, a mix of 3-D printers, drones, and decentralized AI allow people to "walk away" from the mainstream and live mostly independently. That fictive idea seems to suggest that the state remains as a kind of (sorry) superstructure, and you get small little sustainable fiefdoms. Is that feasible or even desirable? I literally have no idea.
Anyway, a couple of things to chew on:
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Folks on Twitter pointed me to this Verso book, Four Futures, that tries to think through exactly this qustion. The essay version is here on Jacobin.
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Reviews of Branko Milanovic's new book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization are mixed, because Milanovic — a noted economist of inequality — comes to the conclusion that communism's function is to introduce capitalism to less developed societies, and that capitalism is basically what we're stuck with. That's... a lot to grapple with for one sentence. Have fun!
Conversations
I have always liked the the conversation format for articles. As opposed to a straight up interview (which has its own dynamics) or a regular profile, the conversation — edited, conscious that it will be published — works because, at their best, they're kind of an ideal of the discussions one might like to have. Here are two that I think I really worth sitting down with:
One of my favourite authors, Hari Kunzru, talks to poet Anne Boyer about her book The Undying which by all accounts is a challenging, novel meditation on Boyer's experience with aggressive breast cancer. It's heady, hard stuff. To give you a taste of Boyer's brilliant mind:
"I will never know why I got cancer. I will never know why I lived and somebody else in similar circumstances died, and I have an example of someone in the book who had the same cancer and treatment that I did, who does die. I will never know the answers to any of this, but I know this other kind of truth which is half of us will have cancer or some sort of malignancy in our lives. We all have cancer. This world has it. It permeates the shared, industrial capitalist environment."
Less intense but no less interesting: Over at LitHub, Irish Writer Mark O'Connell (whose first book I reviewed here) talks to Jeanette Winterson about transhumanism, and perhaps inevitably, gender and identity. I read Winterson's Oranges are not the Only Fruit recently and: consider it a TPO recommends.
Ephemera
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On Slate, David Wolinsky makes an intriguing argument: the rise of the sidekick in video games is not, as you might think, about the shift to social gaming, but instead is a way to meld the projective, interactive nature of gaming with narrative — and by extension that this is a way for gaming to explore relationships.
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Someone who would have very strong feelings about this argument is scholar and Atlantic writer Ian Bogost, who made a whole bunch of people mad by writing about the ubiquitous goose game and arguing video games would be better without gameplay. It's super interesting and, honestly, I sort of like how Ian riles people up, but my beef here is that by positing everything that requires effort as "labour," you rob the potential in play.
Netflix and Wine
Netflix and Wine is a new TPO feature that recommends a thing from Netflix and a wine to go with it.
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David Chang's new Netflix Special, Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner is now up and the first episode with Seth Rogen is great, despite the fact that it's set in (ugh) Vancouver, and you have to put up with Rogen's laugh. Given the variety of food on display, I highly recommend a crisp, acidic riesling — a dry one goddammit! Some faves: Thirty Bench or similar Ontario wineries, or something from Alsace.
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German series Dark on the other hand requires something more hefty and more in line with its literal and figurative gloom. The show might be among the few that actually does something interesting with time travel. But its tone and almost sinister view of familial and small-town life is also the perfect thing to watch as the cool glow of autumn slowly turns into the darkness of winter. Clocks go back next week! To pair, Catena's Malbec is an old standby.
That's it for this week. I'm going to skip a full "TPO recommends" this time 'round and instead tell you that, though it costs C$49, you should drink this merlot. Yes, you heard me. A fifty dollar merlot. What? I said this newsletter was about the good life. Until next time, friends.