Snark is dead 💀 & the depression 🕺 disco

Hi friends!

How are you? I’m doing pretty well! I was just up in Portland, Oregon for a long weekend. In a rare twist of fate, I had my buddy’s apartment all to myself and very few obligations outside of my high school bestie’s baby shower on Saturday. I’ve been to Portland maybe five or six times now? It’s such a great city to visit because everything’s close together, the food is awesome, and there’s loads to do. 

On my first afternoon there, I went on a snack run to the New Seasons Market. Do we like them, or no? It seems like one of those bougie all-organic grocery chains that are such a hallmark of gentrification, but the prices weren’t too bad compared to what I pay for groceries in L.A. Then again… that’s in L.A. I tried to blend in with the locals and bought the granola-est, most all-natural snacks I could find, like vegan pork rinds, chickpea puffs, and non-GMO baked corn snacks.

I also got “they”-ed by the cashier, which was thrilling. (I’m a cis she/her, but I appreciate the inclusiveness.) They were pointing out my Meow Wolf beanie to their coworker, then they mentioned that there is a similar immersive art installation in Portland, called Hopscotch. After I got back, I looked it up and bought tickets, and spent a lovely hour in their rainbow-colored halls on Friday afternoon, while sipping what they called an “Adult Capri Sun,” some kind of fruity tequila drink in a plastic bag. So thanks, New Seasons employees!

Other things I did in Portland: went to oyster happy hour at Dan & Louis Oyster Bar, an old school joint with dark wood walls covered with paintings of ships & sea captains! Browsed Powell’s and then decided the line was too long to buy anything (I was considering grabbing Big Swiss and Shark Heart)! Bought some nice cheese and Kerrygold butter to eat with the sea salt loaf from the Little T bakery! Got some writing done! Hung out with friends and ate and ate and drank and drank! Messed up my buddy’s Netflix algo by watching Love is Blind (wild season!! Commentary to come when I’m fully caught up)! Celebrated the baby! And also her forthcoming son! 😜

I checked the weather forecast before I went to Portland and it said it was going to rain every day for the next nine days. It made the puny three-day rain streaks I complain about in L.A. look pitiful. That said, Portland rain is a different animal than L.A. rain. Portland rain is more of an on and off again light drizzle, a constant grayness. Nobody even uses an umbrella in Portland rain, they just put their hoods up (they all have the same jacket they got with their REI co-op membership). Los Angeles rain is a downpour, a dump. If you get caught in it, you are simply washed out to sea, along with all the hopes and dreams discarded along Hollywood Boulevard. Also, everyone in Portland knows how to drive in the rain. That’s their bread and butter, baby! No one in L.A. knows how to do anything in the rain. Even the dogs rebel against pooping in it in their little raincoats.

In other news, Ross and I have gone month-to-month on our current crazy apartment and have started tentatively looking for a new place. This time around, we’re thinking it would be nice to be those assholes who live in a new building, or at least somewhere recently renovated. I’ve been thinking about what an absolute luxury it would be to be able to make decisions about where I live based on aesthetics, versus just needs. Like, oh no, I don’t like the kitchen countertops or the tile in the bathroom, I couldn’t possibly live here! Versus: hmm, there’s no parking, no refrigerator, and it was literally built on a median in the middle of the freeway… let’s put it in the “maybe” pile??

Let’s get into some little things & one big thing:

- Cooking! I made this fabulous dijon & cognac beef stew from Smitten Kitchen that took half a Saturday but was absolutely incredible. My advice for that recipe is my advice for pretty much every recipe, which is: don’t rush the onions. They add some really necessary sweetness to the stew which balances out all the dijon. While I wouldn’t recommend you make this recipe if you don’t like mustard at all, the mustard is by no means overwhelming. It will not clear your sinuses, and I believe the mustard-apathetic among us would still enjoy it. If the groundhog is to be believed, it will be an early spring, so hurry up and get your stew going before the lightness of spring has you saying, “Oh no, that’s much too hearty.” 

- The other day, an AI-generated picture of a beautiful dark green brick house popped up on my Instagram feed, so I shared it on my Instagram story with the caption “🥰 imagine having a depressive episode here 🥰.” Ever since then, I’ve been getting targeted ads on IG for depression-related medical studies. Some of them are incongruously cheerful, like this one:

What do you think happens at the Depression Disco? I like to think there’s a lot of black sequins, dark corners for weeping, and cocktails laced with Prozac. Instead of bottle service in the VIP section, there are on-demand therapists. And there’s no cover charge or dress code, because if you are actually able to get your depressed ass to the disco, they’ll overlook your sweatpants.

I made a Spotify playlist* of all the melancholy-yet-danceable songs I could think of that might play at a Depression Disco. It ended up being pretty heavy on the ‘80s New Wave, which I know is not disco, but disco can also be a location and a state of mind, man. Disco music is just not very good for wallowing. Disco music is all about being so excited you just can’t hide it and celebrating good times, c’mon and repeatedly asking someone to take you to Funkytown. A depressed person has no business in Funkytown.

*I’m trying to wean myself off of the green devil app, but I haven’t found a good replacement yet. Anyone care to make a case for Apple Music?

Whatever happened to snark?

- Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about snark. Snark is dead, for all intents and purposes. It died somewhere in the mid- to late 20-teens. The landmark I think we can all easily point to is when Gawker got shut down in 2016, but maybe with all the hardship that we have collectively endured since then (a Trump presidency, Covid-19, confronting racism in our communities, multiple wars, Roe v. Wade being overturned, the rise of hatred and extremism, that Dunkin Donuts commercial Ben Affleck just did for the Super Bowl), we simply haven’t been in the mood to hate on things.

I’ve been thinking about snark because recently, Tina Fey told Bowen Yang that “authenticity is dangerous and expensive,” and that he is too famous to give his real opinions on movies on his podcast anymore. This was after Ayo Edebiri got in trouble the week that she was hosting SNL because some snarky comments she made about Jennifer Lopez on a podcast years ago resurfaced, and guess who was the musical guest that week? J.Lo later said that Ayo came to her dressing room and apologized “with tears in her eyes,” which tells me that either a) Ayo got chewed the fuck out for those comments by someone important, or b) she’s just that good of an actor. 

I started a Letterboxd account a few months ago, and I noticed that some of my friends don't rate the movies they watch, they just log them. “Oh, yeah, that’s something people in the industry do,” Ross told me, I guess in case they end up working with someone involved with one of those films and it gets back to them that they rated it low? Makes sense, I suppose. It made me paranoid that maybe I’m not future-proofing myself enough by actually rating things on my Goodreads and Letterboxd profiles. What if Martin Scorsese decides to take a hard turn into female-fronted indie comedies and he’s about to give me a huge break, but then finds out I only gave Killers of the Flower Moon three out of five stars?

I have mixed feelings about snark. I’m a comedy writer and occasionally a professional pop culture critic, so it seems fair that I should get to have my public opinions about things, and that sometimes, those opinions are going to be a little critical and/or infused with humor. At the same time, I have never written or edited a review with the intention of gleefully tearing someone down. I’m not trying to go for the whole “charming asshole” thing. A charming asshole is still an asshole, after all, and I don’t enjoy hurting people’s feelings. That said, is there a way to snark that doesn’t actually hurt anyone? Because reading snark can be so much fun.

One of my biggest breakout pieces of humor writing was a Tumblr post I wrote in about 2012 called “Let’s Make Fun Of: Anthropologie Furniture.” Sadly, it no longer exists, it got destroyed when Tumblr shut down and then revived itself, but it was basically me snarking on the pretentious way in which Anthro staged their unbelievably overpriced furniture at the time. Weirdly, even though I wrote it in 2012, it didn’t go viral until 2014, and that summer, it suddenly started getting hundreds of thousands of views. I still have no idea how that started. That was the summer that I worked as a cheesemonger, and I remember checking my phone in between shifts of slicing up gouda and camembert and watching it blow up with comments about how funny and brilliant I was. Me! Just a humble cheese woman who mongs!

A few years later, in 2015, I tried my hand at snarky writing again, this time aimed at the wedding industry, when I started another Tumblr. I found the most horrifying wedding ideas I could and pulled pictures off of Pinterest and Google Images, and wrote bitchy little captions. Ross and I were deep in planning our own wedding at the time, and looking back, the blog was definitely an outlet for some of my wedding-related stress. I tried to be funny, I tried not to be too much of a dick; one time I unfortunately called a hideous feather headpiece “bipolar,” and someone commented that that was actually offensive. “I’m bipolar, and I would never wear that fugly headpiece!” they said, which was way funnier than anything I’d written. I apologized and changed the caption immediately.

I tried to get some traction going by emailing other wedding blogs and asking them to write about my Tumblr. NEVER DO THIS. Learn from my mistakes!! If you are going to ask someone to promote your stuff, make up a PR person and send it through a fake email. I learned this tip from a friend who has done this to great success. Because what happened is that one of those blogs DID write about my Tumblr, and NOT in a positive manner. They hated it!! They called it “mean-spirited” and compared it to an older snarky wedding blog they’d enjoyed in 2007 (?) and found it lacking.

On top of that, they shared part of the email I had personally written to them asking for coverage. It just felt so embarrassing to have put myself out there and gotten a public, negative response, and worse than that, one which kind of called into question my character. Most of the comments agreed with the blog, too, although I did get a lot of new followers from that post, so what they say really is true: any publicity is good publicity.

All that said, I think what I’ve learned over the years is that the key to good snark is the key to all good comedy, right? Punching up versus punching down. That Anthro post was a great example of punching up: at a corporation, at an overpriced coffee table, at an inanimate object that, sure, someone had styled, but a faceless person, someone who was not being attacked personally. It wasn’t like I wrote, “Whoever styled this furniture is a dumb bitch!” It was more like, “Why are these armchairs placed so menacingly in this bespoke treehouse?”

The problem with my wedding blog was that, in sharing “trends” from Pinterest, sometimes I inevitably included real photos from people’s weddings, without censoring their faces or doing anything to anonymize them. That was stupid, and honestly pretty unkind. I like to think I only posted really egregiously bad photos, like ones with all the groomsmen with their pants around their ankles or all the groomsmen pretending to pee in a man-made water fixture (I don’t know why, but there were SO MANY of those). But still, those were someone’s wedding photos, not a professional wedding shoot for a magazine or something like that. That kind of crossed a line between public and personal that wasn’t cool. Anyway, I deleted my blog not long after I got married and didn’t need the outlet anymore, so all of that is long gone, which I think is for the best.

As a longtime consumer of snark, though, man, I miss it! Snark can be so delicious and witty and release the tension of, “oh my god, I thought I was the only one who thought that was ridiculous!” Sadly, the only remaining reliable piece of snark I can think of these days is the long-running Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog, which only comes but once a year. I used to get a few hits of snark from the Real Housewives recap podcast Bitch Sesh, but they’ve gone and put all their new content behind a membership paywall, which for me, falls in the category of good-for-you-but-I’m-not-paying-for-that.

You might say, okay, fine, snark is dead, but good riddance! Positive vibes only! To which I would say, we’re on a dangerous path to nothing but utterly dull, toothless cultural commentary. I talked about punching up versus punching down, but lately, nothing has any punch at all. Comedians having opinions about movies & TV shows on a podcast should be considered completely innocuous, and should not sabotage their future career options! It’s a comedian’s job to critique and be authentic! You’re not supposed to take it personally!

Or are we all supposed to only post like Travis Kelce, sharing inane observations about “squirles” eating bread? Because lately, it seems like the cost of a squeaky clean social profile is a lobotomy. Imagine how employable I could be with a severed prefrontal cortex? I’m drooling at the thought! And honey, I’d better get used to drooling!

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Alright my dears, that’s it from me this week!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page.

Until next time—see you at the Depression Disco!

Love,

Liz

XOXO