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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about the connections between literality.
An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections. You can support the author directly at patreon.com/christophersloce. There is exclusive writing there, as well.
I had a period of writing self-doubt that hurt my pride quite a bit and while I let time heal my pride, I’ve decided the best way to bust out of it is to do a list of classics. Classic what? Just classics. Lists are easy content, but an entire list of one thing gives you the impression of a professor writing a syllabus. Considering the title of the column, I thought it’d be more interesting to go across genre, medium, and aspect of culture instead of giving in to Rateyourmusic/Letterboxd nerd horse race shit that I don’t have any patience for.
PLANET OF SLUMS- MIKE DAVIS
It’s probably a stretch to say Mike Davis is underrated as a cultural figure, but for a guy who spent the variety of his career bumming around Marxist-Leninist critical socialism (I don’t know if I would call him a Trotskyist, but it makes me chuckle to think of an online ML citing him finding out how tight he was with a variety of 4th International groupings), his reach was rather wide, cited by everybody from Vince Staples to the Verso loft. Bill Moyers called him America’s most famous living socialist for a reason, and his overall corpus and vision, which combined critical theory with radical geography and political economy, is only going to grow more prescient. Planet of Slums gets somewhat underdiscussed in favor of Late Victorian Holocausts, and the reason for this is that while it retains the apocalypticism of most of his work, it’s written in a clinical tone that can’t quite cover up its own horror. Less splashy to bring up in Twitter arguments, and a less splashy title. If what William Gibson wrote about City of Quartz being more cyberpunk than cyberpunk is true, then Mike Davis is my favorite cyberpunk author, and I think he fits that description much in the same way as Michael Mann is a cyberpunk director.
DEMONLOVER (OLIVER ASSAYAS)
A corporate espionage thriller wherein Connie Nielsen, spy, realizes the eponymous N64 graphic level hentai company is covering up for a dark-web sadomasochism site because she’s trying to screw up the deal. It has an icy, removed cool that curdles into a snuff film nightmare. Videodrome is about the possibility somebody might like this stuff and how an evil tv station would kill, but Demonlover is about how the Internet is a series of Videodromes.
I’ve seen this movie be judged for being pornography negative and all I can say to that is I would love a world where pornography is totally unconnected from exploitative practices but it isn’t and you don’t really have to go far to realize that. Where people get tripped up and start sounding like Tipper Gore is when they conflate an argument about reality with an argument about a media; which is to say that while it’s (much too) easy to fail and hurt people and mirror the misogynist violence of the everyday, I take more issue with the reality of pornography than the possibility because I’m not going to be scared by a medium. But for the charge of being “pornography negative” all I can say is it must be nice to live on the internet, a prospect Demonlover views with terror.
LORD WILLIN’//HELL HATH NO FURY- CLIPSE
I’ve watched Redditors fall over themselves about the new Clipse album and I’m mildly amused. Hearing Pusha T and Malice rap together again is great in the same way seeing Lebron back in Cleveland was, which means on some level there’s a degree of legacy management involved that doesn’t take away entirely from the proceedings. Pusha and Malice (who hasn’t missed a step) are innocent, in my eyes. They even push their writing in “Birds Don’t Sing”, a song about losing their parents unlike anything else in their catalogue, probably because John Legend comes in and ruins the song.
That’s a common theme on the album, and Pharrell is by far the biggest offender, putting too much of a sheen on the beats more fit for Jay-Z in obligation mode than Virginia Beach’s finest. I admit, when I first heard “Ace Trumpets” I thought it was nice he was doing a mixtape Tyler, the Creator homage on the beat to call back to his own grotty synthwork, but couldn’t totally shake my worries this would be an album reminding you how great the creator is while retaining none of the original flavor. Luckily I liked “Chains and Whips” and loved “So Be It”, so I went in with high expectations.
The issue with managing your legacy is you have to remind people of it, and that gave Pharrell way too much leeway to get away from what made his production on the earliest Clipse albums knock so hard, which cuts out an important part of the equation: Chad Hugo. Maybe he’s the one who kept Pharrell from singing like a Minion.
Lord Willin’ is where the Neptunes proved they were as good of producers as anyone in the genre. Ignoring all the obvious Neptunes heat, if they only produced Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury, they would be legends. Hell Hath No Fury invokes an alien world of obscene wealth and cruelty. Lord Willin’ is Virginia Beach, through and through, and in a larger way, Virginia. Jay-Z spoke of Virginia as a place to hustle the same way people buy cigarettes here and sell them in New York. For Clipse it’s both home and market, somewhere “where there ain’t shit to do but cook”. Hell Hath is a nightmare made of marble, but there’s a certain temperature and humidity that makes “Cot Damn” the best song to play in a Central Virginia summer. And it’s a better Pharrell hook, too.
SCOTT MCTOMINAY AND ROMELU LUKAKU’S GOALS AGAINST CAGLIARI FOR NAPOLI TO WIN THE 4TH NAPOLI SCUDETTO
All it took for me to understand football was to watch Napoli play Inter, their rivals for the Italian Serie A 2025 championship. I’ve seen Virginia Tech play football at Lane Stadium. This was more than that. This was what I had wanted my entire life out of sports, which was a level of fan intensity that alters the environment of the city. The scudetto race went down to the wire, with Inter losing due to a late game Lazio run. As long as Napoli scored, we won.
I made my partner tune into the final game, home against Cagliari. We had a Sunday off together (they were also there with me when Cade Cunningham hit his first career game winner against Miami and we watched the DJ Burns Wolfpack go to the elite 8, so the relationship is going well). We both got to see my new favorite team win a championship, off of two memorable goals.
First it was the bicycle kick by McTominay, still my phone background as a totem tow ward off evil. It’s trite to say Maradona stadium erupted like Vesuvius, smoking in the background of Neapolitan life. But sometimes, cliches are reality: red flare smoke overtook the stadium and Naples shook.
That cinched the scudetto, but Napoli wasn’t done. After the half, Romelu Lukaku took two or three guys off the dribble and then hit a goal like watching a dunk in slow motion. Lukaku tore off his kit and ran across the pitch. And all the celebration and hype, the red smoke and the rumbling, it happened all over again.
The biggest concession I made in my relationship was becoming okay with watching YouTube regularly, and I still reserve a lot of criticism, which my partner is all too familiar with. I know when a video maker learned the word “neo-liberalism” from Breadtube and I can tell when somebody hasn’t engaged with anything that wasn’t made in the 2000s. It’s not so much there aren’t good things on there, it’s just the amount of bad Youtube there is will scour your soul. My diet is not really what I would call “good”, but I do believe there’s a mental equivalent to junk food, and that’s where a lot of Youtube falls.
So what makes “What to Eat in Naples” worthy of classic status? I admit, this is a bit of a dual entry, but it’s because of what becomes apparent very quickly in the video: Neapolitans are hype about something. The streets are filled with roman candles, fireworks, smoke. Filmed during the last scudetto for SSC Napoli, Luis is a man in a city living its best life, and the city could care less about his Anthony Bourdain moment (which illustrates so much of what Bourdain was about, anyway). They’re excited about soccer. Everything else is just regular; the sfogliatelle, margherita pizza, the gelato. But Luis is in a unique position: he’s here to show us street food, which always exists in the context that surrounds it. And on another early summer night, Naples was itself, without compromise, gustatory or otherwise. All cities should be so lucky.