Everyone Was High and Nothing Mattered: The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers: Two Novellas by Bruce Wagner – Manuel Marrero
December 16, 2024
Sometimes I get the feeling an author wants nothing from me but to let me know he’s smart. Rather than make me think and feel, he hides behind words. There’s something both manipulative and manipulable about it, like it was brute force button-mashed into existence and an AI did the work of sewing up the fair use logistics and marketing gymnastics that would make this a palatable book or serviceable investment. Its bon mots constitute an SEO goldmine. It feels like being firehosed with clickbait. The irreverence can be noble: “It is just a word. But it’s alive, it’s controversial, it’s horrific, and endlessly descriptive, and possesses timeless, inglorious majesty in its power to wound, to offend, to express. You can have any relationship with the word that you wish! You can love it or hate it! You can use it to name your best friend, brother, sister, lover and use it with tremendous warmth and affection, no? Even with respect…but words are an endangered species now, have you noticed? Many of them are leaving us—the words. Gone into hiding…riding the underground railroad of language, stripped of their ugliness and magnificent beauty. Gone but not forgotten! Now they lurk, uncaged, behind other words, behind trending, brittle, bloodless little wokeisms—” look I get it. People are coyly glomming onto a renaissance of conservative media reified and rubberstamped by Trump’s reelection, with Compact getting subsidized and reactionaries finally feeling some relief from the stifling culture wars. But it’s hard to look past the shrink wrap. The climate is crisp, but it’s still boring satire about woke. I only notice politics in writing through values or aesthetics unless it’s a pose, crashing through the fourth wall and artlessly revealing its opinions belly up. We don’t need a decoy rearguard to rouse the hoi polloi into emancipatory sentiment with respect to free speech, nor gusto nor bravado for self-selection into vulgar abandon and elective prejudice. Because however ultra-based, none of this is any more taboo than campy transgression in the most mundane sense. Hyperstylized and occasionally funny. There’s a Babylon in here. At its best, it’s a book about living on a planet with people who can’t think properly because they grew up without love. The end times are in their head. They are awkward, undersocialized, avoidant, entitled, and impotent. It aims to be virulent but truthfully, no one has enough public transit commutes to feel absorbed in this and give the cover its due in advertising through conspicuous consumption. In no way am I fucking around reading books. Someone with no control over his imagination wants to acquaint you with threadbare YA characters that bludgeon you into complacency with twirling batons because they want to save on ammo. Left, trans, queer, the debt is just your innocence, and the fuckable book which this is not. The monotony of vibey no soul-to-soul contact verso to recto for 321 pages makes me feel crushed like a bug in the ground.
Unfortunately art does not exist in a vacuum. There’s precedent for this. Namely Palahniuk and South Park. And back in the crystal if we’re being serious. Ye olde bastard Satanic transhumanist pedophile elite will have their reckoning, but it is not this.
The decadence is cosmopolitan in sensibility, with just the right amount of peppered theater chestnuts, a refined patrician palate and id-penetrating Guignol of images. The over-the-top libertine terminus-of-freedom in extremis feels played. Grating referential psychosis from the basement of profligacy. A friend of mine was saying he doesn’t respect film the same way he respects literature. I said the most respectable films were made like books. Ironically, books are becoming existentially threatened by committee. As long as you’re possessed by the Holy Spirit you can do whatever you want with AI. Let it let you hear your heart speak. But there’s no substitute for hard work because good ideas are born of process of revelation. Even the presentation is tawdry and unserious. A bullshitty diptych. Beyond The Met Gala is another “novella,” a weird array of new age-inspirited verbose flash fictions, a form in perpetual ascendancy as it has the highest material production value per page and demands little, merely that you accessorize it. Thus all roads lead back to a bridge too far. The Met Gala is the frontloaded show-stealer and does lazy things like stage direction, lot of “…left her seat and knelt before Corinne and Charlie, imperiously motioning them—and Candida—to join her on the floor…” and “With a flash of horror, Corrine cried…” and people tripping over things. Plus so many damn em dashes, italics, and parens. It feels like reading something someone published because they can, not because they must. You should leave half-formed ideas for posthumous publishers to cannibalize. Eulogizing and posthumizing yourself so desperate to be famous and talked about while you’re still alive seems an obscene gesture for a clout cookie crumbling. Nobody talks like that. You’re supposed to die.
“Rick grew pensive and brought up something curious he’d noticed about obituaries. It seemed like the cause of death wasn’t mentioned anymore, even when the person was young and the death came out of nowhere. Clumps of healthy young athletes were dropping dead each day—cricketers, footballers, swimmers, and whatnot—and people not known to be drug addicts were dying in their sleep with no explanation or follow-up. “They call it Sads,” said Rick. “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.” “That’s so sci-fi,” said Bee. “Like Blade Runner. Maybe we’re just all replicants, being quietly ‘retired.’””
““It’s total science fiction,” said Bee. “It’s like leaving a party.” “…where people die and no one cares. Everyone’s gorgeous, everyone’s androgynous, they wear these lame white togas and have mass picnics in the woods. Everyone’s laughing all the time.”
It’s all shortcuts for dummies. This one has hands but no heart.