Mallory's Camera

My mood dramatically improved.

So, you know: Good.

Though I have no idea why it improved.

So, you know: Mystifying.

It was wayyyy too cold to go out yesterday, so I didn’t.

The exercise bike isn’t really a substitute for tromping, and I can’t figure out why because I think, actually, it offers a better workout than tromping, particularly if I turn up the resistance so that I’m huffing and puffing my way up imaginary hills.

I suppose it’s the wholesome outside air thing that’s missing.

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I stumbled across the Vimeo episodes of High Maintenance, so in between crunching data for the latest Remunerative Project and writing boring analyses of same, I watched those.

Fascinating on a number of different levels.

As prototypes for the far more polished HBO series, of course, but also as ethnography, a series of animated, anthropological snapshots, very precise: the Millennial Tribe that occupied the Fordham Gneiss during the opening years of the 21st century (archaic).

One comes away with a sense of how… fragmented life is for these characters.

Judging from my extensive fieldwork into Millennial life—funneled, it’s true, through the POV of the two Millennials I happened to give birth to—I’d say it’s an accurate depiction.

Ichabod responds to that fragmentation by longing for a real community.

But RTT embraces the fragmentation. He has like a billion friends—the majority of whom I would describe as superficial acquaintances—and yet, there is a strong sense of rootlessness there. True, he’s very young, not yet 30. But I kinda sense he’s always gonna have that sense of rootlessness. I don’t sense any longing in him for deeper connection.

It kinda throws the whole Millennial obsession with celebrity—see the endless ONTD squawking on the LJ site—into more vivid relief.

Celebrities are the only continuity many of them have.

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I found the last High Maintenance web episode particularly fascinating: A group of young and not particularly attractive Millennials attend a house party at some rustic destination far from Brooklyn. (Long Island? Putnam County?) They’re all on the fringes of show biz and keep up a manic, jargony stream of chatter throughout. Everyone does psilocybin. Nobody—or, at least, so it seems to me—has a particularly good time.

The characters, unironically portrayed, are at the height of their hipness and relevance.

And that very lack of irony is an interesting creative choice because it’s quite clear that Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, High Maintenance’s creators, entirely buy in to that hipness and relevance. There will never be a time when what we are showing you is not the apex of relevant and hip, they are saying.

I suppose that’s what gives High Maintenance its odd, anthropological edge.

###

Of course, nothing stays hip or relevant.

I can remember reading F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories when I was a teenager.

Did I have the slightest idea of how edgy they were considered in their day?

I don’t think so. I liked them because they were quaint and old-fashioned, and had been written a very, very long time ago.

Except they were actually written in the 1930s, which means they were written a mere 20 years before I was born.

Twenty years ago today seems an incomparably short interval of time to me. The blink of an eye!

But very little that was hip or relevant 20 years ago survives as hipness or relevance today.

Unfortunate for me, I suppose.

The gauge I use to measure hipness and relevance was manufactured some time back in the 1990s, and I've never felt compelled particularly to upgrade it.