Esoteric Brezhnevism

“I don’t think anybody’s going to be going to the movies for a while,” a Young Republican acquaintance earnestly assured me shortly after September 11, 2001. He was, of course, wrong. While, according to Box Office Mojo , movie attendance did drop 30.5% in the week of the attacks, and fell another 11.6% the following week, ticket sales were already rebounding by the end of the month as people headed out to see Zoolander and the Michael Douglas thriller Don’t Say a Word . My nihilism was near-complete at the time, my initial impression of 9/11 being that it had made an uninteresting world even more boring than before. I was accustomed to watching reruns of Seinfeld on a little television I had in my dorm room, and I can remember feeling peevish and despondent that, days after the event, my program was still being preempted for live coverage of smoldering rubble. I was reminded of that period recently when Retail Dive published Ben Unglesbee’s epic article, “ Who

[Originally published April 22, 2018] What is a true aristocrat? This is one of the questions pondered by Robert Stark in his startling novel The Journey to Vapor Island . Stark, for those unacquainted with him, is the idiosyncratic host of the Alt-Leftish Stark Truth podcast. His program has been an acquired taste for me – Stark’s distinctive low-energy, low-charisma style of presentation can be unimpressive on an initial listen, and the defiantly eclectic array of show topics can be somewhat jarring for those accustomed to strictly political podcasts – but The Stark Truth has subsequently become one of my favorite programs, and I make a point of listening now whenever a new episode is posted. What one begins to understand and appreciate is that there exists a nebulous constellation of seemingly unrelated people, places, things, and ideas that together comprise the phenomenon of the Starkian . Vaporwave, neon, Japan, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Bay Area, environmentalism, an