A couple weeks ago, I jogged by a cat’s face in the grass. Just the nose and the mouth part, with a shiny knob of bone sticking out the back. I was running that day even though my phone kept warning me that the air quality was unhealthy, which it usually is. Giant spiders live in my back yard — one was as big as a crab. A skunk lived in my garage until it didn’t. There was a different dead skunk up the street, probably from a coyote. You could smell it for blocks. Toxic, acrid. Once, while shooing a bird out of my house, because birds keep flying into my house, I found a dead opossum curled under my son’s bedroom window, haloed by flies. On some evenings, we crane our necks to the yellow sky in case wild parrots fly by. You can hear them coming. They seem too big and too green and too loud to be in the air.
Sometimes it is too hot to be outside, or the mosquitos that only bite ankles and feet are too voracious, so I cruise Next Door on my phone, listlessly scrolling. Next Door is a minefield of thinly veiled racism and excruciating paranoia, usually proliferated by people who are largely not fluent with the language of the internet, and are therefore alarmist in a way that is not cynical, and tends to feel comically hysterical when it is not legitimately terrifying.
Some of my neighbors on Next Door also happened upon the cat face. They were convinced it was a budding serial killer, that the helicopters buzzing low and shaking the shingles off our roofs were tracking said killer, that this killer was just biding his time killing cats and leaving their faces behind as a calling card until he can move on to bigger prey. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it was a coyote until someone suggested that it was a coyote. I logged out of Next Door and looked at Citizen. Someone stole from Costco. A woman had a knife. There was a shooting, or maybe it was someone wielding a gun that had not been shot at all.
On a drive to Phoenix, we pulled over in what turned out to be a ghost town. Next to an abandoned gas station — boarded up with an inexplicable TAYLOR GANG tag over one of the windows (are there really Wiz Khalifa fans out where the Hills Have Eyes?) — a guy smoked meth in a bombed out car with no doors or windows. If you glanced at him, everything seemed normal. Just some dude getting gas on a dusty strip.
Phoenix was 114 degrees. Too hot to go outside for more than a second. The ground boiled before lunch time. While driving to dinner in Phoenix, a friend texted my wife and I to let us know that if a Haboob came, we needed to immediately pull over and turn off our lights so that the cars behind us would not use our taillights as markers. We laughed at the word “Haboob,” thinking it was a typo. Then we googled it.
A guy named Jason Ferguson took this photo from a helicopter in Arizona last year. A Haboob is a dust storm that looks terrifying and is fairly common. In other words, it’s common enough that people do not quite panic, but uncommon enough that it still warrants complete awe. This time, the Haboob did not come. Phoenix already felt like the apocalypse.
In a July issue of the New Yorker, the critic Hua Hsu wrote about what is possibly the most comprehensive document of Woodstock that will ever exist: a 36 hour boxed set of every performance and interstitial moment. By the time you get to disc 38, you are mostly treated to crowd noise. We’ve long been told that to truly get Woodstock, you had to be there. This is an objectively true but still annoying fact. I’d argue that if you listened to every minute of every disc here, you’d probably come away with a very good understanding of what it was like to be there. You had to be there, but you couldn’t be, so now this set is what it means to be there.
Like a lot of culture right now, this boxed set is about fetishizing the past as greater than the present, using our endless thirst for data and media to repackage what has been safely canonized in a futile effort to be definitive. As information moves faster, as news cycles get away from us, as art flits through our collective consciousness too quickly, there is something appealing about a product that asks that you spend more than a full day and night with it. The reality is that very few people will listen to the whole thing, and they probably shouldn’t. How much time do we all really have? Should we use that time to revisit culture we’ve already absorbed, or should we attempt to absorb new things?
If you go to a record store, you’ll see hundreds of reissues of old records, both common and obscure. As if understanding and possessing these objects will help us grasp the past to better handle the present. Will 36 hours of Woodstock audio be all that’s left when the apocalypse comes? Probably not. But our obsession with definitive context says a lot about where our brains are at. Is this what we’re choosing to leave behind? TAYLOR GANG TAYLOR GANG TAYLOR GANG