when i was a kid and my family was watching robots (2006) my dad offhandedly mentioned his cousin worked on the movie which i didn’t fully internalize then and always existed in some kind of liminal space in my memory as something either i made up, or something my dad made up
cut to sometime in the last year when i remembered movies have credits and imdb aggregates credits across a person’s career so i tried to find my first cousin once removed on there and sure enough, he’s had a decorated career - in addition to robots he also worked on:
- the boys
- game of thrones
- john wick
- the interview
- 22 jump street
- a couple of twilight movies
among others; i’ve only met the guy a handful of times, and vfx work is real labor intensive with large teams working the post-production but it‘s so cool to know someone that worked on shit that i’ve actually seen and has had wild cultural significance. this must be what it feels like to be a coppola
Related Recs
Not to brag or anything but my dad was an extra in David Lynch’s Dune so I guess you could say I’m basically Maya Hawke
Apr 10, 2024
👴
It’s been my mission over the past year or two to become my family’s next ‘kind of aloof uncle who only makes appearances at the big holidays and lives in a big city who has a cool job and cooler anecdotes that make up for the aloofness’ and it’s sooo fun
Feb 4, 2024
My dad had always told me we were related to Al Gore and Gore Vidal and of course I knew who the former was but never really bothered to read much about the latter. His first name comes from the family name of his mother.
I started getting into genealogy and came upon an essay by Vidal that had been published in The New York Review of Books called The Ruins of Washington where he writes about our shared Anglo-Irish ancestors who came over in the 17th century and owned a large portion of the land that would become Washington, D.C. Our ancestors sold the land and as the families branched off they migrated further and further south ultimately ending up in Mississippi.
My grandfather was best friends with Gore’s uncle and my dad grew up with Gore’s first cousins, so though the cousinage between us is distant on paper, the kinship bond and shared culture was still there.
I was so excited to see what else Gore Vidal had written about our family that I downloaded his essay collection The Last Empire, where he writes:
“But then the Gore genes are strong, making for large noses and ears and, in many, chinoiserie-style eyes, more gray than blue. Blake certainly had inherited the Gore sharpness of tongue … If there is an uncomfortable truth to be told, at least one Gore can always be counted on to bear sardonic wit-ness.”
“They are also known for their forensic skill, wit, learning— family characteristics the Vice President modestly kept under wraps for fear of frightening the folks at large.”
Which is an eerily accurate and specific description of me. As I read more of the essays in this book, I began to realize Gore Vidal was right about literally everything in the world and that his quote in my bio is true. He was so much more than he’s known for in pop culture.
As I devoured as much of his work as I could, especially his non-fiction writing, I developed a deep parasocial connection with him and found in him a kindred spirit. Beneath his prickly acerbic exterior was a profoundly vulnerable and emotionally wounded man with mommy issues from his BPD mother. I love his fiercely anti-institutional autodidactic spirit. He’s my role model and I think we also look alike and have similar cunty arrogant vibes/minds.
In The Last Empire he writes that the Gore family will selectively pick and choose who to claim as family no matter how distant the relation is. I delusionally believe that if he were somehow alive today—and also not ravaged with wet brain—as a deep personal mythos weaver himself who had once found meaning in his own family story, he would be honored that I feel this way about him. Thank you if you read this rather lengthy volume of Tater Hole lore 🥔🕳️
Apr 5, 2024
Top Recs from @alaiyo
Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024