Three Fun Things for June 30, 2024
A new film from Julio Torres, an essay on anti-nostalgia, and a guide to getting outside.
1. Problemista (streaming on Max)
Shortly after watching Problemista, I listened to a podcast where the hosts asked, “where can Julio Torres go from here?” The implication was that Torres—the Saturday Night Live alum behind the wonderfully weird, prematurely canceled series Los Espookys—needed to do something bigger, or more broadly appealing, than crafting kooky art-project fantasies for fans of surrealistic comedy with DIY sensibilities. (Torres' most famous SNL sketch, “Wells for Boys,” is echoed and expanded in Problemista, with toys that include Cabbage Patch dolls with phones that deliver disturbing messages and a truck with a tire that slowly deflates, reminding children that they’re running out of time). To me, the question “but how will you make it bigger?” is particularly off point, since Torres’ carefully constructed Cornell-box worlds are precisely the right scale for his specific talents.
Torres stars in Problemista as Alejandro, a shy, awkward young man who grew up protected from the outside world by his mother, an artist in El Salvador. Fired by his job at a cryogenics facility in New York City, he needs a sponsor for his visa, and quickly—his dwindling legal status is represented by an hourglass on a shelf alongside hundreds of others, and in this world, when time runs out, immigrants vanish into thin air. Alejandro goes to work for an blithely privileged art dealer, Tilda Swinton, whose increasingly capricious demands largely involve the impenetrable database software Filemaker Pro. Since he can’t earn money until he has a visa sponsor, Alejandro dips into the shadowy world of Craigslist, hilariously personified by Larry Owens—AKA Jacob’s boyfriend on Abbott Elementary. I laughed a lot, but the jokes are mostly growers (another toy: A snake can that apologizes for scaring you but says it was the only way to escape the can); as a fan of visual art who often struggles to explain why a piece of art makes me feel the way it does, I’m not too proud to say the ending, which I won’t spoil, made me cry.
Problemista is for you if you’re a fan of slow-burn jokes, off-kilter vibes, and Tilda Swinton’s whole thing—perfectly cast as an abusive, emotionally labile boss, she plays to the rafters. If it isn’t for you, that’s fine. Not everything has to be for everybody.
2. “The Motel Room, or: On Datedness,” by Kate Wagner
The popular blog McMansion Hell, by a serious architecture critic with an incisive sense of humor, usually focuses on outrageous examples of exurban excess, but last week, Wagner took some time to explore the concept of datedness, which inspires a kind of nonspecific anti-nostalgia. Staying in an anonymous hotel room that hasn’t been updated in a couple decades conjures an image: “My father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, ‘It’ll do.’”
Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser’s economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the “here is my service” type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way “design” can. It can only be discovered by accident.
Read the post (and discover the rest of McMansion Hell, if you haven’t had the pleasure) here.
3. Hiking season
I went for a hike near Seattle recently and for the first time in the more than 20 years I’ve lived here, there was absolutely no room in the huge parking lot for our trailhead. No matter: We kept driving and eventually found a spot along the road, from which we picked our way to a different, unplanned but equally gorgeous, walk in the woods. Hiking season in the North Cascades has just gotten started in earnest, and is fleetingly short for those who prefer not to slog through rain or snow.
The Washington Trails Association has a customizable hike search tool that you can use to select hikes by distance, difficulty, grade change, and other factors, along with recent reports from hikers. Summer is short; I recommend using at least some of it to get out of the city and onto a trail.