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Absurdity Culture I

Updated: Dec 24, 2022

Hello, readers. Welcome to the first instalment of our Absurd Culture roundup. Each month, our editors will be recommending the finest absurdist content they've consumed of late for you to explore.


Hashtag: #c_expo


Laken: I stumbled upon this collage hashtag (and by stumble I think the "Algorithms That Be" pushed it my way) on Instagram and started forwarding my finds to some friends. Ib immediately wrote back to me, "these are all literally fever dreams." So, there you go. This hashtag is a near-constant stream of absurdity and inspiration, which may just be one and the same.


Podcast: The Armchair Expert's Experts on Expert: David Sedaris

River: My go-to entertainment for a long drive is The Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, and my drive to Kansas City this week was no exception. I had the joy of listening to his interview with David Sedaris, and, in case you are unaware, David Sedaris is one of the most absurd humans on this earth. I oscillated between crying from laughter, sitting in stunned silence over the extremeness of his every minute thoughts, and gasping from the inappropriateness of it all. If you want something to disrupt your daily routine, listen to one of my favorite authors share some of the most bizarre parts of his life.


Film: Suspiria (1977)

Abbey: I’m the world’s biggest baby when it comes to horror movies, but I am trying to get over that enough to watch the good ones. Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a garish visual treat—full of red light, red sets, and a glass of red wine that turns to blood when it’s dumped into a sink. I read as many plot spoilers as I could find before watching a screening of the film in a 35mm print, alone, at a movie theater in New York (ily, Metrograph). Admittedly, I did look down at my lap when I knew a character was about to be mauled to death by his own guide dog—in the dog’s defense, he was possessed by witches—but otherwise I found the film to be satisfyingly melodramatic and have had zero (0) nightmares about it.

Watching Suspiria is also timely, as Luca Guadagnino’s remake comes out later this month, starring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, and featuring Jessica Harper, star of the original film. It’s said to be much, much scarier.


In The News:

Ib: I like the weird magical realism in this. It reminds me of magical realism writing, specially 20th century Latin American writing (although I suppose that might just be bc it’s what I’m most familiar with). The sheer absurdity of a TREE grew from INSIDE A (dead) HUMAN BODY but the headline presents it as kind of mundane? And the fact that it was a fig tree is even more absurd bc that’s such a specific and old-times kind of tree, like something that would have been symbolic biblically. Essentially, it’s the absolutely absurd presented as mundane that got to me. Like, it wasn’t the fact that a tree grew out of his fucking stomach that was the focal point of the headline, but rather that the tree was “unusual for the area.”


Film: I Heart Huckabees (2004)

Darren: Existential crises abound in a comedy that progressively unravels its characters and unhinges its actors: French arthouse legend Isabelle Huppert fucking Jason Schwartzman in the mud, Hollywood stars such as disillusioned model Naomi Watts screaming epithets in a bonnet and corporate douche Jude Law turned upside by the question "how am i not myself?"

The movie is tied together, though, by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as existential detectives-cum-lovers dedicated to the messiness of the human mind and the methods to discovering it: "if we might see you floss or masturbate, that could be the key to your entire reality."


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