069: just say no to robots

a consumption diary from tia glista

Tia Glista is a writer, filmmaker, and (fellow) grad student, in addition to being my friend and guardian angel. When I was experiencing endless anxiety and imposter syndrome during my first semester of grad school, Tia’s cheerful and grounded advice offered incredible relief. Apart from being a wise sage, Tia is an incredible writer and critic. She manages to break apart a work, sift through the pieces, and re-present it without losing grasp of its essence. Her critical voice is sophisticated and authoritative, but never alienating. What I admire the most about her is the generous attention she gives to each of her subjects, whether it’s Riverdale or Virginia Woolf. It was a true delight to get a peek into her consumption habits.

xx Akosua

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Friday
Our story starts the way that all of the best ones do: eating breakfast in bed, watching the latest episode of Riverdale. I am really baring my soul to you by beginning this way, but I have to be honest—I simply adore Riverdale, a show so unhinged that it consistently makes me gasp/cackle/do mental gymnastics the way no other piece of media has ever dared to. I also think that this season is, maybe, not so bad—it’s set in the 1950s and they’ve managed to keep the serial killer tally down to one and jettison all signs of magic and the supernatural (so far).

I spent the rest of the morning doing pilates and catching up on reading that I hadn’t finished before my travels earlier in the week. I finished Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE, and felt washed in the depth of research and vibrance of this fabulist novel’s take on modernism—enchanted, if you will. An emergent theme this week turned out to be what is missing from the official archive, and LOTE does a lot of work to restore the important and aesthetically rich role of Black queer British people at the turn-of-the-century. I also read a few chapters of the French philosopher Elsa Dorlan’s book Self-Defense—I liked parts of this book a lot, but it also felt distracted and full of argumentative gaps (if you’re going to read it, most of the best stuff is in the Preface!) I am splitting my summer between freelance writing and (soon) studying for my PhD field exams, and so I sent out some pitches to editors at magazines I hope to work with and chased down screeners and galleys from PR reps.

To that end, the afternoon was spent watching a screener of Savanah Leaf’s feature debut from A24, Earth Mama. I can’t say much about this yet, except that I think it’s terrific and Leaf will be a force. I love seeing directorial debuts and feeling that everything was made-to-measure, that the director has a close and keen vision for their subject or setting that comes through as love and care. It makes such a difference when films are made with this kind of effort and intensity; I like to see someone’s fingerprints left behind, to feel a body and breath flowing into the work. 

I also read an essay from Helena Fitzgerald’s newsletter Griefbacon about the end of Succession. Aptly titled “The Last TV Show,” Fitzgerald meditates on a similar kind of feeling—that of caring profoundly about a story of little consequence to others, and of how Succession so successfully achieved prestige while being incredibly unconventional and niche. Fitzgerald points out one of my favorite things about the show, which was its ability to write sentences that fall apart in the mouths of the actors, sentences that run like beautiful rivers and then stumble and slow to a trickle, at once both more articulate than and as messy as real life. Succession never followed predictable narrative arcs, never offered cheap twists or ham-fisted foreshadowing, but unfolded (seemingly) spontaneously just as life might. In this way, Fitzgerald argues, it seems the antithesis of an AI-generated story or the MCU-ification of film and television in which everything is derivative of something else. As she so beautifully puts it: 

Calling Succession “the finale of television” is a joke, but it also isn’t. This very well may have been the last TV show that was in fact television, and not the internet. The direction in which television seems to be headed is towards the same endless scroll as today’s internet, a feast of numbing, half-baked options, a surface that never collects dust, or dirt, or texture, uninterested in the underneaths. Perhaps that future is inevitable; I hope it isn’t; I hope every strike succeeds. I hope I’m wrong about everything. I hope I feel stupid for calling Succession the finale of television. I always hope I’m wrong about the future.

Of course, this is also about the writer’s strike and AI, about the way in which making art has become something that the ruling elites do not see as worthy of real compensation, or perhaps even as skillful at all. The disdain toward artistry, its mutation into a bland and iterable commodity, is, I think, deeply tied to the idea that it need not require skill, only strategy and a machine-like ability for output, sans thought. 

After reading this, I spent some time being angry about ChatGPT and AI-generated art—the promise of artificial intelligence, we were always told, would be its capacity to boost efficiency and do good in fields like medicine or manufacturing, and yet now it seems focussed instead on replacing the need to think or communicate for ourselves. The idea that AI can make art for us, for example, suggests that art is all product and no pleasure, that its usefulness lies in its ability to generate profit and not in the challenges, questions, and ideas that emerge from actually making something. Also, AI art sucks.

That night, I went to a party at a friend’s apartment and complained about AI some more.

Saturday
When I woke up, I scrolled through tabs that I had left open on my phone looking for something to read so that I didn’t have to get out of bed yet. I happened upon a five year old article from W in which Greta Gerwig (my spiritual twin) directed Florence Welch’s (my other spiritual twin) cover shoot, revealing that they are in fact close friends who once met at Veselka (a Ukrainian diner on the street where I once lived) to discuss doing a project together. I scoured the Internet for any updates, and in their absence, danced to Florence while preparing breakfast.

I finished Self-Defense and started reading Jennifer Higgie’s book The Mirror and the Palette, a nonfiction history of women’s self-portraiture. During undergrad, I received a research grant to do a summer project of a similar kind, and though I predictably only managed about 60 pages of mediocre writing, I am glad to see someone has written this history in much, much fuller detail and scope. Though I wish Higgie added more analysis and argument to her historical glosses, the depth of her research is really impressive. I was struck by the story of Properzia de’Rossi, a 15th-century Italian sculptor who carved a Crucifixion from a peach stone and sculpted a hundred heads onto a cherry pit. If a robot did this, I would not care one bit—it’s the humanity of it all that makes it so impressive. 

I stumbled into this essay in n+1 about the women of Joanna Hogg’s films. I confess to still only being halfway through, but it made me think about artmaking as frustration and as a practice that has to be learned, something that I am more conscious of as my own experience of writing has become less fluid than it once was. For instance, I think I’ve been hiding behind interviews instead of writing meaty criticism, avoiding the effort of the longform and the vulnerability of defending an argument.

I went to my grandparents’ house for dinner and when I came home, I read an article about a crocodile in Costa Rica who had a virgin birth. Nature is healing.

Sunday
Read Higgie. Took a dance class. Bought watermelon and bananas on the way home. Brought my duvet to the couch, watched Abbott Elementary, and waited for the rain to start. 

Monday
I had a slow morning with the intention of moving into high gear after lunch, but received the sad news that my beloved professor Mari Ruti had passed away. Mari was an incredibly distinguished critical theorist who specialized in psychoanalysis, queer theory, and gender, and I was lucky enough to be in one of her last grad seminars in 2021. The course was about mourning, which felt eerily coincidental. I spent the afternoon messaging with a friend who knew her better than I did, sharing memories, and crying. 

In the evening, I pulled myself together by putting on a cute outfit and walking to Bloor St to meet Winnie for dinner, followed by a screening of The Last Days of Disco at the Paradise.¹ So many of my favorite people in the city turned out to be there too, and I adored the movie, which made me wish there were better places for dancing (and that I had the confidence to go). It was also buoyed by the energy of the audience (shoutout to Emma’s awesome laugh!) which made the whole thing feel like a fun group experience with friends, especially since Toronto audiences can be pretty icy and reticent to express any feeling.

Tuesday
I read this short essay, “The Kitchen Sink,” that Sheila Heti wrote for Astra, in which she parses the difference between “dirty” (as in unclean or messy) and “filthy” (as in morally outrageous, disappointing, or upsetting). I don’t really know or care what the point of the whole essay is so much as I was delighted by this attentive thinking, this taking apart of language that is surprising and insightful and imparts not only the importance of human critical thinking but the amusements of it as well.

For some reason I decided to watch Bodies, Bodies, Bodies while I ate dinner, and then did a deep dive on Rachel Sennott’s old YouTube channel. I watched this video twice and then heard Sennott’s voice saying “surf culture” and “watch your step, it’s super dark in here” in my head on a loop all night. (COULD A ROBOT MAKE THIS!??! Robots might be able to tell some jokes, but they will never learn to be silly!)

Wednesday
I made a pot of homemade chai and went to a virtual talk about “the aesthetics of body fat in ancient Greek and Roman sculpture” hosted by the Getty Museum. This was one of those random events that pops up in the margins of Eventbrite and turns out to be weirdly and specifically geared towards you. One of the scholars giving the talk pointed out that because sculpture is such difficult, delicate, and procedural work, we have to take every part of the sculpted body as something designed with intention—the inclusion of fleshiness, body rolls, or muscular tension is always additive and therefore somehow meaningful. Again, I was struck by the coincidence between process and product, or how the difficulty of making something ends up being vital to what it becomes rather than a mere obstacle or inefficiency to eliminate.

After taking a dance class in the evening, I read an article in The New Statesman about greedflation. I am trying to stay off of Twitter as much as possible and to read more longform news, and had started this article while loafing around a newsstand at Heathrow Airport the previous Monday. I finished it and felt weirdly equipped to think about the economy, something I’ve always assumed is beyond my grasp—now, I have some knowledge with which to back up my general skepticism and distrust. The author, Will Dunn, breaks down the way in which Britain’s current bout of inflation is actually based mostly on speculation and price gauging, and shows how at grocery stores, for instance, consumers are spending more to buy less, meaning that the food industry is producing less but charging more and so growing their margins massively. It all undermines the basic argument for capitalism—that the market will regulate itself—and is a symptom of the massive wealth inequality exacerbated by COVID and rampant individualism, not genuine inflation (this seems very applicable here in Canada too). 

Thursday
I went back to my parents’ house and baked cookies and went on a walk with my mom. We watched one of our favourite episodes of Dickinson, “A Little Madness in the Spring” (S3E6), where the family goes on an outing to the local asylum. I love that show, and feel it did not get its flowers. As it turns out, this episode is also one of many written by Ayo Edebri, who everyone rightfully loves now.

Friday
I came back to the city and read more from Higgie on the subway. I watched the Gossip Girl reboot while I made and ate lunch. I’m pitching an essay about the attitude toward celebrity culture (think cameos, namedrops, gossip) in contemporary film and TV, so I also included a quick viewing of the latest episode of The Other Two on Max (née HBO) as “research.” I’m actually pretty ambivalent about this show, which some people laud as the best comedy writing of the moment but I find only intermittently funny or smart (when it works, it works though—I just think that’s too seldom to warrant all of the praise). I started planning to host a lunch for my family on the weekend and then went to dance, and finished off the day with a pitstop for some cardamom gelato. In my life, all roads lead to ice cream.

Thanks for reading! You can follow Tia on Instagram and Twitter. You can find her writing and other work on her site. And if you’re an editor, you should commission her!

Read more guest posts: Emma Cohen, Casey MQ, Rachel Davies, Tony Zelenka, Jess Kasiama, Blake Mancini, Kyle Curry, Sonja Katanic.

1. Editor’s note: A movie that makes an incredible case for the going-out top.