Disco Liberalism or The Last Days of Disco
The piece is excellent. I missed it when it was published right after the election. I also missed Roy Price’s “Woke is the New Disco”, which the piece is based on. Read both.
—although I have to say, Mo Diggs’ assertion that pre-Elon Twitter was the Millennial generation’s Studio 54 is very depressing. Was our corollary to that legendary club and its velvet rope really verification badges (“blue checks”) on a social media platform?
At the urging of a friend, I recently rewatched Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, a coming of age tale set in the “very early eighties” about a group of recent college graduates and their relationship to a thinly-veiled Studio 54. (In the film, it is simply referred to as “the club.”) The WASPish protagonists are all on the periphery of the “disco movement”, as one character terms it, and learn via drug problems, STDs, unemployment, and federal criminal charges that hedonism has its consequences.
There’s a scene in the film that foreshadows whats to come. After being ejected one night from the club, the group discussed some bathroom graffiti: “Die Yuppie Scum!” Are they yuppies they wonder? Then again, no one ever says they’re a yuppie. And if they are, what’s so bad about being young and upwardly mobile?
Disco would die, of course. And the much derided yuppies went on to win the decade. And not to beat a dead horse, boom boom supplanting woke certainly rhymes here.
The movie certainly captures the urban sentiment of our moment: a wistful melancholia, a palpable sense that something has been lost. It’s a feeling present in all of Whit Stillman’s movies.
The first time I visited Paris, I stayed with a friend who was working for Stillman, who was kind enough to do an interview with me for Flash Art. (Don’t bother looking it up though—it was never published. Mostly on account of my poor skills as an interviewer.) He first suggested we do the interview at a racetrack outside the city, but then reconsidered and asked me to meet him at Harry’s New York bar, an expat hangout that predates the Lost Generation—and quite frankly, is the only place you can get a decent cocktail in Paris, if not France.
When I asked him about the millieu he grew up in, and which his semi-autobiographical work is based on, he said, “We didn’t think there would be any more of those parties within a few years. And they still exist so they had a longevity beyond what we thought.” He was talking about the debutante balls of Metropolitan, but the same could be said of the clubs in The Last Days of Disco.
Disco may have died, but dance music and night clubs live on. It’s so over. We’re so back. Plus ça change.
Graydon Carter’s memoir or “When the Going Was Good”
Maureen Dowd on the lost world of publishing from whence she and Carter emerged:
We both started at Time magazine in the early ’80s, a louche era of bars in offices, clouds of cigarette smoke, cascading illicit affairs, sumptuous dining carts of roast beef rolling down the halls and expense accounts so lavish that a top editor would think nothing of sending someone from Paris to London to fetch a necktie he had left in a hotel room.
It’s difficult not to be jealous.
Censorship or From the memory hole
Substack is not only a place where canceled authors go to write, it’s also a place where canceled material finds a second life—even when those currently at the helm of legacy publications would prefer it disappeared. Graham Linehan is republishing work that has been deleted from the archive, like this Rolling Stone piece on The Wachowskis. It’s twenty year vintage means it is rather indelicate about trans issues, which is likely why it is no longer available on the magazine’s website.
If possible, ignore the overt political framing, and simply read the article. It’s fascinating magazine reporting of the sort we don’t see much anymore. Not in our post-expense account times.
#Sean #Monahan
