First Substack Post

My First Post on Substack

This is the first of a very occasional “newsletter” that will be half updates of my work and half recommendations of other people’s work. I do not plan on using Substack as a blog.

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MY WORK

-THE TRUMP L’ŒIL ESSAYS, a three part series for the LA Review of Books about our post-policy politics of pure spectacle. Most recently, MAGA as Fan Fiction, a once-upon-a-time story about politics in an increasingly fan-fictional reality. Last spring, Player One and Main Character, about Musk and Trump’s very literal main character syndrome. And just before the election, Trump l’Oeil, about why I believed Trump, as a walking-talking image in an image world, had home court advantage against Kamala Harris. There is also an audio version of MAGA as Fan Fiction so well edited by Julian of New Models that when I heard it, I thought, “Oh, this is actually the correct medium for this piece.”

-BEELDENSTORM MEDITATION, a guided meditation made in collaboration with Jak Ritger and Cassandra Jenkins about the iconoclastic riots of the protestant reformation, hosted by DIS. This piece was originally made as part of my show, IMAGES: A Show, which just finished up a run at New Theater Hollywood and will be coming to a museum in NYC for a (maybe final) run in December.

-END TIMES, a short essay for Family Style about apocalypses and two contradictory truths: 1) We are living through an extraordinary moment, the “polycrisis” of a species behaving like an addict who craves rock bottom. 2) We are living through an ordinary moment; the imminence of the end has been held in certainty since the beginning.

-ALIENS, short fiction about a middle-aged father having a sexting affair, published in The Drift in 2024. Including here because I miss writing short fiction and would like to start doing so again soon. If I ever republish this story, I think I’ll change the title to, “Love.”

-PODCAST APPEARANCES: Gideon Jacobs - On Images (The Messy Truth ); Mayor Mamdani and the New Image Politics (The Culture Journalist ); Gideon Jacobs on Media, Politics, and Ketaphysics (New Models).

-SPEAKING APPEARANCES: The End of Images, with Dean Kissick and David Rudnick at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in LA, Naming the Unknown, a panel at the Wende Museum with The LA Review of Books.

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OTHER’S WORK

-THE COLOR SCHEME by Aria Dean, commissioned for Performa, 2025. The actors Nile Harris and Zaid Arshad were very good, but mostly I just enjoyed watching Dean take a big, romantic swing in our still-postmodern era when what is raw, fast, and unmediated is celebrated and what is careful, slow, and ambitious is lame. Though a shift is certainly underway, it remains riskier to be caught trying to make something beautiful than to be caught with your pants down.

-WAR SONGS by Diane Severin Nguyen, also a commission for Performa, 2025. We live in a time when watching beautiful, earnest, young people sing about peace is a challenging work of art, a confrontational experiment in tone. Nguyen lets the audience — often unsure exactly what they are meant to do — marinate in that simple fact.

-NEW YORK REAL ESTATE AND THE RUINATION OF AMERICAN ART by Josh Kline, in October’s winter 2026 issue. Anything true is so complex and multivariable-d that it cannot be fully grasped. Kline’s essay is a thorough inventory of the situation of contemporary art in America, a straightforward demystification, matter-of-factness as style. I suspect when insiders of nearly any industry, from film to restaurants, attempt their version of Kline’s exercise, it reveals how many seemingly distinct cultural/societal issues are “trickle down” symptoms of the same disease: an unprecedented concentration of wealth, mostly by a couple thousand people in Silicon Valley.

-MY CAMP by Joshua Cohen, a short story in The New Yorker. This is from 2024 and Cohen, a Pulitzer Prize winner, doesn’t need any more praise, but I thought it was the best fiction the magazine has published in the last decade. (I am setting aside Cohen’s politics entirely.) I may be seeing what I want to see, but I believe the title is a quintuple entendre, which would be annoying if the story didn’t justify it.

-STORES/THEATERS: People still seem to want to go to physical places that are special. For example, Tihngs by Eric Oglander, Surrender Dorothy by Ruby McCollister, Arabella Aldrich, and Leah Hennessey, Rectangle Room by Tim Barber, New Theater Hollywood by Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel, Low Cinema by John Wilson, Davis Fowlkes, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim.

-SUBSTACKS: Although I do not plan on publishing writing directly on/for Substack, here are some friends who do it well: Geoffrey Mak, Fabiola Alondra, Kendall Waldman, Elena Waldman, Brad Phillips, Mitzi Akaha, Lexie Smith, Kay Kasperhauser Seth Jacobs.

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Strictly speaking, we have no right to call something traitorous if all it’s ever done is lie. In fact, I propose we make the mirror our species’ flag, because in it we have found the key to our destiny. -Ángel Bonomini (The Report, translated by Jordan Landsman)

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