7.1.25: An Update
Some Shit That's Been Going On In My Life
Last weekend I was in Fairbanks, Alaska for the Midnight Sun Festival, an annual event that draws 30,000 tourists to the sleepy former mining town to witness 24 hours of daylight on the evening of the Summer Solstice. Fairbanks is the northernmost “city” in the United States, if we aren’t counting smaller towns like Utqiagvik, where 30 Days of Night was set—and boy, you feel that distance when you’re there. A drive across town takes about 12 minutes, passing a few hip coffee shops and a handful of the usual retail fixings of McAmerica. There’s a good university, and the town certainly leans into its outdoorsy identity with touristy infrastructure and nature attractions. But for the most part, Fairbanks is caught in this eerie netherspace between the early 1970s and the present, its architecture in various states of decay surrounded by trees as far as the eye can see.1
When retail death comes to the suburbs of the lower 48, it leaves behind empty warehouses on the edge of town, with burned-on K-MART branding where a functioning sign used to be, empty churches to a dead god, keeping watch over gigantic empty parking lots. Depending on where you are—Ohio, Reno, Nevada—this wreckage either becomes the place in tow where you “don’t go,” or becomes a magnet for a new Shake Shack or Starbucks across the street, after which those silhouetted signs of an earlier retail economy are soon covered up with a Spirit Halloween banner. Not in Fairbanks. In Fairbanks the K-MART never left because it never came, but the building is still there, somehow. When the sun never goes down you can’t really place yourself in time, but that happens in Fairbanks on all 365 days of the year, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky.
If we are using Fairbanks as a laboratory for constructing metaphors to map the antimonies of American history, it’s almost too obvious to periodize the break in the 1970s. Are we being treated to another Don’t Look, It’s Neoliberalism! story? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it, but there just so happens to be a reason. Seventy years after the Klondike Gold Rush brought a wave of immigration that kicked off the modernization of the upper left corner of the North American continent, one final wave of industry swept the region following the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in 1968. Excavation work eventually led to the construction of the privately-owned Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which runs the vertical length of the 50th state and today facilitates 13% of the U.S.’ total domestic oil production. But to the chagrin of the Republican Party, the pipeline nevertheless only operates at 25% capacity these days. Like the rest of the town, the whole thing feels like an allegory: you really get a sense that there’s an entire generation missing from inside Fairbank’s social architecture where development—even creative destruction!—was supposed to unfold.
Speaking purely anecdotally, from the places I visited last weekend, the town appears to be peopled by the descendants of those who arrived in the twentieth century and those who were already there: indigenous peoples mixing with the descendants of White European settlers who arrived in the 1890s in search of gold, and interestingly, a still-sizable Russian-speaking population. This was fascinating to see first hand: while Alaska was at one point Russia, today seems the Fairbanks’ true connection to the post-1989 world of global capital flows runs not only through the pipeline on the edge of town, but also with waves of Eastern European immigration to the existing multigenerational communities of 130-year old Orthodox congregations buried in the woods across the state. This makes the area ripe for cross-Atlantic economic integration in the form of exchange programs that bring Bulgarian college students to town on their summer break to staff the restaurants filled with American tourists on vacation to see the midnight sun. The most famous eatery in the town of 31,000 is a Moldovan restaurant, and I passed a number of Eastern European grocery stores in the center of downtown. In Alaska! I couldn’t tell if they were meant more for tourists or locals; the answer surely is Yes.
All of this was interesting and would have been what I noticed had I come to town on any other weekend, but what made last weekend’s trip so particularly weird to me was the way I experienced Fairbanks phenomenologically. The average high temperature in Fairbanks in June is 72 degrees Fahrenheit; the week I visited it had been around 90 degrees for a number of days without rain, and predictably, a number of wildfires had broken out across the entire region. Something like 40,000 acres had been engulfed in flames by the end of the weekend, resulting in ensuing evacuations, road closures, and mobilizations that brought planes to the sky to try and stop the fires from spreading. You would hear a distant groan up above and when you’d look, as your eyes reached the hazy, brownish gray sky ceiling, you’d notice that the smoke seemed to be coming from just over the hill, like, over there, in that place, an area nearby that you could probably drive to in a matter of minutes. It gave the whole thing an eerie apocalypticism, compounded by the fact that as a visitor, I couldn’t tell if this was unusual or just another Saturday in Alaska in the twenty-first century.
Because the town doubles in size each June, I only needed to walk about ten blocks from my hotel to get to the small downtown area where the festival was talking place. I could have walked down the middle of the street if I wanted to. It’s difficult to overemphasize the extent to which the town really does look like a lot of other American towns, with four-lane streets and traffic lights dividing commercially-zoned blocks. The difference is that here there were maybe four cars out at any given time, and it didn’t seem like the festival had all that much to do with it.
Eventually, I arrived in the heart of the festival. Tents filled with local artisan trinkets lined the streets, selling everything from traditional indigenous Ulu knives to tie-dye anime t-shirts. A few hundred people were roaming the streets with open containers of beer they had snuck out of the beer garden, and like most of these things, you saw just about every flavor of Guy (gender neutral) they make in America. Kids would bump into you while playing chase and cackling in glee; their parents were across the street in line to get their sun-baked faces caked over with paint to look like an elephant or a mouse.
I only lasted about fifteen minutes before I started to get light-headed. The AQI had been fluctuating between unhealthy and dangerous levels all weeked, and the entire thing was cast with a vaguely orange hue under a sky entirely painted over with a layer of smoke covering a sun that refused to set. My headache was getting worse, and I started wishing I had brought a mask. But then I noticed that nobody—I mean nobody—was wearing one. I was standing there thinking about all of this when my phone buzzed and I pulled it out to read that Donald Trump had just approved airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. I fired off a couple of tweets after scrolling the timeline and then put my phone away. In this moment it seemed clear the reason there were no masks had less to do with any kind of coherent anti-mask conservatism and more that everyone wanted to pretend things were fine and that this was a weekend just like any other, and that the tears in their eyes were maybe coming from a joke that had them doubled over rather than the charred particles forcing themselves in through everyones’ sensory organs. I didn’t last much longer and decided to go inside.2
I snuck in the elevator just as it was closing, and the guy inside asked me what floor and I said seven. Standing next to him in the corner was a woman I’m assuming was his mother, or perhaps aunt, who was silently staring at the wall as the elevator beeped past each floor. As we reached my destination and the doors started to open, the woman who had until this point been silent suddenly let out in the most stereotypical Disappointed New York Jewish Mother voice I’ve ever heard, THERE IS ASH, FALLING FROM THE SKY! The guy made eye contact with me and you could read his embarrassment as he said “have a good night,” and I hope that the look I gave him back read as Knowing. When I opened the door to my room it smelled like smoke inside, so I shut off the fan circulating the external air and dealt with the heat, sitting in a room with sinewy strings of light sneaking in past blackout curtains and no air conditioning, inside my hotel room near the arctic circle, which was at that point on fire, 5,614 miles away from a place that was also engulfed in unexpected flames.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I wanted to give you a little update and proof of life. Hi! Things have been pretty crazy over the past few months. I don’t want this blog/website/newsletter—whatever it is—to be a diary, and despite the fact that I am extremely online and relatively open about my life, I really don’t want this to become a place for Matt Lore to fester. So many interesting writers let that stuff overtake their talents now that the demands of creating on social media platforms require a different mode of engagement than, say, the life of a midcentury newspaper columnist or obscure academic.3 But since some of you are paying me, and as I have been sort of dancing around what’s been going on for a while now with cryptic posts and slapdash prefaces, I suppose you deserve an update.
Last fall I got word my renewable NTT contract at Portland State was being axed along with seemingly half the rest of the university as part of a new financial stability plan for the University that just so happens to also be happening all across our higher education system at Universities of all shapes and sizes (Crazy coincidence, huh?). I was very lucky to get that job at PSU to get me back home to Portland after spending about a decade back east in Providence, first for graduate school and then with a few teaching gigs in the years after finishing my PhD. I had already decided I was likely going to leave academia before landing that job, and I knew that it was probably only a matter of time before the hammer fell for it too: but it was going to get me and my wife (and the boy (dog)) back home, which is where I wanted to be anyway.
Knowing something is inevitable honestly makes it worse when it arrives. I realize now I was basically pre-grieving for what I knew was coming and had sunk into a pretty crippling depression for a number of years, really, not just since finishing my PhD but before, as a result of the double-punch assault of Bernie getting ratfucked in the 2020 primary and then COVID locking me inside with a drinking problem, a fully-paid dissertation writing fellowship that meant I didn’t have to be anywhere, and an unhealthy obsession with Marxist economics that started as an academic pursuit before turning into a wet blanket of despair. Long story short: after a lot of personal turmoil that I don’t want to glorify or make into anything different than what everyone feels by dint of being alive right now, I checked out of rehab in January of this year and started rebuilding my day-to-day life to set myself up to make the career change I knew was inevitable.
But then a funny thing happened, as a certain British documentary filmmaker likes to intone. I started to like working again. I’ve had really crippling writer’s block since graduate school for reasons I only now really understand. I learned how to write at SB Nation, where I was on deadline to publish multiple Seattle Mariners game recaps each week for a website that was just as interested in aesthetic experimentation as it was sports reporting. But this didn’t work as well in grad school. Addiction certainly had something to do with it—I am a master avoider and booze gave me a handy out—but so too did the way I never really felt all that comfortable with the responsibility of being a Proper Academic, some of which I guess you could say is a class thing but really its more that I’m stubborn and don’t like being told what to do, to my detriment.
My success with experimental baseball writing did not prepare me for writing a dissertation. I only really know how to write this way, where I use too many em-dashes and cuss and capitalize Important Words to convey ideas to you in ways that it seems we all talk these days, even though I had been learning how to navigate the more formal spaces of seminar rooms and conference presentations for the past decade. Every time I tried to write my anxious brain would just send me down a spiral where I anticipated my advisor’s feedback so much that I would find myself reading something completely irrelevant to the argument I was supposed to be making so that he wouldn’t yell at me (again, I need to reiterate: this behavior was not grounded in any reality).
But sometime over the past few months, the motivation had returned (probably because I wasn’t soaking my brain with a depressant every night). Word was still terrifying, and in my frustration I began to ask myself why it was that every time I tried to write in Word I was poorly ventriloquizing what I thought a Real Academic sounded like, and yet when I used to look at Vox’s CMS for my baseball gig the words would just flow like a broken dam? The day after Trump won the election I drove my wife to the airport at like 4AM and then set up shop at a Stumptown Coffee and opened this website and started hammering shit out in my web browser. I now write everything in the Substack CMS, from blog posts you read here to idea dumps I need to get out, and even to essays I now pitch to Real Magazines and academic journals—you know, what I was supposed to be doing this while time. It’s funny what happens when you dig yourself out of a Mind Prison of your own construction.
I thought I was going to make a clean break from academia after receiving news of my non-renewal, but as I had a little more time left on my contract before the academic year ended, I suddenly found myself doing what I was supposed to be doing all along. So after getting word I would still have part time classes through the year at PSU—and importantly, after getting a LinkedIn only to discover the “real” job market is just as bad as the academic job market—I said fuck it. The only jobs I was seeing with my skillset were offers of temporary contracts to help companies train the AI that would eventually replace that temporary contract in the first place. I realized that I had been spending all this time waiting for the switch to Normalcy after the waiting room of grad school, as if all the trappings of middle class life were waiting for me to pass one last test. But it’s just not true! We are all of us in a serious moment of historical rupture, and nobody knows what’s going to happen in two weeks let alone ten years. AI is being forced on us, capital’s latest attempt to keep accumulating past the hard limit of 1973 that we’ve been ignoring with debt and zero-percent interest rates, moving manufacturing overseas to hide profits and keep the slop machine running before the entire house of cards comes crashing down. We are all scared about what is coming, and it’s going to come for everyone, and there’s really nowhere to hide unless you somehow know how to grow all your own food and are also a multi-millionaire
So to get to the point: my plan is to cobble together enough freelance stuff—adjuncting at PSU, teaching online with Cinejourneys, writing here and for various outlets—along with part time work in the film exhibition world I’ve been lucky to land, to try and make this work. I’m lucky to have a supportive partner and a good network to at least give it a shot before the economics prove unwieldy. How much riskier could it be than any other job, two regimes of accumulation removed from the ideal midcentury MAGA fantasy of full employment and a car in every garage?
More concretely, I want to thank you all for being so supportive over all the years, and I hope that I can keep your trust and interest as I push forward with this, which feels like a very different plan than I had been anticipating while working towards my degree, but in practice is really just the same thing I’ve been doing for 15 years now. Now I’m doing that work with a new focus and healthier sense of what it means to do be in this line of work in a world where we are rapidly destroying the institutions our society has used to produce knowledge for a thousand years. I’m not pretending like I have any answers for that, but I do think it makes this work all the more urgent.
My main project at the moment is my book, tentatively Against the History Machine. Hopefully I will have more details in the coming months (if you’ve been reading this blog you know what it’s about). I will continue publishing here (hopefully at a better pace than I have been), and am at the moment working on the second installment of my ongoing piece on the mythopoetics of Star Wars and Hollywood franchise culture as a strategy to juice a regime of accumulation that is rapidly decaying before our eyes.
More concretely, I think I am going to finally start utilizing the paywall on this site, with “news dumps” on Fridays analyzing that week’s Happenings, thoughts on what I’ve been watching, reading, or listening to, or I dunno, maybe a picture of my dog. I won’t charge you to look at a picture of my dog, I’m just kidding. But look for that soon and if it sounds interesting, I’m only asking for a few bucks a month, which will also give you a discount to my courses over at Cinejourneys. I have some upcoming classes that I’m really excited about, and I’m trying to take advantage of the freedom this mode of pedagogy allows.
So that’s the state of the blog. I suppose I’m saying that I’m transitioning to independent scholarship, but I don’t like that: I still teach at a University, and even if they don’t take what I do seriously, I do. I really do think that in my own life there will be a time where the University as such doesn’t exist. The work will, even if AI comes to replace every institution of learning or aesthetic production we have, and so the only way any of us will survive that is to keep on plugging away with the opportunities we have, assuming that anyone is interested enough to seek it out amidst humanity’s coming A.I. hibernation.
So thanks everyone—I love you, I’m excited for the future for the first time in a long time, and you know where to find me. See you in the funny pages.
I wouldn’t call it a non-space, following Marc Augé, insofar as non-spaces are historically-specific, interstitial zones for capital to pass through in post-industrial societies. Non-spaces don’t really have history, and they feel strange because you are left noticing history’s absence when you’re in them (an airport, a Target with the same exact layout in any city in the country). Fairbanks also has an ungraspable history, but you see its wreckage when you’re there. If the non-space of an airport presents you a space with a name that has its history only in photos on the wall or in gift shops, in Fairbanks you see history in an old movie theater turned into a bizarre, tourist-trap ice sculpture museum, or in a theme park made to look like a frontier town with a grounded boat, a miniature train, and log cabins selling tacos and fidget spinners.
To be clear: those of you who know me know I’m not a big Wear Your Mask! COVID moralist, nor do I really even like making a big deal out of how I feel at any given moment in the way some focus on accessibility as a political imperative (if I’m being honest with you this is mostly the result of spending the past 10 years hungover every single day and pretending not to be in the hopes nobody would notice).
If you want to see an example of this in action, go look at my post from a few years back about Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster, where I gave a brief update on the reunion show my band was playing at the time only to have one Freddie deBoer—who had been very public with the fact that his therapist had told him to stay off social media after he falsely accused Malcolm Harris of sexual misconduct—track me down to yell at me for tweeting about an article he had published earlier that day (he was namesearching, which if you ask me breaks the rule). I just want to get paid to write, dude, lol
I think your writing is quite good Matt. The journo/apocalyto vibe of your Fairbank's journey was dead on and I appreciated feeling it through your sensibility. Drinking is a soul killer. I would caution you on that and wish you well.
Dunno who that Freddie guy is but reading that comment on that post gave me psychosis. Hope hes better now.