MEGAN #24

Mar 16, 2021

^ visual representation of what this week has felt like (has nothing to do with newsletter)

SHORT:

On Saturday, my girlfriend and I went to the MoMa. We entered a room full of balloons and read a plaque that said it was an exhibit about aids and illness.

We turned around to see a girl with long hair and a Gucci bag doing a model pose in the middle of the room. Her friends were like, “you look amazing!” and snapping pics.

We went into another room and saw a Picasso painting that we decided was beautiful and our favorite and then we read the plaque and it said that it was inspired by the piles of bodies in the Holocaust.

Then we saw a painting of a horse with boobs and the caption was just: Satan.

Art’s cool.

MEDIUM:

Every morning, I open my eyes and stare at a Post-It that says: “TIME 2 RISE AND THRIVE”. It’s a sarcastic Post-It. But sometimes it gets me up.

Last week, I managed to rise and thrive and make it all the way to Washington Square Park. I read a batshit book about bunnies on a sunny bench.

In the middle of my reading experience, a man came up and asked me for money. I didn’t have cash on me (and I told him that). He asked me to Venmo him. I did.

Then he asked me to check out his SoundCloud/YouTube. I pulled up The SoundCloud. He said the first song was the best, so I pressed play, and we rocked out to his music.

After a few minutes, he told me to check out his IG (specifically the bio). It said: Stay Positive!

Then he walked away.

I did not stay positive for the rest of the day.

I went home and moped/wallowed in pandemic angst and future uncertainty (as is my wont).

But for a sunny 30 mins, 6 ft apart, that guy and I were on top of the world.

I miss music and singing. For some reason, I have been listening to Taylor Swift’s Speak Now for this entire week. Nobody could’ve predicted that I’d become a Swiftie at age 24, but here I am. Consequently? The Grammys set my soul on fire.

Maybe I’ll write a song this week about a person I saw on the train who didn’t want to ruin/scuff his shoe by using it to hold the train door open so he stuck his hand in the middle of the two doors instead and it looked extremely painful.

He kept saying “I’m not gonna ruin my shoe, brah.” As his hand got more and more smushed.

Could be an amazing hook…

“I’m not gonna ruin my shoe, brah. My hand’s turning into a tortilla.”

Much to think about…

Stay tuned…

LONG:

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I’ve been revisiting my undergrad academic writing. I don’t know if it’s brilliant or ridiculous or all or none or both or who cares.

I spent a lot of time writing about shit like how “In his work. Gilles Deleuze explores society’s transition from structured, stagnant systems of discipline to decentralized, fluid societies of control.” And asking pretentious questions like “Is simultaneous rehearsal and erasure possible?” (see footnote).

I once poured my soul into an essay that focused on how, in Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, “Soderbergh only places one true animal in the film: Nora’s pet pig Herman. At a glance, Herman seems a mere decoration, a quirky accessory for Nora’s whimsically tripped-out character; but as the film progresses, the pig emerges as pivotal to Soderbergh’s exploration of gender and consumption. As Nora’s pet, Herman is constantly by her side; the pig is irrefutably tied to the woman. This relation inverts the classic societal trope of men as swine. Instead of placing his boys in the mud, Soderbergh lets a new group into the pen. In the world of Magic Mike, women are the pigs.”

I even wrote a 10-page essay about Bridesmaids’ gross-out humor called, yep, you guessed it: The Rectal Test.

But the one that makes me die laughing is the one below.

It’s a self-serious, true academic examination of Looney Toons. I hate myself for it. It’s dumb. I think it says a lot about academia and rhetoric and nonsense. Enjoy.

A Genius Among The Wise
From Daffy Duck to Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes characters are hyper aware of their place as performers. There is a constant shattering of the fourth wall; through verbal communication and handwritten signs, the audience is welcomed into the animated world. And at the door, they are given an epithet: “wise”. More specifically, they are regarded as “wiseguys”, a label reemphasized across the cartoon narrative. But what does it mean to be a “wiseguy” in the world of Looney Tunes? Two episodes, Operation: Rabbit (1952) and Soup or Sonic (1980), are particularly useful in examining this question. While the episodes hail from two different spheres of the Looney Tunes world, both place the audience in a similar position of status and all-knowingness. Bugs Bunny and Wile E Coyote’s repetitive acknowledgement of the audience as “wise” both upholds and challenges the validity of the epithet, a paradox that prompts us to question the very nature of wiseness in the Looney world and beyond.
In Soup or Sonic and Operation: Rabbit, the audience is “wise” because they can predict what will happen in advance. Unlike Wile E Coyote, the audience learns from repetition; patterns are taken into consideration. In Soup or Sonic, the audience can predict the coyote’s failure to catch the roadrunner with a rocket by his second try, their anticipation only further satisfied by his third and fourth unsuccessful rocket attempts. In Operation: Rabbit, viewers chuckle at Wile E Coyote’s self-proclaimed “sheer unadulterated brilliance”, for they know that he is not “Super Genius” as he so labels himself, but rather, as Bugs Bunny puts it, “mud spelled backwoids” or DUM. The audience lives for the instant gratification of correctly predicting the coyote’s downfall. It feels good to be superior and omniscient.
And yet, is this dynamic not highly problematic? The so-called “wise” finding joy in repetition, trusting that things will simply “go as they always do” over and over again? This reliance seems dangerous. For how can true change, difference, or progress occur in a system of sameness? Complacency and acceptance are an innovator’s enemy. But the wiseguys in Looney Tunes do not dream of change. Instead, they are lauded for accepting things as they are, as they always have been, and that’s all, folks.
Even Bugs Bunny and Wile E Coyote sense the problematic mentality of their audience. Their use of the term “wiseguy” drips with sarcasm and mockery. In Soup or Sonic, the coyote is faced with a monstrous-sized roadrunner. He turns to the audience, holding up a sign that asks, “OKAY WISEGUYS...WHAT DO I DO NOW?” “Wiseguy” emerges as a teasing term. The viewers can watch the coyote fail, and even, perhaps succeed, but they cannot actively help or intervene. Instead, they look on as passive spectators, elated and comfortable with the serial mishaps that the work provides. In a similar manner, in Operation: Rabbit, Bugs Bunny says “I have come to give myself up”, to which Wile E Coyote responds, “a wise decision my friend”. To be wise is to be undetermined, to merely succumb to the “way things are”.
The coyote, however, refuses to settle for sameness. There is always a new contraption to be assembled, a new blueprint drawn, a plan with an optimistic and ambitious goal at the end: “Road Runner Crushed (Ha-Ha!). The coyote believes in the potential for change, of a different outcome despite all probability and risk. And this is, perhaps, what makes him a true Super Genius after all. Regardless of circumstance, the coyote steps up to the plate and swings with determination. He dreams of difference in a system of seriality, and it is this faith that allows for an eventual earth-shattering change in the Looney Tunes narrative–when the coyote succeeds and finally catches the roadrunner.
Looney Tunes warns us not to confuse the wise with the risk averse. The series recognizes the danger of passivity and the brilliance of saying a relentless “yes” in the face of strongly articulated “no’s”. The mocking “wiseguy” epithet is a call to action. A caution against passivity and comfort in a system of sameness. A system where wiseness is, in reality, blindness, the inability to see the true, sheer genius, of embracing the improbable, the insane, the loony.