Let’s all escape from reality for a second with a little trip into the bizarroland of Doja Cat’s “Mooo!” video. Seemingly one giant pun, she appears, totally straight-faced, in a montage of cow-themed settings: wearing sexy cow suit, eating a burger, green screened on top of anime boobs, drinking a milkshake in a sexy farm girl outfit… When she starts rapping, “bitch, I’m a cow,” you think you’re getting punkd, but then the rest of her lyrics are brilliant. Between samples of everyone from Kelis (duh) to Ludacris, she fits in seemingly every word with the letters ‘moo,’ plus more pun gold: “These heifers got nothin’ on me / Steaks high, need a side of collard greens.” Whatever else is going on in your life today, let this video be your happy place.
The best time to talk about Burning Man is while everyone is there and can’t hear you. On that note, there are some great think pieces out right now about the living fate of the festival. Let’s start with The New Republic’s “Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man.” A solid primer, here’s my extremely bastardized version (that is, you should read the original): where Burning Man used to be a set of a few dozen people going rogue in the desert (cool), its principles don’t really work when the festival is several-thousand strong and tickets range from $200 to thousands. The license to abandon your identity and become whatever you want in the desert for a week (“radical self-expression”) lends itself easily to the Halloween-style ‘slutty angel’ aesthetic among attendees, who, here as in all things, have become more basic at scale. And while burners congratulate themselves for their radical subversiveness, remoteness, and temporary otherness (ha!), as if they’re among the original few, the organizers have agreed to livestream the whole festival, and have set up an exhibition of costumes, art, and other relics at the Smithsonian, entitled… wait for it… “No Spectators.” Please, somebody, justify something.
tl;dr: Burning Man has no laws. While it’s billed as ‘anticapitalist,’ in reality it’s just anti-establishment, which means that the tech elite (ok, and others) whose radical(ly capitalist) visions get held up by pesky regulationin the real world can really flex their libertarian muscles on the playa. That means lavish, exclusive camps built and staffed by day laborers from “sherpas” to models, which, by virtue of the space they take up, dramatically shift the tenor of everybody’s experience. And the takehome here for the Valley guys is that, in an “ideal” society, they get to make the world into whatever they want, with no one else’s input. Which actually doesn’t seem much different from the rest of the year, does it?
Ladies in the room, if you’ve spent the summer looking for the perfect bathing suit, I have your answer: Andie. Their suits come in cuts that balance the classic and contemporary, without unnecessary bells and whistles. On the key question of fit, they have a little quiz to help you find out which suits will look best on you, and also offer free shipping and returns so you can be sure to pick the right one. I have been jamming in the Tulum, which looks fly and covers all the right stuff. It’s almost as if women are in charge at this company (they are). On that note, it’s never too late for a good suit– take a look here.
