The 'How Long Gone' guys talking about exercise
Also discussed: Erewhon; Jacques Lacan; Hollywood Handbook; Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” ; our imminent death; Andrew Martin, Knausgaard; mommy, daddy
With everything going on right now, let’s discuss how the co-hosts of the “bi-coastal elite” podcast How Long Gone, Chris Black (writer and brand consultant) and Jason Stewart (aka, DJ Them Jeans) talk about exercise.
Sam: Something we’ve been discussing “offline” lately is how much we both love the How Long Gone podcast. Can you tell our (many) readers why?
Joe: While the two frequently have guests—basically, people who identify with “media Twitter”—I’m more transfixed by the ten-to-fifteen minute intros, where the two basically compare workout regimens and talk about the purchases they did or didn’t make at Erehwon.
Sam: I would agree it’s one of the few interview-based podcasts where I’d rather listen to the co-hosts talk to each other than to the actual guest. The show is so inside baseball—maybe only inside baseball?—that having the wrong guest on almost feels like an imposition.
Joe: Like another pod with two straight white guys talking for an hour that we unabashedly love, Hollywood Handbook.
Sam: Except in Hollywood Handbook, the boys never really break out of the bit (that they’re big shot Hollywood producers). With the HLG guys, there’s this fun tension in wondering just how much of their discussion is, in fact, a bit. By which I mean, how much of what they discuss—about the minutiae of their tennis game and juice regimen and quarantine fits—is supposed to be sort of ironic?
Joe: It’s like your practically begging me to bring up DFW’s E Plurabis Unum essay — but, having spent three years in MFA workshops resisting this very urge, I will NOT take the bait…
…anyway, I don’t want to be that guy (I am that guy) but I almost think it transcends irony or whatever. I’ve been thinking that there’s something about the HLG guys talking about exercise, plus their utter lack of inquisitiveness re: anyone’s history or perspectives—I mean, most of the time they’re just talking about what people eat and drink and buy—that reveals (and revels in) the beauty of surface. I think there’s a reason it’s what I listen to in the shower each morning, in between sleep and my morning meditation/anxiety attack.
Sam: That sounds healthy.
Joe: I hate myself, what’s new? I’m just saying, the HLG guys talking about applying WeedSport CBD rub onto their calves—it sort of pleasantly washes over you. There’s nothing to hold onto. It’s like watching cars pass you by.
Sam: Yeah, I mean it seems like now more than ever we’re in constant pursuit of things that help us zone out and forget about, like, the omnipresence of death, which is more intense than ever.
Joe: Shout-out to the novel coronavirus.
Sam: To your point, though, because of the all-consuming nature of “everything going on right now,” (hell ya) fewer and fewer things feel totally benign. It’s rare, for example, to see a piece of pop culture released nowadays that isn’t at least tangentially entangled with the issues du jour.
Joe: Maybe that’s why the podcast feels, I don’t know, kind of edgy?
Sam: Right. I mean, the absence of stakes feels almost radical.
Joe: It’s funny, some guests of theirs, when they’re asked, say, what their COVID workout routine has been, think the guys are fucking with them somehow, as if it’s a joke. But it’s not a joke, or it is, but it’s also deeply sincere, and the joke is on everyone (them, the person who doesn’t get it’s a joke, us), and so any malice or deeper meaning is kind of canceled out. There’s a perverse authenticity in there being nothing else to it.
Sam: It’s just like what our thirtysomething protagonist mutters in our as-of-yet un-produced screenplay: “What is ‘nothing?’”
Joe: Sam! You promised you wouldn’t bring that up…*smiles demurely*
I do feel like I’m approaching, through the HLG guys talking about cardio, a sort of “philosophy of surface” which —
Sam: Props to you for coming up with a “philosophy”
Joe: —is not anti-intellect or anti-science or even “numbness as feeling” (as elite podcaster Bret Easton Ellis would put it) but simply a rebuff against aimless digging, and maybe even some fleeting glimpses at uncomplicated joy. It’s sort of like that recent NYT Mag piece, “How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted” by one of our favorite culture writers, Kyle Chakya, but the attitude is perhaps a notch less nihilistic and a drop more…fun? “Chill”?
Sam: Yeah, I wouldn’t describe HLG as part of Chayka’s “culture of negation,” which he defines as “a body of cultural output, from material goods to entertainment franchises to lifestyle fads, that evinces a desire to reject the overstimulation that defines contemporary existence.” The HLG guys seem to have given in to the overstimulation; they’re bathing in it. Perhaps it’s more accurate to describe them as, like, scumbro belletrists—they’re into shit because it tastes good, or feels good, or looks good, and that’s it. (And they like(d) cigs.)
Joe: In other words, they’ve simply accepted things the way they are, on their own terms.
Sam: And the way things are, they’re just two guys who have a podcast with an average following. Unlike other podcasters they’re not “experts” or “authorities” or nerds investigating a cold case (without ever coming to a satisfying conclusion), who are always digging for more. So many people can pass themselves off as experts these days that it's hard to tell who the expert is.
Joe: That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?
Sam: But the FOMO quality feels kind of new. That the accessibility of knowledge, or the semblance of knowledge, on a given topic deludes us (i.e., anyone with Wi-Fi and too much spare time) into thinking that we must be missing something, that because of the incredible surfeit of stuff out there there must be stuff we don't know or understand that's critical to our understanding.
And as with Trumpism, one byproduct of this quixotic approach to information-gathering is that we ignore what's right in front of us—or place what's right in front of us (the physical "truth"?) on the same level as hypotheticals about what's in front of us. Again, I'm pro-intellectualism, but maybe I'm just pro-intellectualism for intellectual people—that is, people who understand how to weigh something that’s unequivocally true against something that only might be true.
Joe: But aren’t the intellectual people (i.e the liberal Twitterati) the ones sort of driving this bus? Or at least eating their own tail? Like your cat?
Sam: The synergy…
Joe: There’s this academic paper I read while researching an early draft of my (unpublished failure of a) novel—
Sam: The brutal self-deprecation just hits different on Substack.
Joe: —that talks about how presidential secrets control us through a sort of compulsive enjoyment. The article uses Lacan’s definition of enjoyment— “the compulsive return to a site of unresolved tension”—to describe how they (we, the public) “perpetuate an anxious compulsion to search,” replacing the “pursuit of happiness with an imperative to pursue a self-defeating enjoyment.” One lens through which the paper sees this is Poe's "The Purloined Letter," wherein everyone thinks the secret is in the letter, when it’s the fact that everyone thinks the secret is in the letter that really characterizes the secret's effects.
Sam: I feel like all of this must be somewhat related to the obsession with "transparency" that seems to have really become a thing in the last ten years. And while I'm all for transparency in theory (obvi), in practice it's one of those things, like the "aimless digging" we keep coming back to, that becomes a self-defeating (or perpetuating) exercise—in that the more transparency we're given, the more opportunities there are to create/keep secrets (because more and more things are supposed to be not-secrets).
Joe: Or you realize, “Oh fuck, there’s a lot more to hide.”
Sam: Like, if I didn't use to tell you what I ate for dinner every night, but then I was expected to, and then I didn't tell you I ate a McRib last night (per Lacan), what used to be something I considered a private matter—my dinner choice—suddenly becomes a secret.
Joe: Or, as we’ve talked about before, transparency just becomes—and I’m really talking on the corporate level here—a way to make yourself palatable again to the market.
Sam: Right, and the disingenuousness of this, at some point, starts to feel like a cover-up for some other truth: They’re telling us this, so they must not be telling us something else.
Joe: It’s a simulacrum—
Sam: It’s like someone had a bet going on how much overused French critical theory you could weave in here.
Joe: —of transparency, whereby the sign of transparency no longer links up to any real transparency (or something). By contrast, you never get the sense the HLG guys are hiding anything, probably because they’re not saying anything of any real depth in the first place. You sort of trust them more. It almost feels more real in its “fake”-ness. Like they are unabashed lovers of things. They did a whole taste test of some weird liqueur, Ghia. The selection of natural wines is a running joke. Eating out at expensive restaurants is always on the docket.
Sam: It’s sort of the counterpoint to everyone’s favorite New Yorker writer/IG mommy Jia Tolentino, who has been taken to task for how she simultaneously critiques and participates in capitalist enterprises (which is not quite a good-faith take, IMO). HLG is pure surface in that it sort of glides past that critique to a kind of fatalist but still-sincere submission to consumerism—like, fuck it, yeah, I love these $20 smoothies. The very sincerity of which inherently amounts to a satirization of themselves and their desires, as unimportant, insubstantial, vacuous...
Joe: Which of course makes sense seeing as they’re straight white men talking to themselves. Who could be less important?
Sam: Us?
Joe: Shout out to the two people reading this (i.e., mom and dad, and not even really dad, because he’s definitely skimming this and saying to himself, “Enough with Lacan!”).
Sam: I think what we’re getting at here though is that HLG’s surface-level dialogues amount to a sort of tacit recognition of themselves as mediocre white guys whose only real area(s) of expertise lie in talking about tennis and stuff.
Joe: To be fair they are very chill at, like, branding and electronic music. But yeah, point taken. Though it’s also part of the bit—it’s almost a send-up of mediocrity, a satire of the idea that white men have to do way less in order to succeed. In a more macro context, it’s almost comical to think about: the white guy trapped with a near-mirror of himself (shout out to this Substack) talking about nothing, barred off safely from the (end of the) world. Like No Exit. Or the end of Seinfeld.
Sam: Or something I’d bookmark on the Criterion channel and then not watch.
Joe: Are we getting paid to plug the most laughably White Indie Guy things on the planet?
Sam: “A Yankee Hotel Foxtrot vinyl.”
Joe: “Signed first-edition of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”
Sam: “That commercial Wes Anderson directed for Prada.”
Joe: My “wanting to be a good guy.”
Sam: Speaking of straight white dudes talking about nothing, though, is HLG not, in some ways—and for those playing along at home, get ready to take another chug of that double IPA!—Knaussgardian? Another way to view Knaussgard’s brand of autofiction—and this is not an original thought—is as a gut-level response to the overwhelming trash heap of information dumped on us every day: a reactionary blindness to everything that's not right in front of us, that's not of us. Is there not something comforting in that—both for the HLG guys talking about nothing and the people listening to the HLG guys talk about nothing?
Joe: Well, yeah, except, unlike My Struggle—or Seinfeld, for that matter—HLG doesn’t seem to end, right? (There are now three pods a week, plus a Spotify radio show, a live show on Twitch...) But they share this exhaustive principle; they’ve embraced the excess of their whiteness, their nothingness. Similar to how a Twin Peaks scene goes on long enough that it sails past comedy, discomfort, and into its own unique transcendence. Which stands in contrast to someone like the novelist Andrew Martin—another straight white guy we hate to love—who, as was implied in this TNR article, is perhaps still too burdened by his own self-awareness of his privilege to create great art.
Sam: An important distinction, here, maybe, is that it’s not like Knausgaard or HLG guys are hedonists (Chris Black is sober, TJ has a regimented allowance of one yellow American Spirit per day, Knausgaard…is more focused on not clogging the toilet in a Minnesota hotel bathroom). It’s not surface that way. It’s almost its opposite. Like a marble statue. It’s pristine.
Joe: Yeah, which takes us back to them talking about exercise…isn’t that the ultimate comfort, the ultimate solipsism, the ultimate reclamation of something we (they) can control? Aren’t our bodies the ultimate surface?
Sam: Literally, a surface.
Joe: Right. So maybe listening to the HLG guys talk about exercise—jumping rope for 45 minutes, 5 AM jogs, afternoons at the park with a personal trainer, private tennis instructors—is at its core just this soothing reminder of what we can control, which really isn’t very much.
Sam: Though it’s not nothing.
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Well I liked the banter even though I had zero idea of who (or sometimes what) you were talking about. But you made me laugh nonetheless.
Just finished skimming article.