TOWARD A THEORY OF HOOPLA

JOURNAL 4 (FEB 3 TO FEB 9)

WHAT IS HOOPLA?

I am completely fed up with hoopla. It all started when I went to the Knicks game a couple weeks ago. When I was in Rio, I went to two Vasco games. There was no topdown fuss, no extraneous extravagance: you watch the fucking game and the crowd sings. But you pay an arm and a leg to go to MSG and they absolutely soak you in hoopla.

The whole time the jumbotron exhorts you: MAKE SOME NOISE! (maybe we would if it wasn’t already so fucking loud in here); there’s music playing the whole time even when the players are basketballing, —which to be fair is really helpful, I mean, how would I know that it’s good when a Knicks player scores if they didn’t play 2 seconds of SICKO MODE, —; there’s not a moment of respite: if there’s a break they’re battering you with dance teams, the pro team, the teen team, the kid team, the dog team; or they’re firing t-shirts from a canon; or clowns are throwing pies in the faces of the fans sitting courtside (which was honestly very subversive and poignant).

But I guess it makes sense cause if you stopped to think for a second you might remember you paid $25 for a hot dog (and reader, why did I eat ten hotdogs? that money was supposed to be for my February health insurance), and that you bought eight cans of $30 beer (and that money was supposed to go toward February rent).

And that’s when it hit me: HOOPLA. Everything that is bad about american culture is due to hoopla. Hoopla is whenever something is alienated from its inherent value by distraction and nonsense to the point where it leaves you unable to engage with the ding-an-sich, the thing in itself—not my original formulation, I’m taking most of this from Immanuel Kant’s Kritik an reinen Tamtam, which I’ve been rereading this week.

In the book industry it’s easy to see this: you just pick up a book jacket and read all the blurbs. Having been someone who’s been blurbed, I know people ain’t actually reading the books; shit, I had a very prominent writer blurb my book TROPICÁLIA, —which takes place completely in Rio, —saying “TROPOPICÁLIA is an stunning amazing exploration of São Paulo”, but we cut that and led with the rest of her blurb on the front of the hardcover which in fairness to her only mentions the quality of the first page, which she probably did read.

I know I’ve been annoying people this week with my calls to OUTLAW HOOPLA. Everytime I bring it up to Gaby she pats me on the shoulder like I’m a senile old man and says, “yes, yes, hoopla, you know I always say that.”

Monday we went to the movies, “and these trailers are a great fucking way to see how americans are getting their fucking mouths held open and being forced to ingest a firehose blast of hoopla, I’m sick of these JohnWickified movies where everyone is killing eachother and there’s no goddamn real consequences, has the american man become such a futile wimp in their daily lives that they gotta go to the movies and see these hyper-militarized citizens fucking shooting eachother, that’s gotta be good for our culture huh?! goddamn not every movie gotta be My Dinner With Andre but can’t we have a nice movie where people just talk to eachother?!” is what I whispered into Gaby’s ear to widespread sushing.

LOCAL 42

But unfortunately I am an agent of hoopla. I am a stand-up comedian. My goal is to flood the internet with inane content for the benefit of my vanity and ego.

But isn’t live stand-up comedy a remedy to hoopla?

You go to some of these open mics, especially in the bleakness of February’s cold, and you sit there, listening, and words like datingapps and retard and porn are bouncing around the room like stray rubber bullets, banging against everyone’s head rendering laughter impossible and sullenness likely and you leave thinking this surely cannot be a remedy for anything; then you do a real show with a hot full crowd and they’re laughing and you’re a god and you exit the stage rockhard with glorylust and you think this feeling is worth the most wicked tribulation, —for others, of course, stand-up comedy is about selflessly making others happy.

Wednesday. It felt like such a long week that I had to drink. So I met Ethan at Local 42.

Now this bar on 42nd and 9th is an oasis of austerity in the portauthoritytimessquare sea of hoopla. Beers are $4, there’s always a place to sit down, and sometimes there’s not even music playing.

Now this is a bar where people are in motion, unadorned: it’s a fanfare void (the Tamtamleere of Kant’s conception: the special and necessary places where you can see human subjectivity in full bloom without bells and whistles).

Initially I wasn’t enjoying much of the humanity on display because Ethan was distracting me. He’s extremely depressed cause he’s been working on this detective novel for a while and it’s reached a deadend.

I’ve been telling him from day one that he doesn’t have what it takes to be a writer, I mean he fucking sucks, —no offense. This is an excerpt from his novel INSPECTOR PAVLAK:

Walking through the corridor, was silent, very silent until my heels started making noise, click-clack. I centered my eyeballs again towards the end of the corridor. Red brick surrounding them went all the way down the corridor, and followed into their cells for their walls. At the end of the corridor, their I see the chair I must sit in to analyze the man whom I will soon be talking to in a few more steps.

I mean respectfully but HOLY SHIT he sucks, —and yes, if this was an intentionally avant-garde work engaging with the limits of boredom, I would probably like that, but he’s deadseriously trying to write good. And it’s 500 pages of this walking around click-clack.

He comes to the bar and he’s crying, begging me to show what he’s got to my best-in-the-biz agent, Clive Clamhands. Like FUCK NO.

Eventually he calmed down and we started looking around.

The bartender got off her shift. She’s a lady in her 60s with a wide grandmotherly rump. Immediately she took a seat down at the bar and three suitors started pining for her. A young gun in his 20s, skunkdrunk and sloppy. A tall older fellow who looked like the grim reaper. And a third guy who looked like a farmer from Ohio replete with a camo hat.

The sloppydrunk youngster was all over this woman. Asking her to do shots with him, hugging her, whispering in her ear, coming on way too strong. The grim reaper misinterpreted her annoyance as interest in the youngster and so he took his scythe and kicked rocks. But the farmer was always in pole position (no phallic pun intended), looming just on the outside.

The youngster spilled some beer on her when he was going in for an unnecessary squeeze and that sealed his fate. She ended up leaving with the farmer.

I was highly amused by the ordeal, but Ethan was still surly sulking sullen. I said, “come on, let’s go.” I knew there was only one place that would cheer him up.

We got a cannabis joint of marijuana reefer from a streethawker and we headed right to the upstairs bar of the world’s biggest Applebees.

Now this is where people come to take refuge from the city’s hoopla. I’ve been to Applebeeses in plenty of bumfuck cities in Ohio and the vibe is the same. Except this one is massive. There’s 10 people at the bar surrounded by a dining area of 350 empty seats.

At the bar there was a girl in pajamas facetiming her boyfriend in Spanish, weary couples from Pittsburgh, a guy in a dress shirt eating broccoli, and everybody drinking massive cocktails in vasesized glasses.

We consumed a couple watery margaritas and a massive order of buttery pretzels (which came accompanied by literally a trough full of dipping cheese) and we left.

We went to Target across the street cause Ethan needed a candle and I wanted to ride the escalator. The joyous thing about an escalator is that for a moment your whole body becomes like an ass plunked down on a chair and you can enjoy a brief respite of complete unmediated relaxation in ecstatic contrapunct to the arduous toil that is LIFE.

Escalatorrushers, those speed-demons that gotta rush to the end pushing you out of the way or forcing you to move fast, well, they will face the punishment reserved for the sinners of hoopla in my inferno. I will not have mercy.

Ethan bought a candle and I stole one. Unfortunately kleptomania has been giving me powerful orgasms lately, —not sure what to do about that one.

BAROQUE BRUTALIST SENTIMENTALISM

On Thursday I went over to Sean’s and inaugurated a new literary movement: Baroque Brutalist Sentimentalism.

I’m still filling in the parameters of the manifesto, but it’s characterized by ornate idiosyncratic prose, exploring crude or violent realities and feelings (poop, death, cum), with a thread of sweetness and kindness (possibly romantic) that believes in and hopes for humanity.

You might be thinking that the opposite of hoopla is austerity. But I don’t think that’s right. Whitman says, “who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.” But Kant in his Critique of Pure Hoopla clarifies between gute Verzierungen and schlechte Verzierungen (good ornaments versus bad ornaments).

I’m paraphrasing Kant here, but basically a good ornament is one that leads you deeper into attention and engagement, deeper into the thing-in-itself. And a bad ornament does the opposite. I’m rereading ULYSSES (a touchstone of BBS) and it’s a dense network of good ornaments. When I used to write stories with a list of vocab words trying to fit them in even though I didn’t know what they meant, those are bad ornaments.

Though I think no ornaments: flat unaffected prose (the kind that AI can write pretty good), tight clarity (a very fucking overrated and misunderstood concept) that you can skim over and just go watch your next Tiktok, is not the wave.

But Gaby says, “so you just shouldn’t write anything that’s easy to read?”

“You just finished Intermezzo. If you can read Intermezzo, you can read Ulysses.”

“Really?”

Maybe not. But I do have a sneaking suspicion most people can read anything if they actually want to, and you should tell them they can!

Action Jackson, a coach at the gym, who I wouldn’t have thought in a million years would actually read my book is almost done with it and enjoying it, —he’s been cracking up telling everyone that I write from the perspective of women “almost too well!” as if it’s sus.

Though he would never read Ulysses cause he don’t give a fuck about James Joyce. The key is to make people pre-give-a-fuck. Which you might only be able to do via hoopla.

SUPER BOWL WEEKEND

Saturday night, Ethan’s girlfriend, —well call her… Sophie, —was having her birthday party at Local 42. You might not know this but Ethan was my roommate, and we had a great thing going. We were gay (happy), he was gay (homosexual), and then she swooped in like a rapacious harpy, hawked her claws into him and stole him away to her lair in Inwood.

Gaby came with me, which normally would’ve calmed me down, but as soon as Sophie saw me, she said, “you don’t have a drink in your hand?! But you LOVE drinking more than anyone I know!”

Of course this was a big problem. Gaby said, “drinking? What do you mean, Harold doesn’t drink.”

I said, “baby she means Heineken Zeros, haha I really put those back, don’t I?”

“No,” Sophie said, “you drink regular beer, and a lot of it!”

Reader, I made a scene. I said, “how dare you slander me!” etc, etc, …and we stormed out of there in the burgeoning snow storm and went to Chick-Fil-A (a place I used to only love for their politics, but the food has really been growing on me); we ate chicken sandwiches and Gaby got Mac-and-Cheese to go so she could eat it on Sunday: a subversive pleasure since they’re closed, and then we went back to my place and [redacted for luridity’s sake].

The next day I did go up to Ethan and Sophie’s Inwood lair to watch the Super Bowl.

They have the nerve to call me The Insatiable Guest just because I drink all their food and eat all their beer, but really, they’re more like The Insatiable Hosts because they keep offering you stuff to lure you to stay so they can get their sick rocks off lauding themselves on their hospitality; our friend Fernándo literally spent all week there, and when I showed up he was zombie-eyed wearing Ethan’s clothes, looking like Odyssesus in Calypso’s lair.

The Super Bowl is quintessential hoopla. It’s all the worst parts of americanism packaged up in an advertisementdoused spectacle. And now that the sportsbetting thing is OD it’s taking on an even more annoying dimension.

I think we need to make sportsbetting illegal again. Not just cause I’m bitter cause my dad’s career (and my life as the child of a billionaire) was sundered by the federal government for doing this exact same thing; but cause it’s just like pussyshit now, I got 14 year old kids I train betting on DraftKings, not even worried someone’s gonna break their legs.

But I kowtowed to the hoopla and I placed a massive wager on the Eagles. Luckily, it was an epic creaming, probably the biggest creaming I’ve ever witnessed in the Super Bowl, the Chiefs were probably dripping cream all the way home.

Everyone I talked to liked the halftime show except for my dad; this is a real text: “He said eight times turned the TV off. Turn the TV off. I don’t understand that.”

He’s hoping next year they dig up Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and throw them up at halftime, now that would be a fucking show, no hoopla, just a couple of dead old farts crooning.

I’ll have a more unified theory soon, but for now: OUTLAW HOOPLA.