Youth’s Decline
My first girlfriend—I was twelve, give or take—had two and a half little brothers and a Super Nintendo, and what I actually loved about her wasn’t the parking-lot kissing but the fact that she was better at every video game than all of us combined. Maria. Street Fighter II, Turtles in Time, Mortal Kombat: she’d run through us like we weren’t there, barely glancing at the screen, then look mildly bored about it. That’s when I developed my thing for gamer girls, and it’s never really left. Less about gaming, more about competence displayed as total indifference to the people it’s embarrassing.
Gabriela Antunes photographed exactly that energy for Vice Style—girls with controllers, girls mid-session, the whole aesthetic—and looking at the series I thought about Maria immediately. There’s something about a particular desire that attaches to a type before you even know you have one.
But I’m reaching for the good memory to avoid the harder one. In the summer of 2011, famine was declared at the Horn of Africa for the first time in over twenty years. Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia—all of them. The drought was the proximate cause. The real cause was governance: civil war, factions in Somalia deliberately starving their own people while selling fertile land to Western and Asian investors. The drought made things impossible. The governments made them fatal. This journal wrote about it, imperfectly and earnestly, and that version feels very far from where I’m sitting now.
From the same period: the webcam turned twenty. The first one was a grainy feed of a coffee pot in a Cambridge computer lab, 1991, visible only to the people in the building. Two decades later it had become Skype, FaceTime, Chatroulette, the entire social infrastructure of seeing each other’s faces across distances. I wrote at the time that the best thing about the internet wasn’t the free exchange of information or giving voice to the otherwise unheard. It was the camera. I meant it as a joke. I also kind of meant it.
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete built a speculative visual project around body image: a realistic future scenario imagining what attractiveness might look like if obesity trends simply held, what beauty standards might quietly become if they accommodated reality instead of fighting it. Everyone heavier. The ideal renegotiated rather than resisted. Science says we’re getting fatter. Television says it. Mothers send brief, judgmental emails about it. Taete’s answer was more or less: and? Maybe that’s just the next thing. Maybe the new ideal isn’t worse. I don’t know if I believed that then. I’m less certain now.
And then Cayal Unger, twenty-one years old, origin story genuinely contested—Greenwich, West Coast, Woodstock, depending on who you asked—shooting punk-grunge-nudity tableaux under the series title Youth’s Decline. Crushed birds. Climbed trees. A praying mantis with a cigarette. Images that feel simultaneously like home and like watching something end, the freedom of a whole generation photographed at the exact moment it starts to go bad.
Looking back at all of this now, from a week in which this journal’s most notable contribution has been commentary on Miley Cyrus’s tits and teenagers vomiting at Oktoberfest—the contrast is real. Not that the current stuff is wrong, exactly. But the earlier work was reaching. I miss the reaching.