Rilke In Neon

Or, A Plague Thinkpiece In Forking Paths

From The Pavillion of The Limpid Solitude: Eight Permutations

Givenchy poster by Tigran Manukyan

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The Plague Thinkpiece is the iteration of the old form, the thinkpiece, which is an iterative itself of the essay, which is anew the essai in Anglophonic drag. Irony is dead. Only sincerity lives. Sincerity is the new irony. Thus, sincerity is dead. Only irony lives. Irony is dead.

The voice of your leader reminds you of bluebells/rasping gateposts/the whir of server cooling fans. It calms/enrages/dispirits/enlivens you. You leader is alive/dead/dying. You write Rilke, or maybe Hölderlin, or maybe even Goethe, in neon on the wall of your increasingly adolescent bedroom. In every universe the German Romantics make a new and errant/precise sense.

Coffeecore Extended Universe

Prior to this post, I wrote about some soothing gifs of coffee and tea being poured, dubbing the subsequent aesthetic #coffeecore. But what do the citizens of the universe of coffeecore do when they're not drinking coffee? Who else lives there? Enter the saturated-pastel-alternating suspended time of the Coffeecore Extended Universe...

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This first .gif is from an 80's anime with the delightful, and fully not pornographic name, of 'Dirty Pair'. The anime itself defies logic in the best way, but this spoon tap isn't illogical at all, placed in front of a kind of sky-by-way-of industrial-blue that crops up a lot in illustration of this period. Everything is safely and extremely processed here. Consider the candied cheery plucked from the cocktail glass in the second image. Like the tray of bling it is perfect pre-arrayed. The hands are all somehow processed too. Once you enter the Coffeecore Extended Universe, I presume you get your hands re-processed for purity. They are always freshly manicured and washed. This is femininity.

Time for #Coffeecore

I know some people find aestheticising in the midst of pandemic crass, anti-material, oblivious to the needs of dying bodies. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'll regret leaning into the roses of 'bread and roses'. Right now though, I am coping with the fact that the coffeeshop is usually the calm workspace with background hum in my life, and like many of you, I am now deprived of it. A lucky deprivation and small, in a world of gross and horrific deprivations, but still. 

I have previously resisted the Kawaii, the self-consciously over cute, but now I have a bullet journal and a hand-stitched mask that I embroidered with the Latin word for hope. I don't quite know how this happened. Perhaps my response to fear is to revert to an aesthetic of softness. Is this a cop out, a dodge? Maybe, probably. But that's what coping is, right? I'm not nostalgic for the prior world, because that wasn't this cutely or gently inscribed either.

Now, I'm sucking you all into my softness cult, my complete aestheticisation of the private cosseted world of my imaginary. I'm giving you my animated coffeeshop gifs on infinite loop. I hope they feel like a cashmere sweater, like anything but the well-trod spaces of your apartment, like low-fi tracks in visual stereo, like hygge, only less sinister somehow for their actual non-existence in a physical or political sphere. The "look" is from mostly spare, pastel-ish, 90's animes digested into clips by teenage Tumblr users since about 2011.