“Authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself”

In this edition of the Weekender: the end of travel, why AI can’t make great art, Met Gala cringe, and Laura Marling on Elliott Smith

Painting by Justin Parpan

This week, we’re traveling nowhere, subverting expectations, cringing at the Met, and cataloging Stormtroopers.

PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL

The travel bug extinction

A wide-ranging essay on why travel has lost its allure for young Westerners. Grant David Crawford starts in his own classroom, where students have stopped arguing about travel ethics, and casts back—through Rousseau, the Romantics, the Beats, the backpackers, and Bourdain—toward a question about what we are without the “elsewhere” we used to believe in.

The End of Elsewhere

—Grant David Crawford, PhD in Fugitive Margins

For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow: colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.

It doesn’t anymore.

I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”), there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.

What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.

Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.

Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.

I think it means more than the obvious thing.

So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.

Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post–Cold War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record), subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.

The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.

But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.

It strikes me as a loss of belief.

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MUSIC

Sincerity vs. farce

Before sharing her cover of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight,” Laura Marling surfaced this clip of him on a morning TV show from the ’90s:

Regard, how this room full of pretty people, perfectly willing to participate in the low-vibrational farce on which this show was supposed to rest, allow the awesome force of Smith’s sincerity to re-awaken each and every one of them. Apart from the unbelievably hot woman sitting next to him, who knew it already.

And be sure to give her haunting rendition of “Twilight” a listen:

Keep listening

ART

The surprise factor

Why is it so hard for AI to write a great poem? Nabeel S. Qureshi works through the question, arriving first at a quality LLMs are particularly ill-suited to: great art subverts your expectations.

What Makes Art Great?

—Nabeel S. Qureshi in Nabeel S. Qureshi

Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise—where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know—our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty.

The essayist Henrik Karlsson cites the sentence “an interesting and exciting finding” as an example of bad prose, because:

“the word ‘exciting’ is sort of implicated by the word ‘interesting’. They are not synonyms, but if I had blanked ‘exciting’ and asked you, or a language model, to fill it in, ‘exciting’ would have a high probability. So it is not adding all that much information—the reader already has that adjective implicitly in their head.”

Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten “hothouse” or “uniquely”:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…

The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting [above].

Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:

Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?

— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133

The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor…” and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word “whipping.” This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.

These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception.

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PAINTING

Modigliani’s “Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice)” (1918), shared by artplace

FASHION

Met Gala cringe

Mørning traces the Met Gala’s descent into self-parody.

How the Met Gala Became Cringe

—Anastasia Vartanian in BURN AFTER READING

As a teen, the Met Gala was like my Christmas. I’d stay up until silly hours of the night because of the time difference in London, watching the looks roll in and reviewing them on my Twitter account of a few hundred followers. My personal highlights were 2018 and 2019: Catholicism and Camp, which brought us iconic moments like Rihanna as the fashion pope and Billy Porter carried on a throne by 6 hunky men. But in hindsight, fashion’s old guard was cringing already. Tom Ford lamented how it had turned into a “costume party”, saying: “It used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century.”

André Leon Talley similarly felt that 2019’s Camp Gala had gone “off the rails”: “If you go from being a chandelier that lights up and change somewhere in the hallway to a hamburger, then I think you’ve lost the plot.” Sorry, Katy Perry, but according to Ford and Talley, it was at this moment when the Gala became cringe and redefined by such pleas for attention.

Fast forward to now, and Demna Gvasalia agrees, revealing to the New York Times last November, with a laugh, that he neither cares or knows if people still get excited about this ‘cringe’ event. While there’s a lot of things to criticise the fashion designer for, he always keeps his finger on the pulse.

So how did we get here? In 2015, Rihanna’s yellow Guo Pei cape catapulted the Gala to pop culture notoriety for a new generation and demonstrated the power of viral fashion. After that, everyone wanted to have their Rihanna moment. Though as the stunts got bigger, from Zendaya’s literal Cinderella moment to Tems’ view-blocking Oscars dress, public opinion was starting to turn.

However, as a child of the fashion brainrot era, I was always of the opinion that the crazier, the better. Raised on theatrical clips of old McQueen and Mugler shows, my brain demands drama. A beautifully tailored jacket or a cleanly cut dress does nothing for me. Saturated by constant images but removed from the tactile qualities of clothing, I need fashion that will smack me in the face, like Coperni’s spray-on dress with Bella Hadid.

But what looks good on the feed may not be so chic in real life. Remember when Tyla had to be carried up the Met steps in her (otherwise stunning) sands of time look? Or when Lana Del Rey’s headdress was fighting with Kim K’s face?

We, the online fashion fans, didn’t help things. In the late 2010s, I was part of the chorus, alongside influencers like Haute Le Mode, who criticised celebrities for not dressing on-theme or providing a big enough moment (see below). Like clockwork, every year High Fashion Twitter dragged guests who didn’t try hard enough with their outfit. Looking back on this era now, it was also when Drag Race went mainstream, which probably rubbed off on our appetites for avant-garde looks and gag-worthy outfit reveals.

The try-hard fatigue came to a boiling point with red carpet fashion more broadly, with film press tours and their anything-but-subtle method dressing. Wicked took promotion to new levels of annoyance, while Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights made it clear that everything is a choreographed media opportunity. Thus, we’re now seeing celebrities like Odessa A’Zion being praised for not having a stylist at all.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

INTERVIEW

Collector’s edition

Adam Starr talks to Rafael Pavon, who has 730 Imperial Stormtroopers, a custom 3D-modeling pipeline, and a theory about why a faceless character with no backstory became one of the most reproduced toys in history.

My Collection of Stormtroopers

—Adam Starr in My Collection Of

What do you collect?

Rafael: Everything related to the Imperial Stormtrooper helmet design from 1977: toys, memorabilia, objects, and things inspired by it.

How did it begin?

Rafael: By accident, which is probably how most collections begin. For years, I was just someone who liked that helmet. I’d spot one in a shop or a market and grab it without thinking too much about it. Then one afternoon in December 2015, while wandering around Covent Garden before watching The Force Awakens on opening day, I walked into a comic book store called Orbital Comics and picked up a loose original Kenner Stormtrooper for £7. I got home, put it on the shelf, and realised I already had about twenty of them. That was the moment it went from a habit to a real problem.

What’s the first thing you remember collecting?

Rafael: I wouldn’t call it collecting at the time, but my uncle ran a toy shop in Madrid in the early eighties. I was a kid, and Star Wars figures were basically the most exciting objects in the known universe. Two of them survived. They’re items 475 and 476 in the archive now, two battered little 3.75-inch Kenner Stormtroopers that I assumed were long gone until they turned up at my cousin’s place decades later.

What first inspired your love of collecting?

Rafael: It’s less about collecting and more about a question I can’t let go of. The Stormtrooper breaks every rule of what a memorable character is supposed to be. No face, no name, no backstory, almost no lines. And yet somehow it sits alongside Spider-Man and Barbie as one of the most reproduced toys in history. Kids pick it over the heroes. Artists across every discipline keep coming back to that helmet. Jony Ive said it influenced the iPod and AirPods. It’s shown up in LEGO, Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Mr Potato Head, on toothbrushes, shampoo bottles and keyrings, even on beer labels. So, at some point, I stopped thinking of this as a toy collection and started thinking of it as anthropological research. There’s a hidden message somewhere in people’s fixation with that helmet, and I haven’t cracked it yet. That’s what keeps me going.

Where do you usually find the things you collect?

Rafael: Everywhere, which is part of the problem. I’ve tracked down pieces in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile, Ciudad de México, Madrid, and Los Angeles. When I want to look for really special items or art toys, I love places like Toy Tokyo and myplasticheart in New York. And probably my favourite place in the world for Star Wars toys is the Persa Franklin in Santiago de Chile, a massive street market full of unexpected troopers.

How far have you gone to add to the collection?

Rafael: It kind of became a thing to fly to a city knowing there’s a trooper somewhere waiting for me. I once took a train during a snowstorm just to visit the Imperial Castle Toy Store in Pawling, NY, 2 hours north of NYC. In terms of effort, building a database, creating a custom photo app to capture them all, a pipeline to turn them into 3D models, and designing a website display is definitely the furthest I’ve been for the collection

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ICYMI

Substackers featured in this edition

Art & Photography: Justin Parpan, artplace, clara, Composition

Video & Audio: Laura Marling

Writing: Grant David Crawford, PhD, Nabeel S. Qureshi, Anastasia Vartanian, Adam Starr

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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Substack’s editorial team.