We got free tickets on Friday to Jurassic World: Live Tour, so of course Scooter and Jaffles had to be dragged there against their will, straining against the seatbelts and complaining the entire way down. Beforehand, we ate at a pub near the MVP Center, where they complained about their dinner, which was chips (fries). Usually the only thing going on at the MVP Center is a monster truck show or Uncle Kracker, and I didn’t know that a Jurassic World live show even existed. But as we got closer to the sclerotic heart of Albany (flattened to make a brutalist plaza) we began to see men selling glow sticks and children in dinosaur t-shirts and knew that we were in the right place. It was happening.
The show launches into action with tourists in a gyrosphere being confronted by a dinosaur and a Jurassic World jeep driving into the arena to usher the dinosaur away. The actors leapt out of the car and set up the plot, which was goodies versus baddies story (a scientist who trained a dinosaur and designed a brain-reading dinosaur cap vs. poachers trying to kidnap the pet dinosaur from Isla Nubla). You got the gist of this from the prerecorded audio track—the actors had to mouth along and perform BIG GESTURES to let you know who was “talking.” One character was an “influencer” and kept pulling break-dancing moves. Every time he did a one-arm handstand, Jaffs would go “Yeahwoo!”
The baddies drove dirt bikes around in circles, doing wheelies like “Yee haw, we’re baddies!” and the kids also thought that was AMAZING. Noodles and I were pissing ourselves laughing from basically minute one.
The dinosaurs—incredible. The main pet dinosaur was raptor shaped and got around via the man inside walking with dinosaur legs stitched to his feet and maybe operating a lever to move the head about. You could see their black tights out the bottom. To underscore: Jurassic Park, that sci-fi parable from Michael Crichton, is here a large-scale puppet show staffed by men in tights.
At one point the music swelled with the Jurassic Park theme and some stegosauruses came out—the mother was on a wheely platform, possibly operated by people turning hand bicycles on the inside, and the baby maybe was a guy on all fours. I was transfixed, trying to figure it out. It reminded me of this diagram of how people walk in shallow water:
As well as Kelly Conaboy’s 2018 deep dive, “Do Men Enter Bathtubs on Hands and Knees So Their Balls Hit the Water Last?”
I never got over it. For the entirety of the show, including the penultimate moment when (just the head of) the carnitaurus broke through a wall dramatically, the kids were ensconced in fantasy and Noodles and I were laughing out loud at the bare-legged nature of the show, trying to figure out how the humans fit inside the puppets. One of the dramatic stunts had a pterodactyl (looked like an origami crane dangling from a wire) carry a man up into the scaffolding. There were some little fireworks went off at different points, and plenty of dirt bikes going “ruh-ruh-rUH!” in circles. It was hysterical.
The show had 20-minute halves and an intermission that was about 30 minutes long and designed to sucker you into buying Italian ice cups that came in wearable dinosaur heads. This is a business, you know.
As the second half began, Jaffs yelled, “Who wants to go to John Hammond’s dream!” I don’t know if this is something he made up, or something from one of the Jurassic World movies, or, worse, something from a weird YouTube Kids Lego video some 25-year-old dude made. The show marched (padded?) on, finding the four of us with arms around each other, so joyful was the pantomime of the sagged-legged dinosaurs. I ruffled the kids’ hair while they watched, attached by emotional strings to the pet dinosaur with the neurotransmitter skull plate. At the end, J and S were standing clapping their hands over their heads and hooting. J legit pumped his arm into the air out of sheer enthusiasm. “I can’t believe the dinosaurs were real!” he said, demonstrating better than my drama teacher ever could what “suspension of disbelief” means.
To recap, ‘twas wonderful:
After the show
Noodles: What was better, Hamilton or Jurassic World?
S: Both!
J: THIS!
v. glad Noodles spent our retirement funds on Hamilton.
Goodies
If you can believe it, I’ve been dispatching KAFKA’S BABY (also answers to Kafka’s Bébé) for three years at this point—weee! As you know, it’s not intended to be trend-pegged (though death is always trending!), and I’ve found a couple of pieces on the content-land race-to-the-bottom really interesting of late. Firstly, Bijan Steven wrote in
about being laid off, offering a deft look at how media has crumbled into noise:We all live in our own Content Bubbles now, you know? Which is why it can feel like trends are moving faster than ever — you’re just hearing the chatter from inside other people’s bubbles.
Consequently — and I think this is the far more important thing — it means that everything has become kind of niche. Things break through to many bubbles very briefly, sure. But it means that nothing will be truly viral ever again, I think. It’s nearly impossible to assemble an audience the size of, say, The Daily’s or This American Life’s if you’re not a massive institution already.
And secondly, this
dispatch on the half-life of a trend, and the media’s need to manufacture microscopic moments into Things:“Asking men about the Roman Empire” may have set a new record for the, well, rise and fall of a trend. On Tuesday, I texted Nick—the faceless man behind the curtain of this newsletter—if I should write about it, since I had started seeing it on my FYP. By Thursday, I realized it was already too late. “Tomorrow we’re gonna start seeing a waterfall of Roman Empire posts,” I said.
Lo and behold: “How often do men think about ancient Rome? Quite frequently, it seems.” —The Washington Post; “Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? Yes, Say Men.” —The New York Times; “The Brain of a Man Who Is Always Thinking About Ancient Rome” — The Atlantic; and my personal favorite, “Can't Stop Thinking The Roman Empire? Check Out This HBO Series” from Collider. (The show: Rome.)
A quick Google search unearths explainers in Wired, Time, Today.com, Elite Daily, Cosmopolitan, and more. Now, I’m not saying men thinking about the Roman empire is not a thing, but it certainly isn’t this much of a thing—and certainly isn’t one anymore now that it’s been yanked out of its organic origins on TikTok and into an inauthentically manufactured cultural moment.
Don’t worry, no cultural moments here!
I love Etel Adnan’s art, and didn’t know all of this about her writing and life! An interview with Laure Adler.
I’m afraid I cried laughing at some of these.
Bring back messed-up teeth like mine.