Welcome to FRONTSEAT! This newsletter is an ongoing commentary on pop music, pop culture, and, oftentimes, a real-time unraveling of my own psyche. If you find yourself enjoying this, I would love it if you sent it to someone you think would, too!
WHITE LOTUS IS SMART AND I’M A SAPIOSEXUAL
I started White Lotus late. Three episodes had already dropped before I actually started the show, which for me, is late. Here’s the thing: I love prestige television. I love when there’s buzz about a show and I feel like I cannot help but be pulled into it.
This time around was different, as I was coming off of a months-long hiatus from serious television watching. TV used to be a treat — it was something I could do whenever I wanted in college, with the newfound freedom of a less demanding swimming regimen than I had in high school. In college, and then into my early adult life, TV was a dependable hangover activity. Before I discovered melatonin in early 2020, it was also a debilitating addiction in my first year or so in NYC, wherein I’d find myself hooked on a TV show, and suddenly it was 1 am on a Tuesday night, and there I was clicking play on another episode as my eyes began to crack and peel from the burning screen light. It was bad, but I loved it so hard, and sometimes good TV felt like one of the only reliable things I had to make me feel good.
Television lost its luster sometime in late fall 2020, after months of the early pandemic. I had already watched everything there was to watch. Production had halted on many sets, so there was a dearth of content. (God I love that word, dearth! Who the fuck made it? I’d like to suck them off!) I began to re-watch shows, something I never ever ever used to do. Re-watching, re-reading, re-doing — I don’t like ingesting content more than once unless it’s replaying good music. I just don’t have the attention span.
But there I was, re-watching everything: Broad City. Succession. Insecure. High Maintenance (many, many times, this one). Please Like Me. Skam. Everything and anything with a compelling story or comforting & meandering plot line, especially if the episodes were short. I just wanted to feel good in the first pandemic winter, and then I just wanted to feel good in the second pandemic spring and the second pandemic summer. Lol, was I okay? No! And neither were you xo.
Cut to a few weeks ago, when I’m experiencing quite a depression low, and I decide to check out this White Lotus thing that I keep seeing tweets about. Instantly, it’s an ‘undivided attention’ show — AKA a show where I actually put my phone face-down, more than five feet away, and lie on the couch so I can actually enjoy the entire episode. Few shows can compel me like this, but this was one of them instantly.
With the finale coming on Sunday, I realized I forgot that the whole plot was driven by the opening scenes, where we learn that someone has died and we don’t know who or how or why or when. Has anything even happened these first five episodes, plot-wise, besides rich white people being rich white people and a hotel waiter getting his ass ate by the mustache guy from the show Looking? The mustache guy who has been Australian this whole time, apparently? No, not really.
But if you look closer, you see the plot has actually been moving, even in devastatingly small increments. Relationships are fraying. Love is dying. False promises are beginning to show their true colors. The resort is becoming a little too rosy, too pampered — it’s become a place of perversion. Hope is slowly, but surely, being ground to a pulp under the foot of the show’s burdensome pace (Belinda, sweet Belinda, I can just feel your spa business dreams being stamped out). And, of course, the next episode will reveal who has died, how they die, and how the myriad interpersonal dramas finally explode. And there are so many interpersonal dramas. And — where the hell is the hotel hostess who was giving birth the first episode? Hello? Where is she? How is she? Where is the baby? What?
THINGS I’VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH IN WHITE LOTUS
Jennifer Coolidge (her entire being)
The goddamn soundtrack/theme song
Molly Shannon being fantastically evil
Connie Britton having her whole breakdown despite being a pretty asshole-y partner to her husband the entire show (not like he is all that redeemable of a husband, either)
Newlywed wife, like, every time she talks I’m like, go off you little introvert! She surely is going to explode next episode and maybe even kill someone, and I’ll cheer her on!
The conversations that the dad and son have in the pool are always so psycho and shroom-ed out and I love
The son going out on that boat every other scene
Jennifer Coolidge’s physical acting, the way she pauses, the way she non-answers…
I just learned that the show’s creator, Mike White (famously Ned Schneebly in School of Rock), went to Wesleyan? Go Cardinals
PERSONAL CORNER: THAT TIME I SORT OF OUTED MYSELF IN ART CLASS
In Drawing 1 at Evanston Township High School as a freshman, I had a major slip.
Whenever we’d draw, Ms. Seibold would play music, and one day she had us make a playlist so we could add songs to it. Obsessed with that! Little old gay me decided, hey, what about this song?
I add ‘Check It Out,’ by will.i.a.m feat. Nicki Minaj, which, like, does anyone else even know this song? I recently saw it on TikTok, and I don’t know how I found it back at age 14, because I don’t think it was much of a hit, and I only really knew songs from the radio or YouTube music videos back in 2010.
Anyways, the song comes on. ‘Oh, OH!’ is what the singer (it doesn’t sound like Nicki) sing-moans to get the track started, before Nicki raps her first bar: Step-step-step up in the party like my name was that bitch!
“Who put this gay ass song on?!” said literally at least four different guys in the class. At that point, my life was basically over and I was simply waiting for the devil to accept me into the gates of hell, Lil Nas X twirling down the pole-style.
Imagine how red my face immediately became — now imagine it even redder, and then you’re almost in the ballpark of how flushed I became with embarrassment. It’s like, sad, because I literally had my fight-or-flight going off, my nervous system acting like I was just launched into the sky on a rocket with Jeff Bezos without a spacesuit. I shut my mouth and stared at the floor until the song ended. God damn, the longest 4 minutes and 10 seconds of my entire life.
Have I recovered from that moment, yes I have, but it certainly added like, 10 months to my ‘Coming Out’ meter. Deeper into the closet I went!!
Anyways, if you’re 14 and in Drawing 1 class at ETHS and you’re gay and you’re reading this, I’m here to say that ‘Check It Out’ is a bop and never let anyone tell you otherwise!!! And if it’s a ‘gay ass song,’ well, it kind of is! And that’s good, actually.
TWO RANDOM SONGS THAT RELEASE SO MUCH SEROTONIN IN ME
Heartbreak Anthem - Galantis, Little Mix, David Guetta
I became a Little Mix stan last year, and I’m never looking back. This is sugary-sweet. Like when the pre-chorus starts at :38, I kind of snarl my nose because I have to do that with my face when a song is REALLY good.
Love Me Again - RAYE
This whole RAYE album is full of bops and this is no exception.
A SONG THAT PERFECTLY FITS INTO MID-AUGUST’S VIBES
Slide Away by Miley Cyrus.
No matter what I do, August seems to sip away like a bottle of wine — wait, that’s Taylor. But really, August feels like I have a handful of sand, and it’s literally running through my fingers at warp-speed, and nothing I can do will keep it all in my palms. It’s scary to feel out of control!
Fall used to be such a stressful time for me — in high school, it was four straight years of me, closeted and cripplingly socially anxious, having to go back into my 3200-person high school again for nine months straight. Fall meant a return to so many things I hated, the ease of summer gone and a whole crowd of high schoolers who I’d potentially have to have a social interaction with. The horror….
I have residual stress from high school these days, even though every fall in college was fantastic because I loved college, and going back to my new life at school as an out gay gay gay boy was thrilling. Deep in my psyche, when August rolls around, I brace.
Now, there are added pressures and regrets. Every NYC summer feels, at first, like I’m on the precipice of my entire life. I am going to party party party till I die die die, I’m going to be so hot in front of so many people, I’m — actually, that’s it. All of my late spring fantasies revolve around me being hot and having fun. Lol. And then, you get to the end of summer, and you’re like, OK, I am washed up. I went to 2.5 parties, and I made out with three hot guys, but two of them were just in a dream.
Obviously, much of this regret is in my head, as it tends to be. Summer was a lot of fun. But ‘Slide Away,’ which is, according to United States federal law, Miley’s best song ever, perfectly captures that melancholy, bitter-sweet, sunburnt feeling of a three-month sprawl that you ended up falling face-first into. It’s such a good song!!!!!!! It’s so good.
POSTCARD, N E 1?
I have like 15 postcards just sitting on my desk right now, and sometimes I get bored, so why not write some lil words on them and send them to people? I would actually love it if you texted, DM’d, emailed me with your address if you want a postcard!!! I cannot guarantee that I will write anything meaningful or interesting, nor can I guarantee that the mail will even reach you (I tried to send a postcard in July and the U.S. Postal Service decided that that letter would be better off dead in a ditch. Maybe I used the wrong stamp??? IDK). I also may not even get to it! But if you want to, I’m down to try.
skam!!!!!!!!!!!!
Second of all I want a postcard and you have my address methinks. Belinda deserves everything and more. Totally forgot ab girly pop who had the baby on her first day. August is soooooooo slide away that is a fendi fact, I also still have residual stress from years of back to school seasons. Who do you think is going to die???????