The only thing I’ve accomplished thus far in 2021 is surpassing my weekly screen time record. While the copy of Dune I asked my sister to get me for Christmas sits untouched on my desk, I’m spending more time than ever making my vision swim from staring at a screen at all hours of the day. At least I’m not doom scrolling 24/7. To get some relief from the onslaught of updates about white supremacists doing white supremacy even more brazenly than usual, I’ve been on the lookout for anything ridiculous or beautiful or mind-numbingly silly – down the rabbit hole we go!
The Great Gatsby Has Entered the Public Domain, so Naturally Fanfic Writers Are Having a Ball
On January 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby entered the U.S. public domain 95 years after it was first published. In other words, the public now owns The Great Gatsby to use and build upon as they see fit. The good people of AO3 (Archiveofourown.org, for the uninitiated) wasted no time in remixing and paying homage to Fitzgerald’s work in ways only fanfic writers can.
AO3 user butting, for example, used Ctrl-F to replace every instance of “Gatsby” with “Gritty,” the official mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team:
Fitzgerald famously concluded The Great Gatsby with the line, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I remember my tenth grade English teacher desperately trying to get a class of sleepy, uninterested teenagers to discuss the symbolism of this sentence. Maybe if Fitzgerald had gone with Tumblr user chemtrailmix’s version we would’ve been more willing to participate.
As tribute to this Moment in Culture, AO3 user RumwoldofBuckingham uploaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby “with nothing altered at all,” except the final line.
Other seminal copyrighted works from 1925 entered the public domain this month as well, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (no new hits on AO3, unfortunately) and songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. The Center for the Study of Public Domain curated a list you can check out here.
I Finally Downloaded Tik Tok so I Could Dig Into Gen Z Disney Star Drama
As a High School Musical super-fan of yore, I felt compelled to watch the Disney+ reboot High School Musical: The Musical: The Series when it premiered in late 2019. It wasn’t very good – the dialogue had that stilted, trying-too-hard quality that often characterizes stories about teens written by 40-year-olds, the stakes of both the musical and the romance were too vague to be compelling and the effort to strike a balance between meta irony and wide-eyed earnestness was unsuccessful. But apparently nostalgia conquers all, because I still watched the entire season.
The romantic leads of the show, played by Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett, are supposed to be Troy and Gabriella for a new generation. Initially it seemed like a simultaneous on- and off-screen romance in the mold of Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron was imminent. With the recent release of Olivia Rodrigo’s first single “drivers license,” however, it became clear that this new iteration of the HSM cast was going to be messier than their forebears. I won’t get into any of the details because I don’t want to take up any more space writing about these teenagers’ love lives and also Google is free, but let it be known that Disney starlets haven’t lost their touch for the break-up anthem.
Seeing Tik Toks about this developing Disney teen entanglement and not being able to scroll through the comments for more intel was the last push I needed to finally make an account on the app, after months of having my Tik Tok consumption curated by Twitter and friends. In the same way that watching HSMTMTS made me faintly wistful for my adolescent obsession with the original movies, scrolling through videos of people trying to reconstruct the timeline of Olivia and Josh’s ill-fated relationship produced faint echoes of the time in my life when debating whether Nick Jonas was better off with Miley or Selena in the comment section of omg.yahoo.com was my favorite hobby.
As if Sensing a Disturbance in the Force, Millennial Disney Channel Drama Also Reared its Ancient Head
Speaking of Jonases – who knew Joe Jonas was such a harlot? Certainly not 12-year-old Iris, who took one look at Joe’s purity ring and painted-on white skinny jeans in Camp Rock and refused to hear a bad word against him. Now, thanks to a Joe Jonas stan account posting a mind-bogglingly long (and totally unsolicited) thread of his dating history, we can all see him for what he is: a menace!
Some more takeaways:
Henceforth the act of dating your ex-girlfriend’s best friend shall be referred to as pulling a Jonas.
To the best of my knowledge, the only non-white women he dated were Asian, which I’m deeply thankful I wasn’t aware of as a preteen. I probably would’ve been grateful, thought I had a chance, or something else equally as mortifying.
As a short king, it’s kind of iconic that he almost exclusively dated Amazons who towered over him.
Say what you will about stans, but their organization, memory, and dedication are formidable things to behold.
Joe Jonas dated six (6) separate people in 2012. That same year, Sophie Turner and I were both sophomores in high school. I don’t know what she was doing, but I was furiously refreshing the Lizzie Bennet Diaries Tumblr tag and not getting asked by anyone to Homecoming. Let that be a lesson to us all – ladies, you too can live out a self-insert Y/N fantasy as long as you’re statuesque and successful. And if you aren’t, you can write a newsletter about the women who settle down with your promiscuous girlhood crushes.
The Man of the Moment
Regé-Jean Page, king of arching his left eyebrow and rumbling seductively into a debutante’s ear.
After staring at him for hours on end, I think the key to how good he looks in period costuming is his neck – swanlike, framed by a starched, snowy collar and inviting you to imagine how it would feel against your mouth. I know it’s probably more realistic to the time period that men’s shirt collars look like they’re slowly consuming them and saving their heads for last, but thankfully Bridgerton is not all that concerned with historical accuracy and lets Regé-Jean Page’s glorious neck and face shine.
Jazmine Sullivan Is Back With a New Album and We Are Grateful
If you want new music to listen to, look no further than Heaux Tales, the fourth album from R&B icon Jazmine Sullivan. The spoken interlude is a familiar R&B gimmick by now, but in Heaux Tales, it transcends the function of mere aesthetic or ambiance to become an integral storytelling device. Six different spoken “tales” from real women in Sullivan’s life – monologues about sex, money, longing and regret – are interwoven into the album between songs that bring these tales to life, like an anthology of character studies.
To me, listening to Heaux Tales is like reliving the best parts of a house party that seems to stretch on endlessly, a giddy conversation with a stranger in the bathroom bleeding into a hushed confession from a friend while you’re both lounging on someone else’s bed. It’s an intimate look at the women behind “heaux” stereotypes and a declaration of their humanity – every raunchy, insecure, defiant and pragmatic inch of it.
Initial standout tracks: Put It Down, Lost One, The Other Side, Pick Up Your Feelings
Jazmine Sullivan also performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, marking the second time I teared up watching a Tiny Desk Concert because of how much I miss live music. (The first time was Chloe x Halle's, of course.)
There’s a New White Woman Watchdog in Town
Tavi Gevinson, who founded the online magazine Rookie in her teens and is set to star in the Gossip Girl reboot, is performing an essential task that so few people in her position seem to be willing or capable of – keeping her foot on the necks of her fellow rich white women. First, she pushed back on Nancy Meyers’s daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, who accused Vulture’s Nancy Meyers week coverage of being misogynistic. The true root of her anger seemed to be the fact that journalist Rachel Handler called her 2017 film Home Again “a Westworld robot version of a Nancy Meyers movie.” Rachel Handler is right and she should say it – Home Again was bad. Tavi commented on Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s now-deleted Instagram post like a parent who isn’t mad, just disappointed (Tavi is 24 and Hallie is 33). In essence, Tavi wrote that sexism is too serious an accusation to throw around indiscriminately and that nepotism might be hard on your self esteem sometimes but that doesn’t make it oppression, actually. Girl bossed the girl boss with ease.
She stepped up to the plate again in early January, when Karlie “Not even to dinner with the Kushners?” Kloss tweeted “I’ve tried” in response to someone telling her to stop posting performative tweets about the dangers of inciting violence and actually confront the anime villain family she married into instead.
Tavi dispensed with the gently admonishing tone – a proportionate response given the stakes of the situation – and went in on the hypocrisy of Karlie publicly branding herself as progressive when in private she’s closely linked with powerful people who have fanned the flames of white supremacist violence for years.
Get her, Jade! Just know that no matter how lackluster the Gossip Girl reboot might end up being, I will be streaming in support of Tavi aka the OG influencer aka Miss Not on My Watch Gevinson.
Some Things to Look Forward to
Minari is a film about a Korean American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of the elusive American Dream. Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung and starring Steven Yeun and thee legend Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari also has a release date, finally: February 12. My dad’s family left the South Korean countryside for a tiny, dusty town in Delaware, USA when he was a teenager. He’s even more excited to watch the film than I am, to see a story so similar to his own being told with such respect and care.
February 12 is also when To All the Boys: Always and Forever drops on Netflix, so we’re in for a weekend of Asian American excellence. To All the Boys: Always and Forever is based on the final installment of Jenny Han’s trilogy, which focuses on the bittersweet compromises that characterize coming of age. From the trailer alone, I’m hopeful that it’ll recapture some of the magic of the first movie and especially now that we won’t have to deal with the sequel’s tedious love “triangle” (it’s not really a triangle if neither Peter Kavinsky nor John Ambrose express interest in the other as well as Lara Jean), we can really bask in Lana Condor and Noah Centineo’s top-tier romantic chemistry.
And finally, calling all Rooneynators – Sally Rooney’s third novel is titled Beautiful World, Where Are You and scheduled for release on September 7, 2021. Until then, I’ll be reading the synopsis and trying to guess which characters will ask to be choked and which characters will reluctantly carry out said choking.
Hope you had a Happy Rennsday!