Daisy Alioto introduces our September issue.

Hello, and welcome to Dirt’s first monthly issue, an experiment in consolidating your attention. We have four stories, one in each category: Entertainment, Technology, Culture and Collecting.

If you’re looking for quick hits from Dirt Media, Clone is an hourly glance at our open tabs, with a new audio integration that lets you listen to Tasteland and the latest livestream from our friends at Boys Club while you scroll.

More info on our other media properties here 👁️‍🗨️

This issue doesn’t really have a theme, although this line from Louise Glück has been rattling around in my brain: “I acquitted myself, but I moved like a sleepwalker.” She’s talking about love, or something like it. I’m wondering whether we are sleepwalking into another culture war. Whether it’s possible to be passionate about the internet without turning into a zombie.

The pieces in this issue involve questions of passion or lack thereof. Emily Jensen’s exploration of matcha notes in perfume begins with the stupefying overheard line: “It’s like coffee, but matcha.” Francis Zierer asks if farmers and venture capitalists can ever be bedfellows. Zach Schonfeld reports that the dream of smooth jazz is alive in Toronto and Madeleine Adams reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man: “No ketamine autofiction, no chronic masturbation, no braindead posts as sentences.”

We recommend reading everything in one sitting. But first, a word from our sponsor.

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ENTERTAINMENT

Kaputt-core

Zach Schonfeld on the Toronto indie scene that's making smooth-jazz sound radical.

In the late 2000s, Joseph Shabason was, by his own account, a self-loathing saxophonist. The multi-instrumentalist had studied jazz performance at the University of Toronto, but now he wanted nothing to do with the genre. He yearned to be in a successful band and play cool festivals. “I thought jazz was this thing that was stale and dead and not vital,” Shabason says. “The way forward was to go and play pop music.”

Then Dan Bejar, lead singer of Destroyer, invited him to play on the Canadian band’s landmark 2011 album, Kaputt. Bejar asked him to bring his saxophone to the studio, Shabason recalls, “and then essentially got me to improvise for, like, three hours.”

When Kaputt came out, it was unlike any previous Destroyer album: a glossy immersion in the jazz-rock and sophisti-pop textures of the 1980s. It sounded perversely, irresistibly slick, like its creators had found a Midnight in Paris-esque portal that lets you snort cocaine with Roxy Music in 1982, and Shabason’s sultry sax solos were central to this new sound, luxuriating in the velvety grooves of tunes like “Downtown” and “Song for America.”

TECHNOLOGY

Venture agriculturalism

Francis Zierer on farming returns.

There’s a romance to farming. Every yuppie has been party to a conversation about leaving whatever city behind and buying a farm. This romance is most often idle fantasy: The United States has lost some 286,780 farms since the turn of the century—a 13.2% total loss.

My family are farmers. I grew up on a small farm in Northern California, which is still my 70-plus-year-old parents’ sole source of income. It’s around eight acres and employee count (besides them) peaks around five in the spring-summer growing season. They’ve been in the field for over 40 years. Since the early 2000s, their annual “gross cash farm income” (GCFI) has usually landed them in midsize family farm status (between $350,000 and $1 million), sometimes dipping into the smaller tier.

According to a 2021 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, small family farms—smallholdings—make up 89% of American farms. The USDA defines this category by income: a small family farm has a GCFI less than $350,000. Small family farms make up 45% of agricultural land and contribute 18% of national production value. 

Large-scale family farms ($1 million-plus GCFI) make up 3% of all farms nationally, use 27% of agricultural land, and contribute 46% of production value. Nonfamily farms make up 2% of farms, 10% of agricultural land, and 17% of production value—the smallest share in all three categories, though with an outsize production contribution rate.

I once asked my parents why they became farmers: because that’s what they were doing when they decided to get married and start a family. Baby on the way; need to feed and clothe it.

CULTURE

Muscle meme

Madeleine Adams on Jordan Castro.

In Muscle Man, out now from Catapult, Jordan Castro burrows into the muscled mind of a Dostoevskian malcontent. Castro’s protagonist Harold is an English professor at fictional Shepherd College who likes three things: lifting, literature, and his lifting buddy Casey, who also happens to be his only friend in the department.

Harold is Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov if he lurked on weightlifting meme accounts. “Power,” says Raskolnikov, “is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it.” Change “stoop” to “deadlift” and you have Harold’s philosophy. Smuggling a half-serious body fascist manifesto into an uncanny thriller, Castro produces a “sincere” satire in the tradition of novelist, bodybuilder, and ultranationalist Yukio Mishima.

Harold’s resentment feeds on imagined conflict, recalling Dostoevsky’s creations—the embittered “Underground Man” of Notes from Underground and the scheming Raskolnikov. Like them, Harold embodies ressentiment, the condition described by critic René Girard—Peter Thiel’s former teacher and a frequent touchstone in Castro’s essays—whose work on the “underground man” also surfaces in Muscle Man. As in Girard’s reading, Harold is a thwarted romantic, soured by envy and paralyzed in action.

Before the faculty meeting that takes up the first half of the novel, Harold does take a sort of action: a glinting object he sees in the hallway near the meeting appears to be a knife. When he steals an unattended backpack that he thinks contains the knife, the reader begins to wonder whether Harold’s paranoia is justified. But there has been a spate of stabbings on campus, reframed by “ALERT TO INSPIRE” emails as “opportunities to get inspired to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand each other.” The wannabe Übermensch professor isn’t Muscle Man’s only target of satire. The nanny-state liberal arts college, in fact, holds much of the blame.

COLLECTING 

Matcha madness

Emily Jensen on matcha in the perfume aisle.

In 2018, I was having my lunch at the Soho Dig Inn and doing what many pre-Covid Manhattan office workers did on their lunch break: eating my $20 slop bowl while eavesdropping on the tables next to me. Seated to my left were a man and a woman who seemed to be on the acquaintance side of the friendship spectrum, so naturally I was all ears trying to understand the nature of their relationship. She was telling him about how hard it was to eat raw in a world committed to the tyranny of cooked, a.k.a. toxic, food before she invited him to a matcha at the MatchaBar downstairs. He did not know what matcha was.

“It’s like coffee,” she explained, “but matcha.”

I was both stumped and fascinated by the simplicity of her explanation which both did nothing to elucidate what in fact matcha is, while also succinctly hitting on all you really need to know to understand matcha’s appeal—at least the kind of matcha they were serving at the Soho MatchaBar in 2018.

Additional illustrations by Kyle Knapp