Join for the Friends, Stay for the Federated Universe
Plus, a look at Pimm’s Cup, The Bear, and the Hamlet of 1980s German synth-pop
I have deeply visceral recollections of the early MySpace era. I know some of my Okay Pokay readers do not recall that tiny, fleeting slice of heaven but I’m going to do my best to paint a picture. Imagine you’re a 20-something with an extremely heavy Dell laptop. It has the Windows XP OS that came pre-loaded with David Byrne’s “Like Humans Do” in the media player, which you played repeatedly while hallucinating on the oxycodone your dentist prescribed post-wisdom teeth extraction. You’re young, nubile, and free of any material obligations except keeping yourself healthy and alive – a tall order on some occasions, like when you were doing Jager bombs and dancing barefoot to Sean Paul at a foam party in Jacksonville. Who knew so much soap would carry so much filth?
Ahhhh, life is good. You know what would make it better? A place for friends on that Dell computer. Enter MySpace.
College is this once-in-a-lifetime, totally insular social experiment with no resemblance to the cruel, thankless reality of adulthood. Surely that would be enough to excite and sustain a person for a few years, but we elder Millennials were a greedy bunch. And so, when everyone’s BFF Tom Anderson co-founded MySpace in 2003, everyone between the age of 18 – 25 became an early adopter.
MySpacers were the most sophisticated content creators of the digital age. Everyone fawns over Gen Z for their mastery of reels and TikToks, as if this proves they have inherent digital superiority. Listen, Millennials literally learned HTML coding during our free time, just so we could change the background image to our MySpace profile page and set up a song to autoplay every time visited. Coding! Where does one find the custom code for the animated glitter wallpaper? No clue. How do you source the code for the first 30 seconds of Weezer’s El Scorcho? A mystery! And yet, somehow I figured out how to do it between foam parties and Math for the Liberal Arts Major. (Yes, a real class that I performed poorly in, thanks for asking.)
MySpace was a beautiful little microcosm of early aughts culture and self-expression – music, fashion, photography, flirtations, and technology all woven together in a community built more on mutual interests and less on competition. (Except, of course, the friendly competition amongst peers for any one person’s ‘Top 8’ friend placement.) There was a special energy coursing through the veins of early MySpace – it was exciting but still felt spacious, with room to breathe. You could easily navigate to the people and places that felt like home without having to slog through the toxic sludge of today’s social media rancor. There was no sponsored content or influencers. It was a magical time to imagine what social media could be.
Meanwhile, at the same time I was learning Weezer code, Mark Zuckerberg was over at Harvard preparing the launch of Facebook. The rest is history. It took the flirtatious whimsy of MySpace, pumped it with steroids, and tossed all of us “early adopters” into a giant mud pit of dysfunction. And instead of trying to crawl out when it got messy, we just pulled more and more people down into the mud with us. When I first started dating my now-husband, he — Gen Xer — had no interest in Facebook. Somehow, I convinced him. First it was Facebook, then it was Instagram, and now we spend most of our nights sitting side by side on the couch, “watching” TV as we flip through the endless algorithm. I often feel guilty for insisting that he join me in this madness. He should have never taken advice from a chick who proudly got her first job out of college through Craigslist. #earlyadopter
But I’ll never stop! Just put “early adopter” on my tombstone, because today I was the 279,442nd person to join Threads, the new Twitter-like conversation app that is a companion to Instagram in the Meta universe. New York Times tells us that Instagram’s goal is to “ultimately have Threads work across multiple apps in what it calls Fediverse, which is shorthand for a federated universe of services that share communication protocols.”
Guys, they literally said they’re creating a FEDERATED UNIVERSE and I was like, tell me where to sign! It’s clearly the Illuminati. Beyonce is my master, the demon horse at the Denver airport is my steed, and me and my Metaverse compatriots ride at dawn. I’m not even in the mud pit anymore. I’m bathing in the blood of junior software engineers from startups that were crushed under the boot of Big Tech, deep down in the fiery bowels of Cupertino – which, according to my iPhone, is a real place! It’s a hellish moral purgatory where people like me crow about the ills of social media while simultaneously taking Mark Zuckerberg’s side over Elon Musk, even though their end game is essentially the same.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to go back to 2003, posting about the VMAs on my LiveJournal and sourcing code for my next profile song. Sure, MySpace was a “place for friends.” But it was a self-contained place that lived on my clunky Dell computer, and I was always free to walk away. In today’s digital reality, I’m not sure that’s an option for me anymore. See you over on Threads.
Wimbledon has kicked off. I’m not really dialed into tennis as a sport, per se, but it has cultivated a very fashion-forward social environment that appeals to me. Any sport that lets me downplay my athletic deficiencies by killing it with dress and drinks is a winner in my book. Golf and horse racing also meet this criteria. Give me a sartorial prompt and a signature cocktail and I’m good to go.
As far as drinks go, The Masters has the Azalea, the Kentucky Derby has the Mint Julep, and Wimbledon has the Pimm’s Cup. Incidentally, my husband whipped up a batch of Pimm’s on the 4th of July, not for any reason other than it’s light and refreshing. However, once we realized that we had timed it perfectly with the event where Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom were seen canoodling, I knew I had to share it in this week’s issue.
NOTE: It has about half the alcohol content you’d normally find in other highballs, so if you’re looking to cut down on the sauce, this is a good one to go with.
2 oz. Pimm’s No. 1
3 oz. ginger beer or ginger ale
1 cucumber slice
1 sprig fresh mint (5 to 6 leaves)
Fill highball glass with ice. Add Pimm’s, then top with ginger beer, garnish with a slice of cucumber and mint sprig, and serve. You can easily swap ginger beer for seltzer (I used Pellegrino) and throw in some other fruit in addition to or in place of the cucumber.
If you haven’t started season 2 of The Bear on Hulu, you must. If you haven’t started the show at all, then I don’t even know what to say to you right now. It’s gorgeously shot, thoughtfully written, masterfully acted, and the soundtrack is perfection.
I’m going to hold off on a major deep dive assessment of season 2 for a few more weeks since, to be fair, the new season just launched two weeks ago and that’s not really enough time for everyone to catch up. But please, promise me you’ll finish season 2 by end of July so we can dig in together. I think I cried at least once in every episode this time around – that’s how deep they’re digging into these beautifully flawed characters. The food is getting more sophisticated, too. I’ll give you this pasta-filled scene to chew on in the meantime.
WATCH: Sydney’s Chicago Pasta Montage | The Bear
I recently noticed that the song “Forever Young” by the 80s group Alphaville has been used extensively in television and film scenes about school dances. Two examples that come to mind are Napoleon Dynamite and Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I know there must be others since the song feels so familiar to me, yet I was only one when the song was originally released in 1984. The fun thing about the internet, which I just likened to a blood bath in the depths of hell, is that you can look up one little benign bit of trivia and find yourself pummeling into an endless rabbit hole of even more trivia, none of which will enhance your life – except if you write a weekly newsletter about useless trivia.
Anyway, turns out this song is like the Hamlet of 1980s German synth-pop – heavily referenced, widely adapted, and prolific as all get-out. When it was first released, it placed on 17 global music charts. Pretty good showing out the gate, but then it goes on to be covered or sampled over a dozen times, from Wayne Wonder to Jay-Z to Brandi Carlile. These German popsters have range! So cool to hear a simple song from almost 40 years ago tell so many unique stories.
Original: Forever Young | Alphaville
Reggae: Forever Young | Wayne Wonder
Hip-hop: Young Forever | Jay-Z
Songstress: Forever Young | Brandi Carlile
Until next week’s Okay Pokay, cheers!
I am so grateful that you reunited me with Forever Young. What a terrific song.