17. A Lana Del Rey concert you won't forget

9 July 2023

I.

I had grossly underestimated how popular Lana Del Rey is in the Netherlands. The announcement of the concert at the Ziggo Dome came only a week in advance. And yet within ten minutes all the tickets were gone. A second Ziggo Dome date could easily have sold out too.

Last Tuesday she was here. For the first time in ten years back in the Netherlands. For me, Lana Del Rey’s music is perfect for wallowing in. Headphones on, a small tear rolling down your cheek. I read a nice description of her music somewhere this week: Hollywood sadcore.

That image doesn’t quite square with the delirious, screaming audience I found in the Ziggo Dome. The enthusiasm of the crowd overwhelmed Del Rey just as much. “That was stunningly deafening,” she said after — honestly the loudest applause I’ve ever heard — after Summertime Sadness. “I’m gonna take that with me for any bad day I’m having and remember that ten fucking seconds.”

Del Rey is a world star without a perfect show. Things occasionally go wrong. She performs some practiced poses a little awkwardly. A charming combination. The absolute highlight was the song Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. That’s one of her most beautiful songs in any case, but live with a few gospel singers it became, impossibly and yet truly, even better. “Don’t forget me,” she sings. “But I get a feeling after tonight that you won’t.”

II.

Within just a few days, nearly 100 million people had already created an account on Threads, Instagram’s Twitter clone. That’s a huge number, more than The Great Leader Mark Zuckerberg had expected. So he says. And to think that the European continent officially still has no access to the app (but with a US Apple ID you can already get on it).

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter for an astronomical sum and has since been steadily working to destroy it, the hard core has been salivating at every available alternative. I myself now have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky. And now also on Threads, the app with the best chance of beating Twitter.

With Threads, Zuck and co are capitalizing maximally on the current chaos at Twitter. Last week Elon Musk imposed limits on the number of tweets people can see, and it was announced that Tweetdeck would become a paid service. Both decisions guaranteed to get Twitter users up in arms. The fact that Threads arrived precisely this week can be no coincidence.

It even looks like Threads launched earlier than intended, purely because the timing was so perfect. You notice it when you use the app. Too much is still missing. The search function is half-finished. There are no hashtags. The timeline is a mess, filled with people you don’t follow and not in reverse chronological order either. The Threads algorithm force-feeds you seemingly random posts from seemingly random people.

Image made with Midjourney.

III.

Bizarrely, the sympathies of many Twitter users now seem to lie with Mark Zuckerberg. He’ll be rubbing his hands, because his companies came under heavy fire in recent years following scandals over manipulation, data breaches, and the inability to stop the spread of disinformation. We haven’t forgotten the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen. Threads is conducting a charm offensive that briefly puts Meta back in the spotlight, and Musk a little further into the shadows, but what’s behind it?

Tech writer Ryan Broderick cuts through the hosannas in his newsletter Garbage Day. “The true goal of Threads is to give Instagram’s code a fresh coat of paint in the hope of making the network relevant again,” he writes. “And Threads is proof that after all these years, Meta still has no ambition other than to get as big as possible.”

Threads might feel fresh and exciting right now, but Zuckerberg was also clear about it himself. He wants 1 billion people on the app. “After that we’ll think about how to monetize it,” he writes. We know the drill: first make sure your users can’t live without your app, then inject their eyeballs with advertisements.

I wrote about the first moments on Threads for NU.nl (behind the free login).

PS.

Very much looking forward to the new Martin Scorsese film: Killers of the Flower Moon. It comes out in October and runs 3.5 hours.

The YouTube algorithm is so good. It knows unfailingly what I want to see, like this video about modding children’s toys.

I finished Tom Hanks’ debut novel: The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The title is excellently chosen, because the book takes you in meticulous detail through how a superhero film comes together. From the source material to the casting and the shoot itself. Tom Hanks can write compellingly, as the first section proves — it tells the story of a man returning from a war in which he operated a flamethrower.

That the book itself is no masterpiece comes down to the rest of it refusing to come alive in quite the same way. Hanks keeps introducing characters until you can barely keep up, and then too little happens that really lands. As a result, the various storylines dissolve into nothing.

That said, I enjoyed Hanks’ rant about streaming services in a recent interview with The New Yorker.

Be honest: How many times have you—and maybe you alone, or you and your family—said, “Hey, let’s watch something tonight”? Great, you pick up the remote and it takes you forever to agree on what you’re going to watch on Apple or Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. “Oh, no, not that. No, not that. No, not that.” So forty-five minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch—which is not what you really want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address. And someone has to go through their phone, come up with a billing address. Because why did they reboot this? Who rebooted it? So there’s another fifteen minutes that are lost to the process. Now you’re finally ready to start the movie that you have all “agreed” to watch. And you think, At last, let’s watch the movie. Seventeen minutes into it, you think, I have no investment in this movie whatsoever. I don’t like this movie. I’m going to leave the room and not bother watching the rest of this movie. Right? How many times?

This newsletter is produced as a weblog on my website. You can read along live there throughout the week as I add to it.