I Watch the Witch Burn

I WALK PAST the organic juicery on Sunset. Its slouching marquee screams “COFFEE: IT’S GOOD AS F*CK,” the exterior plastered with adverts for a festival appearance by Paris Hilton—2007 was very loud, and now it seems to reverberate. Down the street at Intelligentsia, when I ask why I haven’t heard a song released within the last decade, the barista, under the promised aegis of anonymity, confesses they use Pandora. Women: hordes of them in verbose, graphic baby tees, low-rise everything, even the occasional Bumpit. They’re all smiles—everyone’s fucking loving it, libfected with HOPE in the Obama sense of the word. I’m confused and frustrated, as though I’ve stumbled back in time in a pair of Heelys, or I’m trying to make fetch happen. The uninitiated might call it nostalgia, but I think it’s better described as arrested. It seems we’re “dancing on the ashes of culture”—at least that’s how Jeff Weiss described it at the launch party for his new, debut book Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly!, a novel that provokes the question we’ve all been asking in the denouement of Trump bombing Iran: what have we learned since 2001?