Introducing The Execution of All Things: a new column by Bernard Cohen
February 8, 2026
My name is Bernard Cohen, I am a poet/author and one of two coeditors of Charm School, an online literary publication. There’s no real justification for this column existing other than that I think about culture a lot and I have a hardcore nostalgia disease and I really really love noticing how the passage of time recontextualizes every single thing that ever existed. The Execution of all Things is a column about the stuff I remember, the things I like now, and the gratuitous reasoning behind why I remember and like them.
Imagine I’m a hipster and I’m snarky and I’m writing this for Cracked.com instead of Perfectly Imperfect. I’m at this very moment, dear readers, in a hipster coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where it’s clear that culture has really just stopped, and that our amazing shared pandemic has enabled and affirmed the fearfulness that was certainly already present in most young people who came of age here during late Obama vibes. Portland is one of many examples of a real, developed culture that was commodified and distilled (dumbed down maybe) beyond the point of no return. Keep Portland Weird! (Austin denizens are quick to point out that even this was stolen from them, another weird city that was broken by its own identity. Idk maybe they don’t really care at this point) and Portlandia and its runoff unfortunately made Portlandians too aware of their own cultural obligation, and the dissonance between their ideas of who they were supposed to be and their actual lived experiences created a coasting-based non-culture that rested on their laurels to death. Idk.
James Blake is playing in the coffee shop, and it made me think about how cool I thought James Blake was when I was 13, and how recently I found my CD copy of Retrograde and my first thought upon finding it was: wow, this is so of its time, how can I fold this into my current identity? The CD’s most prominent quality, to me, was the fact that the passage of time has changed its context.
And this got me thinking about how tastemakers ambulate in a culture that honestly feels beaten to death by self-awareness. Like. Ohh I get it, we’re living in the ruins of a dead civilization that was able to thrive by being a billion times less self-aware. Ohh so we’re picking through the baubles and relics of what once was and saying “it’s really cool how the passage of time recontextualizes this one mundane detail, this one choice of color, this one resolution or aspect ratio.”
But it’s not like stuff used to be all good and now it’s all bad. There have always been bad bands that tried to sound like better bands and because they were trying they had already lost. I’m definitely going to recommend music by them too, because the thing that people don’t always acknowledge is this: Sometimes the little pieces of brilliance that poke out of the mediocre are more interesting, and more affecting (and maybe less challenging, more fun) than actual pure brilliance. We’re all trying, we’re all imitating, and there is so much now to imitate. We’re going through the motions because we have been given motions through which to go. There’s nothing left! The execution of all things! Here’s a bunch of stuff I like.
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Ok now this is awesome. While not necessarily failing to reach its own aspirations (its pretty self-contained and low-stakes), it does show a level of poor sentiment translation that feels really good when you watch it. This video was uploaded to YouTube in 2009 and my favorite part about it is that the audio from the video clips isn’t cut out. My second favorite part of it is that its moodiness is totally undercut by a punchline-like moment at the end of the video where a cat is shown sitting by an empty water bowl as Ben Gibbard sings the line “What does it take / to get a drink in this place.” Sometimes I feel guilty for liking something just because it’s pixelated but it’s impossible to deny the filtering/cohesive effect of low-resolution stuff. The palette of muted pinks and blues, the snow outside, the floors and the rug, it all is blurred into cohesion. I think that’s why comedians are so inclined to use 1980s-style video effects or old cameras in their sketches and Instagram Reels: it applies a streamlining aesthetic/artistic matte to something that is kind of inherently anti-aesthetics. I know nobody would care about this video if it wasn’t from the past, but I think it’s okay to acknowledge the emphasis on medium that the passage of time promotes. As I always say, if something is old or using an old device or medium, it immediately at least 51% becomes about the fact that you’re using that old device or medium. If only there was sort of incredibly popular media theorist who wrote about this.
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I know he’s not doing it on purpose but I love this kid’s voice, if you’re looking for a truly mumblecore Minecraft Let’s Play series, not one that has cloyingly intentional cozy vibes, you’ve found it. I think RexStang (2.55K followers and counting) must be high school because there are moments in his videos where he mentions having to post less because track season is starting up. The concept of his main series of videos is that he starts in a very early version of the game, and updates it incrementally each episode. It’s no-frills but not really by design and in a media landscape where everything is so compulsively conceptual and built-out it’s nice to watch a friendly-seeming normal kid play Minecraft for fifteen minutes. He’s also really really good at building, so maybe he’ll go to architecture college :)
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I’m so confused about this one and am honestly on the fence about recommending it. A brief description: this is a webcomic drawn in a loose DeviantArt meets Nickelodeon style that is meant to be a tonal parrot of newspaper comic strips from the 1990s. BY AND LARGE it is played incredibly straight and true-to-form; the timeline is accurate and runs thirty years behind ours, the political and cultural references are specific, pervasive, and largely middle-of-the-road (I’m looking at a “Sunday” strip about the promotional McDonald’s menu for The Flintstones movie. Footnote here would be about the comments and how sincere they are. One example: “Eh, the first Flintstones movie was decent. Had a solid plot, the actors did the parts well, and it had some good jokes. Viva Rock Vegas, however, can go sink in a tarpit.” Awesome.). I was and still am a newspaper comic strip obsessee (another example of something I liked as a kid that I now like in a different way as an adult), and I am struck by how infrequently any sort of veil is lifted, revealing it as not having been written in the 1990s. It also has this really comforting mid-old-internet sense of humor that generally has been beaten to death but it’s very Portal 2-ian/Hitchhiker’s Guide-ian (a tone that reductively might be referred to as “Reddit”). What’s most interesting to me about this webcomic is how it is at the same time a loving and unnecessarily period-accurate recreation of 1990s comic strips, and also so clearly fetish content. And both of those things remain true without diminishing one another. What is striking is how rare the fetish content is, making the webcomic not a vessel for it, but rather two things existing symbiotically. The author clearly has a thing for being submerged fully-clothed in bodies of water, and he presents that fetish tastefully and with a romantic bent. There’s like two strips where he shows boobs.
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Not at all within the topical parameters I’ve set for this column, but I just thought of how awesome it was that he acknowledged that the haunted scary tape that Samara makes is bad video art. I always found it to be a confusingly friendly and disarming moment in a movie that generally takes itself so seriously. Somewhat related: one of my favorite things is when TV shows and movies make fun of conceptual art, and the TV writers’ uninformed parodies of conceptual art. I always thought it’d be a cool idea to curate an exhibition of them. I can’t think of any examples right now.
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I’m coming to recognize that I am drawn to roundabout stylization, things that become cohesive in their mundanity. If mumblecore is too poised and intentional for you, try bro-mumblecore, a new genre that Cooper Raiff seems to have invented by being a cutie pie. Maybe sensitive-bro-mumblecore. Shithouse is about a college freshman who is a boy but he has a stuffed animal and misses his family. And then he meets a girl who is older than him and kind of snarky and they try to have sex but he can’t get hard and then they have a nice night and then they are weird to each other due to miscommunication and then they make up and become boyfriend girlfriend. The end. I have to recommend Shithouse because it worked on me, it made me cry, but it’s so unspectacular and that’s really awesome. I love that it’s unspectacular. I love that it looks like it was shot on an iPhone, that you can imagine how common-or-garden the snacks available to the actors and crew must have been, that Generally I’m drawn to movies that really take advantage of the fact that they are movies, that tell tight stories and hit all the right beats. Not that Shithouse doesn’t do this, but it also feels so “Fictional cinéma vérité–style films” subcategory on the Cinéma Vérité Wikipedia page. There is inherently nothing spectacular about the main character’s life, it is not presented as mundane or heightened (his vulnerability is a little mundane but that’s part of its charm), so it lives in this weird middle area. Maybe that’s the through line of this column. Cooper Raiff is also addicted to Alex G needle drops, like fork found in mother fucking kitchen 🤑 I often like something a lot and then find it on Letterboxd/Goodreads/Rate Your Music and boom. Three star reviews from all my friends. As if they don’t realize that three stars is five stars and five stars is scary. I don’t want to watch that! It’s too good! I’ll get jealous. And that is the honest thesis behind every single thing I’ve said in this column. Until next time…