Sacred Musings: August 2025

Zoolander, Josie & the Pussycats, and selling out

Bonjour à tous et à toutes,

I hope the end of August — in my opinion, the most maddening month of every year — has treated you well.

I am yet yet yet again packing my trunks for a cross-continental flight to Paris. As the United States tumbles further and further into fascist chaos, the differences between Los Angeles and Paris only become more stark. Not necessarily for the obvious, but for the simple fact that even Parisians seem to demonstrate more common sense day-to-day than the average American. Quelle horreur!

I am sure an astrologically minded subscriber could give me the cosmic explanation as to why it is that this August has been particularly chaotic, but I have been in a state of whiplash for several weeks as more than one gig has cancelled, only for another, larger opportunity to fall into my lap, and so on. It has been a month exemplary of the expressions “When God closes a door, he opens a window,” or for those more secular, “Rejection is redirection.” What with the ample and long lead times of the art world, I am already looking at my 2026 planning with a mixture of excitement and dread. At the rate I’m going, I am already blocking time in 2027 for a true holiday.

I have filled the hot hours of August doing some of my favorite Los Angeles summertime things: catching Cinespia film screenings at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (where I own a plot — a story for another time) and enjoying philharmonic rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl. I feel lucky to have watched Gustavo Dudamel rehearse his orchestra many times over the years, and am sad that this is his last season conducting for the city of Angels. Unfortunately, Hollywood Bowl rehearsal has gone from a well-guarded neighbors-only secret to a social media phenomenon; that said, it’s always nice to see people of all stripes enjoying classical music, and I take enormous pleasure in roping new friends into joining me for a little morning coffee and hushed conversation on the benches. (One such friend, the talented musician

Jean-Luc Eldenwood

, just launched a Substack which I highly recommend checking out.)

At Cinespia, I caught a screening of an eternal, all-time favorite film, 2001’s Zoolander. I hadn’t seen it in some time and it had me thinking much about how prophetic seemingly inane comedies like Zoolander, Josie and the Pussycats (2001) and the oft-cited Idiocracy (2006) were. Josie and the Pussycats charmingly satirized the commodification of music groups via relentless product placement and subliminal messaging — and yet, today, it feels commonplace. I was telling a friend that I remembered a time when the indie band of Montreal was more or less ‘cancelled’ — or rather, being labelled "sellouts” for licensing one of their songs to an Outback Steakhouse commercial. Nowadays, a feature like that would simply be seen as them “getting their bag.”

Watching the absurdist plot to brainwash idiot male model Derek Zoolander into becoming a political assassin, I thought about the links between fashion and geopolitics — okay, sure, I don’t think Lucky Blue Smith is going to take out the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but it’s foolish to deny that the veneer of glamour that the fashion business projects has a hand in swaying high-level government decisions. People hoard power, resources and money in order to… be seen out in the newest Chanel bag? Sit front row at Paris Fashion Week? The desire to be accepted by the ‘cool kids’ in the culture space is both a weapon and a tool to be refined and, perhaps, better used. Zoolander opens with a cabal of high-level fashionistas (Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani are referenced) demanding the assassination of the aforementioned Prime Minister to prevent him from hiking wages for child labor and sweatshop workers. The ensuing hilarity is perhaps the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, but the real concern for the bottom line over garment worker’s rights isn’t.

à là prochaine,

Chloë