The Authenticity Trap
On the Sunset Motel and objects of the heart
When it was still warm, I spent a night at the Sunset Motel in Greenport, Long Island. Calen and I decided to book a last-minute trip the night before, and after trawling through sold-out listings online, we came across the motel's website. It was a busy landing page with swirly fonts and bouncing animated titles that was so starkly opposite Airbnb and Hotel Tonight's sleek minimalism, a few rooms had been spared from the weekend reservation rush.
Knowing little about the motel, other than its last-minute rates were decent and its guest reviews were almost unbelievably good, we pulled up to a collection of chalky yellow clapboard buildings that didn't so much greet us as direct us toward the main event, the ocean. Beyond the parking lot, we walked out to the bluff that stretched into an expanse of space and color so foreign to the sensory experience of living in a city, I felt immediately anointed with a kind of modest clarity.
There was so much to love about the Sunset Motel. The rooms were sparsely outfitted with beachy reed furniture that had known the space for decades, and someone had written in sharpie all the TV stations and their corresponding channels on a piece of paper taped down next to the TV. If it's possible to feel cared for by a place before you have any real reason to, I felt it there. Maybe it's because it tugged at a personal history, reminded me of the place my dad is from in Canada, Newfoundland (the bluff, the sea, the clapboard), but I think it’s also because it represented a moment in time when that kind of simplicity felt way more accessible.
We joked that the next time we came back to the motel, it will have transformed into a sceney beach bar with long lines and ironic drinks and new furniture bought to approximate the old styles, and that maybe, if we were enterprising enough, we should be the ones to do it. The authenticity of a place like the Sunset Motel is a powerful force beyond my not-unusual attraction to it. Ever since apps like Instagram and Snapchat granted us unprecedented access to each others' lives and tastes, the need to distinguish ourselves from one another became increasingly valuable. An aesthetic of authenticity - customizable, small-batch, highly visible originality - exploded everywhere from the restaurant industry to tourism to commerce. It came in the form of microbreweries and speakeasy bars, faraway yurts and cabins you could only access with great effort. It was san-serif honesty, back-to nature iconography, and quippy copywriting that just wants to be real with you, you know?
Americana hipsterism - that mason jar strain of the authentic aesthetic - was one of the most enduring, and today has become a cultural export as ubiquitous as Hollywood movies. It's why if you go to this barbershop in Kabul, you'll find it looks strikingly similar to one thousands of miles away in Copenhagen or Minnesota or Seoul. It's why you can find a hotel in just about any city with the same exposed brick, Edison lightbulbs, and reclaimed wood on which to place your latte art. “We could call this strange geography created by technology 'AirSpace,'" wrote Kyle Chayka in The Verge. “It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset.”
If the mass exportation of authenticity seems like an oxymoron, it's of course because it is. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance recently while browsing the gin section at a liquor store, in which all of the labels boasting each regional distillery's particularities used the same language, font type, and design elements that could have been peeled off a Catskills milk carton. The Canadian philosopher and critic Marshall McLuhan wrote about how new media technologies in the 1960s (television and early computers) fundamentally altered people's experience of space and time. Instead of the chronological progression audiences had come to know in print media, people now consumed information with a sense of “all-at-onceness.” This flattening of time and space created what McLuhan called a “global village,” in which relative sameness (and critically, Westernized sameness) shaped a new age consciousness.
My generation has gotten a bad rap for seeking authenticity almost ruthlessly - and then churning it into content to share on social media apps. My own consumer behavior has lined up neatly with the millennial archetype countless times before: I traveled to Iceland solo and took pictures of myself on a black sand beach with an abandoned airplane behind me, I've chosen the yogurt brand with the cursive-looking doodle on the container because it looked vaguely more homemade than the others, and I've floated into Air Space's vacuum in various localities around the world despite my best efforts to avoid it. The impulse has become so sophisticated, I don't even need to post about it on social media anymore. My taste in so many ways is self-curating. So much so, that when I feel pleasure holding a vintage teacup I found in the kitchenette at the Sunset Motel - translucent white with a flowery mid-century print around the brim - I can't help but wonder if the feeling is an honest one.
Of course, I derive pleasure from the content churning too, at least most of the time, even if it's in pursuit of feeding my curated social avatar. But authenticity, as I see it, can't really be sought; it must be found in as unguarded a state as you were when you found it. “Objects are not without spirit,” bell hooks once wrote, “as living things they touch us in unimagined ways.” A teacup inside a motel kitchenette can tell you a lot in the right circumstances. About the woman at the front desk, for example, who is terse but kind, and who gave you two extra towels and a plastic bucket when you told her about the leak in your bathroom. She knocked on your door, twice, later that evening to make sure everything was ok. The teacup and the weighted-bottom water glasses and the small plastic toaster with its cord wound about it like a tail were placed there, maybe by her too. Their presence spatializes a kind of care and comfort that’s hard to export - and it feels as fresh as seawater.
🌙 Some Bookmarks
*LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe (on the psychopathy that is the LinkedIn feed…I loved this piece so much)
*The Strange Lives of Objects in the Coronavirus Era
* “Appearances” podcast by Sharon Mashihi (honestly one of the most masterful pieces of audio storytelling I’ve ever heard. It’s a nine-part series about family, gender, and immigrant identities that explores the blur between truth and fiction)
* And a moon meme for the road
This is lovely Nicola - really thought provoking, and a joy to read!
As usual I loved the piece, how to seek authenticity without falling into the trap of seeking authenticity.
Bring on the links! More of them.