Lando at Tanta: On Yuppie-maxxing and TikTok Realism

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” (Judd Crud, 2022).

It’s become a cliché that today’s short social videos—be they TikToks, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts—pass through the cultural digestive tract without a hitch. Swiping up may summon a fresh piece of content from the depths, but it also hurls the previous clip into an algorithmically opaque sea. For all the ink spilt on these videos’ malignant effects on the attention span of a generation, relatively little attention has been paid to the videos themselves. Few shorts merit the nigh Herculean effort required to resurface them (keyword searching “cute dog” or “easy pasta,” or attempting to remember the number of underscores in a username), and yet, for over two years, I’ve found myself returning to one in particular.

It opens with a shot typical of a lifestyle vlog: the subject, a goateed, floppy-haired yuppie in a white tank top exposing a head-spinning number of squiggly arm tattoos, takes a step back from the front-facing camera, having just set it up in his living room, revealing a selection of plants and eclectic vintage furniture and decor behind him. The code at play—“lazy” editing lending personability to the manicured performance to come—is both obvious and ubiquitous to anyone who’s been online in the past decade. The subject then points to a text bubble overhead, to be inserted after the fact: “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago.” We are cued to expect what is promptly delivered: a financially and calorically preposterous series of small bites, cocktails, and pop-ups that a casual, occasionally bored, narrator’s voice assures us is utterly typical. 

These tropes are widely recognized, if seldom verbalized, and tie the video to a subgenre I’ll call “yuppie-maxing”: capsules of days partitioned by a rigorous schedule of small bites, iridescent cocktails, and otherwise energetic participation in bourgeois urban life. These weekends are documented with lightning-fast cutting between bright images of mindless consumption. Because of their speed, they can resemble benders, and yet their typicality is constantly attested to by a voice-over that’s unfailingly bored. The well of yuppie-maxing runs deep, and channels into ever-smaller routes of market segmentation with subtle differences in formal codes (“as an introvert in Atlanta,” one might read, or “as a freelancer in Toronto”).  

Over three days, the narrator of “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago,” comedian Judd Crud, sees 27 different people, eats or drinks at 19 different restaurants and bars, and pursues 26 activities that could fall under the umbrella of “recreation” (Trader Joe’s, Legoland, et cetera). The logic of the weekend breaks down as the video progresses: the narrator mentions a girlfriend, a wife, and a husband; kayaks the Chicago River on a warm day before taking a winter hike; and consumes no less than three “margarita towers” before enjoying, in his own words, “a beautiful drive home.” The video cuts 142 times in its 135 seconds, deploys five recurring images run back at different speeds, and is presided over by casual narration that nonetheless dilates all sense of time and rationality, paying only token respect to the procession of images.

All this, and yet the satire of “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” is subtle, a dimly dawning impression rather than the onslaught suggested by these eye-popping formal and content statistics. Everyone seems to realize that the video is a parody at a different point. Many cite the repetition of the “marg tower” footage, others when Crud patronizes the Museum of Ice Cream for the third time in a single day. Chicagoans seem to clock it when he goes on a day hike in the kind of mountainous landscape you won’t find on the Illinois glacial plane. I first cocked my eyebrow when he goes to see Bill Maher at the Chicago Theatre (“he … absolutely crushed”) before fully breaking down when he unwinds with a late-night viewing of Trumbo (“for like the billionth time”). There’s not a single moment that breaks kayfabe, but rather an accumulation of subtle violations: Millennials watching Real Time may well exist, but the notion of a socially viable, “normal” millennial perpetually rewatching the Bryan Cranston blacklist drama Trumbo (2015) genuinely tests the imagination. In isolation, these moments begin to give the game away; in the context of Crud’s earnest-sounding flow, they’re indistinct eddies in a torrent of information.

As the video proceeds, Crud toys with the manic pacing of the genre he’s mimicking, crafting an experience that accelerates and decelerates, distends and twists. Mysteriously, he cuts seven times in three seconds for a trip to Trader Joe’s versus just once in four seconds for a winter hike. Even so, the broad impression of normalcy proves stubbornly durable. The voice-over spells an increasingly nonsensical reverie, and yet the illusion is never entirely revealed. Nearly all deviations from the norm can go unnoticed by glazed eyes exhausted from scrolling, and therein emerges the potential for experimentation.

“Weekend in the life of a 26 year old in NYC (Codey James, 2022).

Crud was inspired by a viral—and seemingly earnest—TikTok, “Weekend in the life of a 26 year old in NYC,” which was made by Codey James, a Manhattan-based Reddit employee. On April 29, 2022, Reddit held a “Mental Health Day” for its employees (a similar event inaugurates Crud’s short), and James went from a boozy coworkers’ brunch (at “Mud”) to a bar (“Maiden Lane”) to a friend’s pop-up (“Your Name”) to a house party to the club (“Playhouse”), all before the sun rose on Saturday. His subsequent two days similarly stretched credulity; a rare moment to himself is reserved for an inexplicable Sunday night dinner: “roasted grapes,” onscreen text reads.

There’s a symmetry between videos like James’s and what critic Greta Rainbow terms the “reference novel,” a trend in contemporary internet literature which could be considered a descendant of the “hysterical realism” James Wood diagnoses in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and others. “The proper noun seduces with exclusivity,” Rainbow writes, noting that these reference points are “standing in for description.” Wood critiques the tendency in these authors’ works toward expansiveness at the cost of depth. Rainbow, on the other hand, observes the proper noun’s function to define increasingly siloed worlds, citing Honor Levy’s My First Novel (2024) as one such perpetrator: “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b …” the book’s first sentence reads. Both Wood and Rainbow find the authors guilty of using hyper-specificity to gesture at deeper meaning rather than truly generate it. But whereas a reader is at least able to pause whenever they’d like to contemplate words on the page, a viewer of a TikTok or Reel is yoked to the pace of the edit. An autoloop seems to impede clarity rather than foster it, its repetitions accumulating into white noise. In James’s “My Weekend as a …” series, updated weekly until quite recently, his voice-over often sounds as if it were assembled randomly via Mad Libs blanks, stringing words together like a yuppie exquisite corpse. “Brunch at Mud” is but one example. Other highlights from the series include “Rosaluna Mezcal invited me to the Virgin Hotel” (February 13, 2022) and “My friend Lisa owns Ian Charms” (December 12, 2022). The litany of proper nouns bypasses seduction, bludgeoning our sense-making faculties: Which word corresponds to a brand, which to a place, which to a person? The Lower East Side comes to seem like a William Gibson novel, its narrators introducing alien signifiers that may or may not be explained later. Crud’s coup de grace comes about halfway through the video, when he declaims: “Me and Jeera had reservations at HideSeek for their Alpana, then got Lando at Tanta,” a feat of sound poetry worthy of the Cabaret Voltaire.

“Weekend in the Life of a 27 Year Old in New York City, Episode 13" (Codey James, 2022).

It wasn’t until I’d viewed “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” several times that I realized just how much of the video is composed of found footage. We can be certain that Crud shot the clips in which he appears, but in many other clips, part or all of a different TikTok handle is visible. The perennial “marg tower” footage, for instance, was plucked from the profile of Chicago-based TikToker @alyssainthecity. Multiple clips, in fact, are sourced from James’s videos. Much of my own familiarity with such content derives from @favetiktoks420, an Instagram aggregator account cum internet art gallery run by Leia Jospé that collects cringe-inducing dances, bizarre thirst traps, and microtrends that appear and disappear by the day. On Jospé’s feed, groups of mannequin-esque young men uncomfortably gyrate their hips and contort their hands to sped-up versions of “Mr. Brightside,” teenage girls in wealthy suburbs stage elaborate human-trafficking cosplays, and grown men whisper vaguely threatening sexual promises to their front cameras. If James himself has never made an appearance on the page, certainly scores of his clones have. These clips would hardly stand out on their native platform, but isolated on Jospé’s page they appear newly vulnerable and exposed, suddenly legible in a light they were never meant to be seen in. Extracting snowflakes from an avalanche, @favetiktoks420 has crafted an archive of ephemeral artifacts that nonetheless structure so much of our scrolling time. 

Jospé also shot B-roll for How To with John Wilson (2021–23), taking snippets of footage on the streets of New York to be associatively linked with Wilson’s voice-over. The resultant daisy chain of observations, ceaselessly creative and counterintuitive, requires a certain tolerance for babble, an audience accustomed to nonsense, comfortable enough with unacknowledged dissonance to make the requisite mental leaps between clips. An audience scrolling TikTok, or Jospé’s Instagram feed, in the waning 30 minutes of pre-hypnagogic blue light time would likely make for ideal viewers of John Wilson’s show.

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” tunes to these same frequencies. Pulling from an archive of content meant to be viewed once and not thought twice about, Crud violates the codes of online visual experience so as to clarify them. It wasn’t until the studio system had been dead and buried for two decades that David Bordwell began to define its norms of expression. Only five years into TikTok’s ascendance, the scale of Crud’s accomplishment is difficult to comprehend. But if his satire has metabolized just one taste cluster of the endless scroll, that means we’re only just beginning to digest a wider onslaught of content. This video is just one fish that’s been caught, examined, and tossed back into an ocean of Codey Jameses.

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” ends on a shot of an immersion blender whirring in homemade aioli, slightly canted, a little out of focus, as Crud starts slurring his words in the voice-over. The rotating blade churns scarcely recognizable masses of garlic, egg yolks, and basil into slurry. Lando at Tanta. Lando at Tanta. Lando at Tanta. I always think I can hear the grinding motor when I watch it, like a TikTok left on repeat too long, or a drill in the back of one’s head. But, aside from Crud’s fading narration and some faint, pleasant music in the background, the clip is silent.