I think I have mercury poisoning. I eat like a suicidal Connecticut housewife from the 1950s, all tuna salad and martinis and deviled eggs and oysters and cornichon, and I think that having a culinary palette that matches my aesthetic palate is producing disastrous results on my health. That, or I’ve just been a bit (more) depressed for the last few months. Whatever the cause, the effects are apparent: I have admittedly been slacking in my writerly duties. Due to heavy metal poisoning or moderate mental illness or a failing of personal character and fortitude, I owe the world—or, better put, my paid subscribers, a.k.a. my world <3—an essay. I’m working on a longer piece adapted from my lecture at the University of Chicago last week (special thanks to Arya and Novak!) that was about the nuances of writing about trauma, particularly in navigating the tension between the radical power of telling our own stories with the exploitative nature of a literary market that seeks to consume stories of marginalized pain. I hope this will be out soon, but until then I have this less formal (but very long, 6,000 word) piece. Without further ado, I present:

Twenty-seven reviews of every book I have read and every film I have seen in theaters this year, presented in chronological order. This includes ten books and seventeen films, my six favorites marked by an asterisk.

The Iron Claw dir. Sean Durkin*

Slowness by Milan Kundera

Eileen dir. William Oldroyd

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

An American Werewolf in London dir. John Landis

Poor Things dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

The Boy and the Heron dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Anatomy of a Fall dir. Justine Triet

The Holdovers dir. Alexander Payne

All of Us Strangers dir. Andrew Haigh

Chapeau Claque dir. Ulrich Schamoni*

Love Lies Bleeding dir. Rose Glass

Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956 dir. Abdenour Zahzah

Between the Temples dir. Nathan Silver

I Saw The TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun

The Zone of Interest dir. Jonathan Glazer

The Door by Magda Szabo* 

Drive-Away Dolls dir. Joel Coen 

Earth Angel by Madeline Cash*

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stop Making Sense dir. Jonathan Demme*

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Why Look At Animals by John Berger

The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin

Life For Sale by Yukio Mishima

Challengers dir. Luca Guadagnino*

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I was a person in front of a painting, until I was an image.

My hearing isn’t the best (in my left ear, it’s basically shot), but what’s left of it seems to be particularly sensitive to the clicks of camera shutters. It’s not hard to hear the difference between a film camera and a digital camera and the camera on a phone, where the shutter only sounds if the phone is Japanese or the owner is a Baby Boomer afflicted by their generational inability to set a cell phone to vibrate. Being photographed is something you can feel, it was something I felt inside the art museum, my being flattened into an unwitting actor in someone else’s tableau, an image created for purposes beyond my knowledge. The first time I had my photograph taken, I asked if they could delete the pictures, unnecessarily justifying my request with the explanation that I just wanted to look at paintings and not serve as fodder for someone’s social media profile or Squarespace portfolio. One woman excitedly tapped my shoulder to show me the pictures of me she had taken, sitting on a wobbly folding chair in front of a painting by Mark Rothko. All the photographs were of Mark Rothko paintings, because we were attending a Mark Rothko retrospective. And yet, despite walking through a dozen rooms filled with massive canvases, it was not painting which captured the focus of the large majority of patrons, instead their attention laid mostly in photographing the paintings. A patron would stand a few feet behind a painting, only seeing the canvas through the light of their phone screen, moving on to the next as soon as a suitable photograph had landed in their camera roll, always ensuring their sight is never raw, always digitally mediated. Among the young, thin, beautiful patrons with bad tattoos and garishly large belt buckles, an identical aversion towards art-viewing in favor of image-making was apparent, poorly concealed behind the mechanical aesthetics of the film camera, equally cynical in its desire to turn art and audiences into a collection of objects populating a sharable image. 

Having my photograph taken often incites me to cry. 

My friend Ryann has large, beautiful hair. We have a tendency to sit in comfortable silence together, and we have boys’ names despite not being boys. We met in the woods of upstate New York, where so many of my strange and fine friendships began, we met in the winter and we would walk through the pine trees looking for deer bones and moss and jagged beams of sunlight on the snow. We would make photographs in Ryann’s basement, usually of me, heavily costumed in vintage polyester while The Kinks played on a bluetooth speaker. We briefly dabbled—and failed—at furniture-making. I like these photographs, pieces of make-believe and performance, where my emotions sit sturdy and lacquered and complicated like the Shaker furniture that fills all the Hudson antique stores. I like images, collections of signs and signifiers bound inside frames. Including things. Excluding things. Pictures are objects of intention, like paintings and text messages.

I like photographs which depict contrived narratives. Cameras make something impossibly permanent, so upon viewing photographs we become so uncomfortably conscious of the impermanence of our beings. The heavily staged photograph reminds us that all photographs, all memories, are staged in some way or another, that we’re all posing ourselves for lenses and frames, real and imagined. I like abstract paintings because they evoke the same anxiety, forcing us to humble ourselves to environmental affect. Portrait photography and abstract expressionism both require creators and audiences alike to subsume themselves to the process of deeply feeling, eliciting emotions that cannot be edited into frames with finite edges. This consciousness of being looked at is perhaps why women dominate both genres: Cindy Sherman, Nadia Lee Cohen, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning are all masters of forcing viewers into emotional submission through the manipulation of nostalgia, melancholy, and mood. And while we live among many, many images, we do not live inside images. We live inside our lives and our perspectives, even though there is a palpable desire to shove everything into a frame, a square, a photograph. Creating art is empowering because it is a process so unlike living; it would be so easy if all our feelings and experiences were nameable and photographable and capturable and framable and shareable. 

You can’t photograph a Mark Rothko painting. You can point a camera at a Rothko and produce an image, but that image is not a painting, it’s an image of a painting. If you want to “get” anything from a Rothko painting, you must work for it. All of the melancholy and magic of his work must be mined by the viewer; these paintings demand the use of wobbly fold-out chairs tragically under-utilized at museums.  

The paintings are funny, sad. At its core, abstract expressionism, despite its association with pretension and black turtlenecks and natural wines, is about letting go of your ego. You must forget yourself and your opinions and your experiences, you must be empty to make space for the painting to move inside you. The painting must move through you. When you spend enough time with one of these paintings, you’ll notice how they buzz and hum, not like telephone wires but like insects, moving, undulating, somehow producing noise and a faint tingling sensation on the skin. Some colors, even some whole paintings blend together, while others remain impossibly separated and irreconcilable. The paintings, with their base colors and base forms, evoke the most base concepts of life—weather, water, wounds—yet each painting is inlaid with its own unique nuance. It’s an uncomfortable process, and a public one, which may explain why so many people are unwilling to shrink themselves in the presence of other spectators. Rothko’s work requires a degrading level of vulnerability; critics of abstract expressionism are perhaps most averse to the necessary penetrability (and, therefore, femininity) required to “get” it. 

I sat in front of these paintings for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes each. There’s no way to really see them all in a day. The exhibition was at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a grossly corporate venue whose probable purpose as a tax write-off generator with an influencer-friendly logo makes it the ideal factory for turning people and paintings into content. I don’t particularly care about museum patrons taking a discrete photograph or two, especially of representational art which depicts something strange or interesting or ugly or true, these personal photographs creating a digital archive for future artistic reference. But we weren’t looking at pictures of things, we were looking at objects, objects whose magic depth cannot be captured, regardless of the resolution of the photo. I’d hear another camera click, look behind me and find the barrel of a Nikon lens pointed straight at my head. If I moved away from the painting, the photographer would inevitably give me a disappointed scowl and move on, only interested in creating the image if a person was unwillingly cast in their composition. I was upset, almost to the point of rage, nearly to the point of standing on top of my borrowed folding chair and yelling,

These paintings can’t be captured by your iPhone camera, or your professional SLR, or your parents’ old Olympus rangefinder! They can’t be captured by anything, really—at their best, they’ll capture you! But that can only happen when you sit in front of them, which you have the opportunity to do right now, but you’re not, because you’re only focused on taking pictures of unphotographable paintings for… what reason? To prove you were here? To produce some sort of digital footprint? To inspire jealousy in your friends? To affirm to yourself that you are cultured, educated, well-read, because you lack security in your sense of self? Because if it's a sense of self you’re lacking, you’re in the presence of an immersive, pious experience that can help you work through some of these feelings, if only you put down the lens!!!! And please, STOP TAKING PICTURES OF ME! 

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in quotes: “painting,” “Paris,” “culture,” “art,” “color,” “emotion,” “Rothko,” “museum,” “participation.” When I am photographed, I too become a collection of symbols, a condition that is a source of voice and power when I decide on the symbols and an act of domination when it is imposed on me. The difficult, illogical, intimate parts of myself that are knowable only through the vulnerable, frightening process of intimacy are flattened and compressed into a frame. If the public around me is only capable of forming their own identity through signifiers, unwilling to engage with the complexity of the art they chose (and paid) to be around, how will they conceptualize others? What lies behind identities constructed out of images? What happens when there is no patience, no desire to understand what lies within the frame, much less beyond it?

I cried at the Mark Rothko exhibition. Twice. The first cry began because I could not escape the camera shutters and the process of objectification that they incite. The second cry began because, despite all my frustrations with my fellow patrons, I fell inside of the painting in front of me, immersed, uncertain, humbled.

“A sacrifice is a novel, a story illustrated in bloody fashion.” —Georges Bataille, Eroticism

Do we need our bodies anymore? Our lives are cybernetic, our relationships algorithmically curated and digitally maintained, so many of our jobs are nothing more than pinging email inboxes and shrill Slack notifications. Perhaps bodies themselves are obsolete, heavy objects which do nothing for us beyond requiring rent payments and food intake.

I don’t believe this at all, though many libertarian biotech investors and effective altruists seem to. And it seems that, just as our ever-digitizing lives necessitate a reconsideration of our mass and flesh, cinema as a medium is likewise returning to “the body,” not as an object but as a place, a space, a site, and an archive. Last year, no film did this better than The Iron Claw. This year, Love Lies Bleeding may be the definitive treatise on The Body. 

To be frank, I did not expect Love Lies Bleeding to be good. I expected it to be fun, kitschy, sexy, the kind of movie you watch over many (many) beers and too-loud commentary with your friends crowded onto an IKEA couch. Instead, I saw a melodrama handled with the tact of Douglas Sirk, a presentation of artifice under the same electric glow as Showgirls, and a work of body horror that could have been conceived by Cronenberg. It is deeply, deeply Batailleist. Yet Love Lies Bleeding is far more than the sum of its influences; it is a wet, neon, fever dream of sex and violence, an encapsulation of the American Pathology, and a beacon for what this latest wave of Queer Cinema can be. 

Love Lies Bleeding is set in 1989 Albuquerque, among strip malls and dingbats and sandy shooting ranges. We see almost no natural light, our characters and their surroundings illuminated only by buzzing overhead fluorescents and drowning in the neon glow of advertisements. The sets are strange, insular, I got the feeling that I were to wander just off-frame, I’d reach not only the end of the film set, but the end of the world itself; each shot bounded by some deep, imagined darkness. The score is entirely electronic, built, fabricated. There is nothing beyond what we see. Everything—everyone—is constructed and manufactured by their environment and their will.

In this way, Love Lies Bleeding is not a Trans Film, but A Trans— Film. Upon the first meeting of our leads, Louise (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian)—who go by Lou and Jack, in obvious reference to their gender nonconformity—inject each other with illicit steroids. The act of changing their body, de-feminizing it, is their initial act of intimacy. What immediately follows is sex, and what follows sex is a series of close-up shots of raw eggs, milk, sweat, bodies depicted with the topography of mountains and deserts. It is a wet film, concerned with the fluids of life, its opening scene beginning with a shot of a toilet filled with diarrhea. There is blood. There is amniotic fluid. 

The mutability of the body at the will of the individual is the film’s key theme, one that necessitates constant depictions of bodily fluids. To Georges Bataille, and to Love Lies Bleeding, there is a necessary connection between eroticism and wetness, the liquid viscera of life in stark contrast to the dryness of death, the finite state of bleached bones, the New Mexico desert that surrounds Albuquerque. “There exists an unmistakable link between excreta, decay, and sexuality,” writes Bataille in Eroticism, “Horror at death is linked not only with the annihilation of the individual but also with the decay that sends the dead flesh back into the general ferment of life.” Lou and Jack transform their own bodies, and the bodies of others, between natural and artificial, alive and dead, needing and satiated, wet and dry. The film’s antagonist (Ed Harris) is always surrounded by the barren, arid nature of death; he, like the beatles he keeps in his home and office, live dryly amongst the sand. Lou and Jack must be fluid to be alive. The violence enacted by Lou and Jack is bloodied and glistening, encased in the same wetness as their erotic desire for each other.

Love Lies Bleeding is a collection of beginnings and endings, so it is fitting that it would be set at the end of the 1980s. AIDS awareness posters line the halls of a hospital, homes in the once-booming Sun Belt are dilapidated, Reaganite tax cuts have failed to trickle down. Lou and Jack have limited interaction with the politics of their day, but a newscast can be overhead narrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, described as a “celebration of the individual.” Politics have emphasized accumulation and individualism, anyone can become anything. As the film progresses and Jack’s steroid use increases, she becomes physically larger, closer to her desired form, far less stable. The erotic drive is illogical, taboo by the very nature of its triumph over the “logic” of Western societies. Following desire at the expense of social norms is an affirmation of life, of the transgressive power of the individual as a spirit and a body, and thus it is necessarily tied to violence. Harris’s character oversees a system of violence in Albuquerque supported by institutions of power, his desire for capital and material acquisition non-threatening to the social order and thus (to a degree) permissible. In this way, Harris simultaneously plays the role of the state, dictating the boundaries of sexuality, desire, transformation, death, and taboo: he is a necropolitician of deregulation, a Ronald Reagan. 

Bataille writes of the dangerous desire for transformation, “At bottom we actually want the impossible situation it all leads to: the isolation, the threat of pain, the horror of annihilation; but for the sensation of nausea bound up with it, so horrible that often in silent panic we regard the whole thing as impossible, we should not be satisfied.” Love Lies Bleeding is the story of two individuals who will do anything to become what they desire. Perhaps its success as a biopolitical film suggests that we must do the same: we must dictate the shapes and boundaries of our own bodies, we must insist our desires do not simply uphold the powers that confine us, and we must want things that are living, changing, corporeal, alive, wet.

All my good habits—the reading, the walking—beget more good habits. When I walk I want to walk more, but also read more and write more and talk more. The bad habits do the same, compounding on each other. No matter what, sticking with the good habits gets boring after a while. Luckily, the same is true for the bad ones.

In the last week, I’ve had three dreams about former lovers. It’s always the same two subjects (one very mean, one very avian). They all follow the same formula: we run into each other, speak for the first time in years, I’m angry at first, then charmed, typically against my will and my better judgment. Things go well for an evening, or a week, or a month. And then, inevitably, they reveal what I’ve always known. They don’t care about me. In fact, they don’t really like me at all. But they hated feeling guilty about the way things ended, so they feigned warmth. But not well enough. Their ruse has an expiration date, even their guilt is of limited importance to them. And then my alarm goes off, and I try to jump back into sleep, into the dream, so I can have more time to scramble and plead for their forgiveness or adoration or just kindness, but I can never get back to bed, because the anxiety of the situation has sped my heart rate up two twice its normal pace (this may also be a side effect from the Ritalin). And then I wake up upset, and I look over and see Charles, so beautiful and kind, his thick, dark eyelashes kissing his cheeks. What else is there to feel but guilt? Why do I need an apology? Why do I need to be told that my teenage self deserved more love and respect than it got from me or anyone else? 

I haven’t written anything real in a month. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block. I want to respond to the world, but I don’t want to react to it, to sit around waiting for things and experiences to occur solely so I can mine them for meanings and feelings. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference. It’s just that I’ve been so bored lately. But I know that the world is rich with images and opportunities, but that doesn’t change how bored I am, but it does produce an anxiety over my boredom wherein I know that one day I will be old (or at least older) and I will wish I had the time and energy I do now. I don’t think I have that much energy at all. But I don’t think I’ll have more energy any time in the future—the opposite is far more likely. I had no idea how young I was when I was twenty-one. Every January seems longer than the last.

Sometimes, we have to do things not for the sake of doing them, but so we stop saying “we ought to do this” to ourselves over and over. This is what I tell Charles outside of the museum as we walk back from the Edvard Munch show. I skipped an important press conference to go to the exhibition before it closed. I’m too disorganized to write things in my planner before they happen, but self-conscious enough to write them down after the fact. Just in case I leave it behind, or drop dead on the subway, I want people to know I had a healthy social calendar.

It took me a long time to pick out a pair of sneakers at the department store. They’re so ugly. And I get around fine in my boots and loafers, which look nice. I feel like sneakers draw attention to all the parts of myself that make me self-conscious—my thick ankles, my stocky legs, my big feet, which are two different shoe sizes. But I’ve been so in my head and out of my body that I feel compelled to move and sweat, and I would walk into a gym in my burgundy Chelsea boots if I wasn’t so afraid of the judgemental gazes from women with balayaged hair and two-piece polyester workout costumes. So now I own a pair of sneakers, and I resent the shoes because they mean I care what other people think about me, and I resent the shoes because I resent the shoes and I don’t want to be someone who has a tense and fraught relationship with a pair of footwear. 

I’ve been gaining weight. I have a hard time discerning real weight gain from imagined weight gain, and for this and similar reasons there are very few mirrors in my home. But I can see my navel—once far more vertical, pulled taught by the skin on my abdomen—has grown rounder and deeper embedded into my stomach. I’m not supposed to care about gaining or losing weight. And I don’t care, at least not as much as I used to, but I can’t help feeling jealous of the babies who were born and then received those tall, thin, sideways-em-dash navels from their doctors, a neonatal promise of a beauty I bet they never notice. I know this is irrational. I’m insecure about the frivolity of my insecurities.

Perhaps this is just January, a series of anxieties over sneakers and belly-buttons and lost planners. Perhaps it’s just being twenty-three, or just being. I spend my days walking, going to the cinema, thinking about people who are very far away. I miss something. Or I want something. Either way, I’m not sure what it is. And it feels so silly to be so bored and yet so anxious, my ever-shortening attention span somehow always making an exception for lengthy fixations on my insecurities. I think it will be alright. I’m just waiting for daylight saving’s time to end. ❦

A bit of housekeeping: My book, Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un-)Belonging in Europe will be restocked on Friday, February 2nd at 6 p.m. Berlin time. You can find the link here. Paid subscribers can enter to win a free copy of Slouching by signing up on this site using the password provided behind the paywall. Three winners will be notified on February 2nd at noon (Berlin time).

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Submissions have been edited for length, clarity, and anonymity.

Dear Charlie,

Greetings from California! We have beautiful redwood forests and dutch crunch bread and terrible wealth disparity and great art all up and down the coast—come visit sometime :-)

I am young, which as you know, is a problem in and of itself. I am on a gap year, and at the end of it, my girlfriend and I will go our separate ways. She to a nunnery for a few months, and then to volunteer with disabled folks at a traditional village, and I to college. She wants 0 contact following the end. I love her desperately in that awful way that teenagers do.

This would be the first truly painful breakup of my life. How can I cope with 0 contact? Or worse, how do I cope if she Becomes A Nun? It's a very real possibility. She's very spiritual and thrives in quietude. Why does that possibility bother me so much?

Much love,

Piously Pining

Dear Piously Pining,

It’s wonderful you have been able to experience an intense, intimate relationship before your university years. Not many people have this! And it will certainly grant you perspectives on your relationships going forward. But beware: having perspective on our emotions—thinking about our feelings—is not the same as feeling them.

This very definitive break-up may be just what you need. I received a handful of letters from people unsure if they should continue old relationships once they begin university, and my advice is unilaterally the same: break up! And break up distinctly and conclusively. You are right in predicting that this will be painful, but there is nothing for you to do except feel your pain. When you begin university, you’ll be joining a brand-new climate, one which really does demand your full attention. You’ll want to be able to focus on what’s right in front of you, which is particularly difficult when your heart is somewhere else; even in cases where the relationship itself is fine, the cost of maintaining that relationship means removing yourself from campus. After all, some of my closest friendships began as failed first dates.

It seems like your girlfriend has a strong sense of purpose and spiritual identity. I think this staunch sense of self might be what’s frustrating you as you work to discover your own passions and values. On the chance that she takes up the veil, first and foremost, you should be leveraging this for social and romantic desirability—it is a great opener at parties and in classrooms, which will make you look very cool. At the same time, I find it very admirable that she is so driven and so sure of what she wants. College is the exact time to find what calls to you, whether it’s scripture or sociology or supporting disabled people through public policy initiatives. Use the space that she once occupied to find yourself; I can’t think of a greater honor than being the catalyst for another’s self-discovery.

Of course, you can reject all this advice and continue the relationship, which is a perfectly teenage thing to do. If that’s the case, then refer again to my earlier advice: try to live in your emotions, not above them. When it sucks, allow it to suck. When it’s great, allow it to be great. When you regret missing a club meeting or a party because you stayed in your dorm to talk on the phone (or when you regret missing a phone call for a club meeting or party), feel it out first, then reflect on your emotions. Most of all, watch lots of movies and listen to lots of music, make friends your first semester, realize you hate them, make better friends that will last a lifetime. Eat as many french fries as you can.

Love,

Charlie (Further reading: “Untitled God Song” by Haley Heynderickx)

Dear Charlie, 

i have a lovely boyfriend, who does his best to cater to my needs and see to it that i am happy. the trouble is, i don't think i'm attracted to him. at all. please advise. 

Sincerely,

Non-Ferrous Lover

Dear Non-Ferrous Lover, 

Break up with him. Sorry!! :( It seems like you can be happy with him, but could he really be happy with you, knowing (or if not knowing, then suspecting) you aren’t attracted to him? He deserves better, and you deserve a relationship that feels passionate and magnetic.

Break up with him, and lie when you do it. Say anything other than “I’m just not that attracted to you.” This is the perfect time for an “it’s not you, it’s me.” He will likely know this is not the case, but the lie itself is the gesture that demonstrates you care about his feelings.

Love,

Charlie (Further reading: Seinfeld S5E6, “The Lip Reader”)

Dear Charlie,

I've lived in a lot of different places over the past couple of years that could be considered 'picturesque' - or if not, interesting to look at for their ugliness. I've thought a lot about living in different places, why we go, how we're supposed to interpret the world as we pass through it, or it passes through us. 

 I've lived in Paris for example, and have contemplated how ambient it is to be surrounded by architectural 'beauty' on all sides - but have still been uncertain what to do with it all, unmoved, like I'm floating an inch or two above the concrete and maybe I'm not appreciating it enough for what it is - what 'appreciating' something by gazing at it means. I've also lived in Beijing, which is a more harsh, grim place to be, and I've wondered why it is we think space should gratify us at all - or should make us feel anything: that urban space isn't 'art,' however we want to define that (though it is created by humans, sometimes with the intention of adhering to the principles of some aesthetic form). I've also found myself in parts of Southeast Asia, or more recently in Italy where a lot of urban space feels very constructed - theme parked - to appeal to tourist sensibilities, and I'm let-down by the artificiality of it all and feel that vague 'late-stage capitalism' smug turn of phrase want to bubble up from within my throat, though I'm not sure what purpose it would serve - and if visiting some remote village in rural China and being disappointed because it was all a bit post-historical and tacky doesn't all just equate to being let-down that my Orientalism wasn't satisfied. 

I'm not sure I'm articulating what I mean to say here well - where do you think we draw the line between what art is and what man-made structures are? How do you interpret the city as you pass through it - does it pass through you? Should we disregard understanding it as creation and art, for purely functionalist rationalist understandings? And when these things do prioritise form over function (for the sake of tourism, consumption) does that detract from its integrity in some way? 

Best,

Ennui Experiencer

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I don’t think I’ve changed much since January. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I didn’t read as much as I should have, and I’m still often impulsive and angry and fickle. I drank a lot of wine. I cried an average amount, but mostly over things that don’t make any sense. I try and do the things that will make me happy, but I have no idea what those things are. I am very bad with money. I am trying to be more ambivalent about my appearance. I am trying to be less shy. I am trying to speak less.

My favorite movie that I watched this year was The Last Picture Show, because it made me feel all of the emotions I can’t quite put into words. I listened to a lot of Joan Baez and a lot of George Harrison. I saw Salomé at the opera and Alex G in Neukölln. I gave up on veganism (again) but will never give up on vegetarianism (since age 7 and a visit to the cows of Pineland Farms). I went to many places and spoke with many people, and yet I remain near-clinically agoraphobic when I’m in Berlin. I miss America. I miss America so much, no one place in particular except the Dunkin Donuts drive-through and the dive bar. Nevertheless, I remain afraid of Californians. I think my childhood cat is going to die soon, but my mother doesn’t want me to know.

In February, Charles and I went to Scotland. In June, I quit my job. In September, I saw Nathan and Peter and Ryann in New York and Aidan in Maine. In November, I wrote a book. In December, Charles and I hosted a very perfect Hanukkah party at our apartment. I took six-hundred-and-two film photographs this year, minus the ones I still need to get developed. I’ll miss living in an odd-numbered year. I am ever-full of opinions and ambitions and persuasions, some of which feel worth sharing.

There is nothing better for one’s mental and physical health than a brisk walk up a steep hill. Thoughtful gift-giving is one of the highest forms of love. Art is meant to be felt and thought about, but not solved. Always take the window seat. It’s important to feel bad sometimes, but unproductive to wallow in self-pity. Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. Please and thank-you are the most important words in the English language. There’s no use in running to catch the bus, another one will come. Punctuality is a lost art due for a revitalization. I miss a lot of people. Presentation is everything. Waking up early is a necessary evil. Most people we speak with are either helping us or need our help, and thus it is the highest honor and best use of our time to be of assistance to another person. It is good to leave your phone at home as often as you can. It is good to be bored. Owning files is far superior to streaming services. The library is a perfect place.

For my first post of January, I’d love to dispense some advice, but I’ll need your help. If you have a problem with love, work, family, dreams, sex, or friendship, send me an email (terrortwilightbypavement [at] gmail [dot] com) with “DEAR CHARLIE” in the subject line. I’m hoping to respond to 3-5 with extended answers.

I hope you all have a bright, messy, sloppy, loving, shiny New Year’s Eve where you look beautiful and adore all the people you’re with. I’ll see you all in the New Year.

With love,

Charlie

You’re falling asleep, or waiting for the dentist, or riding the bus. You’re passively scrolling, taking in blue light and clickbait, when you see the announcement on an Instagram story or Twitter feed or Facebook post. Someone is missing or suddenly passed away, and it isn’t a stranger, but it isn’t someone you know, either. It’s someone you could know, a friend-of-a-friend, someone the next neighborhood over, the middle school teacher your older siblings had, a person who is completely real but only realized to you in that moment through the LED glow of the phone screen. It is at this moment that the distance between the digital world and the physical world becomes non-existent, a false wall torn down, each pixel of grief as tangible as ink and paper.

There’s this phrase, “real life.” It isn’t too new; Dostoevsky uses the term in The Idiot to separate the sphere of fiction and literary imaginings from the on-the-ground happenings in front of us. There’s IRL, which is short for “in real life,” something which demarcates the line between “the internet” and “everything else,” that “else” being something that is supposedly fundamentally more “true,” more “personal,” more “real,” all terms which can only ever exist in quotes. The careers, friendships, conversations, and emotions which occur when we interact with the internet are just as real as careers, friendships, conversations, and emotions which take place in the physical realm. It seems, in many places, that there is not an “offline” world of which to speak: digital networks are used to pay for coffee and subway fares, to navigate roads and sidewalks, to pull up concert tickets and vacation photos. And so, if there is no real life without the internet, there can be no real death without the internet either.

And of course, when I write you I really mean me. Hearing and seeing these expressions of grief and concern makes me worry about every person I know all at once, the kind of news that makes all the alleyways seem darker and all the strangers more sinister, the kind of news that makes me feel selfish for adopting grief and fear that is not mine to adopt. And, in an act of very human selfishness, I have a tendency to type the names of these half-strangers into my search bar and hit return, an anti-social urge to answer the very human question: What happened?  One of the great intimacies of the internet is the ability to ask the questions which would be too inappropriate or too rude or too personal to ask out loud. The desire to acquire information which cannot be respectfully requested from another person feels like a very natural urge, at least among myself and the people I know, an urge abetted by the internet and the very concept of “The Information Age,” which often functions more as “The Age of Entitlement to Information.” And as this is a natural, shameful, and unspoken compulsion, there exists a digital market for a solution.

It should come as no surprise that those who are willing to capitalize on our antisocial, illicit urges do so in an antisocial way. When I last searched the name of a real person, a name which only came to me in missing posters and pleas for a safe return, a name which came to exist in my mind that day as a result of something very raw and real and human, I was presented some of the most clinical and fundamentally in-human writing I’ve ever read. The uncanniness and insensitivity with which these articles were written left me disgusted with the authors, the structures of the internet, and most of all myself. After all, it was my thirst for answers that provided some of the clicks upon which clickbait feeds.

This is hardly news to anyone who has searched for the name of someone and gotten suggested results which prey upon our most morbid curiosities, the Google Search Bar urging us to couple these names with “what happened to…” or “cause of death.” It seems there are at least dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of websites which scrape the internet for information and create algorithmically-generated postings specifically designed to generate clicks, written in the language not of human beings, but of search engines. And these types of articles are not new, they did not begin with ChatGPT or OpenAI; I recall encountering them for at least the last half-decade. The end result are multi-paragraph piles of dehumanizing, sensationalizing nothingness posted to WordPress blogs with titles like EternalHonoring, EarlyMemorials.com, TheWorldObits, and dozens of fake law firms claiming to issue legitimate statements. They gather their content from whatever public websites provide information about their subjects, most articles seemingly written entirely off information found on LinkedIn, the missing and deceased reduced to the points on their resume and the language of a human resources handbook. If you click on the “authors” of these pieces, you’ll find dead-end links to non-existent profiles. The articles have the linguistic precision of a press release, the cold distance of an encyclopedia, and the veracity of a 4Chan post. One piece, from Bao Law Firm (which is not an actual law firm, but a “hub for reliable sharing and advisory of business financial knowledge”) refers to how “the public eagerly awaited the comprehensive autopsy” which was “anticipated with bated breath.” The webpage ends with the disclaimer:

 “Please note that all information presented in this article has been obtained from a variety of sources, including wikipedia.org and several other newspapers. Although we have tried our best to verify all information, we cannot guarantee that everything mentioned is correct and has not been 100% verified. Therefore, we recommend caution when referencing this article or using it as a source in your own research or report.”

There is no other way to put it: I find these web pages to be deeply, unshakably upsetting. Despite a high saturation of words, images, and videos of violence, I try to remain highly sensitized to the information I take in from the internet. As a digital native, I was raised on the border between the provinces of LiveLeak beheadings and Tumblr BDSM porn, things which make it all-too-easy to believe the internet is this cold, image-producing machine with an output of files. Constant exposure to these things leads us to believe that no aspect of life is private, intimate, or personal—anything which is able to be captured and uploaded to the internet is empty content, proprietary filler material for its host site, decontextualized and stripped for parts until it is a collection of hashtags, pixels, lines of code. Speaking with friends my age, usually the ones who were equally unathletic and unpopular and thus inundated with the content of the grotesque, we share a desire to actively re-sensitize ourselves to the tenderness of human experience. 

It was precisely the completely desensitized language of these articles which felt so profoundly negligent, so maliciously uncanny. Something that was real, which was happening now, to a real person who was missing, who was somewhere, the hearts of the people that love her thumping real blood through their real veins, all of that pain and feeling consumed as content and regurgitated into a neat package of search result optimization and algorithmic clarity. My feelings morphed from upset to disgust towards the individuals who create these sites and train them to reduce real people into per-click optimization, the human beings systemitizing dehumanization. Perhaps strangest of all, the function of these websites for their creators seems unclear—each of these websites was created by a person just as real as the subjects they cover, the result of human time and labor and perhaps money, but with little obvious benefit to site owners. Some run ads, but plenty don’t. Most don’t sell products, nor do they drive traffic to other websites. 

The only hint came a few days later. I was still disturbed and captured by these sites, I knew I wanted to write about them, and I knew I’d have to revisit the ones that had me so unsettled a few days before. I typed in the same search terms I had previously, still guilty that I was driving web traffic back to these sinister places despite my purely investigative intentions. But they seemed to have disappeared completely from the internet. I used an advanced search to only include results from a week beforehand. Still nothing. But two-thirds down the page sat a small clue, one line in italics: Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. All of the original results were only shown to me because my VPN placed my computer’s address somewhere in the United States, a place which lacks the extensive data privacy legislation in place in Europe. This legislation requires websites to provide ample information and choice about web cookies under “the right to be forgotten.” Surely enough, upon Inspect Element inquiry, most of these sites were running multiple third-party cookies, collecting the data of their visitors and selling their personal information. It is not enough for these websites to depersonalize the missing and deceased, reducing their names into analytic benchmarks; website visitors themselves become metabolized into this system of compacting human beings into commodifiable sets of data.

The incident which led me to these websites ended in tragedy. An untimely death quickly sensationalized, both by flesh-and-blood journalists writing in the media and by computers writing by algorithm. On Twitter, the letters which once formed a person’s name—the set of sounds which denote an individual in all their complexities and nuances, the name parents wrote in birthday cards and teachers shouted in roll-call—have now congealed into a hashtag, an invitation for invasive inquiry, fodder for “content.” A person, still a person in the hearts and minds of those who knew her, becomes a piece of data. The unquantifiable radiance of a young person gone too soon becomes an easily quantifiable metric and currency in an attention economy. 

These holographic graveyards, empty and intangible evocations of memory, are not un-real just because they live on the internet. There is a wholly human industry of “true crime” which similarly mobilizes morbid curiosity to transgress social norms of privacy and respect. And just as these technological treatments shape our perception of death and dying, so too do they influence our perception of our lives and our selves. If the individual can so easily be reduced to a phonetic unit of digital information, our self-conception can become increasingly metricized and thus atomized. The profit motives of the internet as it exists now encourage every aspect of life, including death, to be gamified, quantified, optimized. Life and individuals become systems of data-points, holding a single mathematical utility which stands in such stark contrast to the communal and non-linear nature of grief. 

We experience the world through systems. We ask our search engines for the uncomfortable details of private matters exactly because we want to understand, digest, and systematize the maddeningly illogical and oftentimes random nature of violence. The systematic transformation of death into content occurs on an algorithmic level, but that does not make its implementation separate from the personal greed that sparked its inception. Constructed systems—financial, social, technological—are upheld not by some supernatural or divine force, but by individuals who have some level of interest in upholding them. If we are to visit our manufactured, in-human, holographic graveyards, we must remember that they are constructed at some level by human desire. And, in remembering this, we must urge ourselves to transform our own human force into things which are warm, communal, empathetic, kind, and, for lack of a better word, real. ❦

Of course, there is no gift more sought-after or exclusive than an evil female subscription for the one you love! But you already knew that. And so, without further ado or digression, welcome to the evil female gift guide, 2023.

A Fruit-Of-The-Month (or anything of-the-month) Club Subscription (variable)

I don’t know if anyone in this world remembers the days of catalogues, but I loved pouring over anything that came on glossy pages with big, beautiful pictures. As a child, due to a malady I can only describe as “Early Onset Niles Crane Syndrome,” I dreamed of having a fruit of the month club subscription. And one day, as I stopped by the Skidmore College post office to pick up an unexpected package, that dream became a reality. It was everything I wanted, and more. As a gift, this not only provides variety and surprise but longevity—something that will continue to delight month after month. Fructose intolerant? Go for whisky, soap, a Patreon subscription, and so forth.

An Actual Mix CD (less than $5)

I know some of my subscribers are younger than I am, and may believe it is unfathomable that you can make a mixtape all by yourself, but you can! A brief crash course: visit your nearest Staples and pick up a pack of blank CD-ROMS. Open up iTunes on your computer, and make a new playlist filled with songs. You should legally download these songs, and you “should” “not” Google “Youtube to MP3,” inserting links to Youtube videos with high-quality uploads of the songs you’d like to add. If you don’t have a computer with a CD port, you can go to your local library—chances are, the old desktops have them. Then all that’s left to do is burn the CD and decorate the case with stickers or photos or love notes. If you really want to go all out, record your own voice introducing the tracks. Before making your mixtape, ensure the recipient has a way to listen to it; the best place to play a mixtape is in an old Honda Accord or Subaru Outback.

A Really Nice Umbrella ($30+)

Look. I’m not phoning it in here! I’m on a mission to give you actual, very good, quasi-unique gift ideas and not just vomit up whatever’s cutest at the local shoppy-shop! And I think a very nice umbrella is an absolutely genius gift which suits almost anyone. Even you’re living in the Atacama Desert, you can swap “umbrella” for “parasol!” The perfect umbrella for your recipient might be the perfect gift: it is incredibly practical, something few people would think to splurge on for themselves, and endlessly customizable. If you’re looking to buy new, I love this umbrella from Duckhead with a gorgeous watercolor design and made from wood and recycled plastic. If you want to go the vintage route, “vintage umbrella” is a very easy eBay or Etsy search that will return your results at a variety of price points. I love this very mod, earth tone umbrella ($45) and this Italian, rabbit’s head umbrella ($125). Plus, what’s more romantic than someone thinking of you whenever it rains?

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You learn a lot about art in school. Some paintings, some sculpture, some literature. Maybe some buildings and poems, perhaps a play, and if you’re really lucky you might get to watch a bit of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I remember being twelve or thirteen in French class (on the second floor of left wing of the middle school) and being shown the 1986 film Manon des Sources, sitting in a group of tweens transfixed by the beauty of Emmanuelle Béart, giggling at non-sexual (and some sexual) nudity, scandalized as our teacher stood in front of the projector and explained how she’d be skipping over the scene where a man pierces his own nipple with the hair ribbon of a young woman he’s obsessed with. While I learned little in the ways of vocabulary or grammar, I certainly gained a deeper understanding of the French Condition.

This is all to say: we are often taught about art. We are rarely taught how to look at art. Enjoying and understanding complex art is a fundamentally pretentious or elitist exercise in that it is predicated on some level of prior understanding, but that’s not a bad thing. It just means that you have to work a little harder, look a little longer, dig a little deeper to speak the language of painting or music or dance or theatre or—in this case—film.

I have no desire to “consume content.” What I want is to watch, and to listen, and to feel, and most of all to engage with art. I believe there are objective measures of artistic success, and that certain things hold more meaning and value than others. I also believe it takes work and prior knowledge to get the most out of good art, and I happily accept that some people will live perfectly content lives without active and critical film-watching. After all, like taking vitamins and letting go of old grudges, there are plenty of things which are enriching for the mind and body and spirit that I myself have no desire to do.

I’ve been fascinated by the public reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese’s films are far from the most avant-garde or formally experimental productions being made today, and yet (due to the box-office dominance of IP-based films and sequels and “franchises,”1 I’d reckon to guess) they are treated as if they are insurmountable knots of endless complexity. In particular, the discourses that have piqued my attention concern A.) the question of whether or not theaters have the right to insert intermissions into films against filmmakers’ wishes2 and B.) the role that “enjoyability” plays in assessing a film’s merit. Both conversations really center what the function of film is (to entertain? to captivate? to distract? to pacify?) and who a film is for (the audience? the critics? the filmmaker?), big questions which certainly can’t be resolved in 140 characters or fewer. In fact, I don’t think they can even begin to be answered without first addressing a much simpler question: how do you watch a movie?

How To Watch A Movie

“Film” as a medium is not monolithic. It’s hard to find universal metrics to assess, understand, and critique a form so wide in scope—I don’t think it would be a stretch to describe a movie like Singing in the Rain (a Hollywood studio production) and a movie like Julien Donkey-Boy (an auteur-driven work abiding by the principles of Dogme 95) as different mediums entirely. But I think film (and, really, all art) can be digested by simultaneously considering these two seemingly simple questions:

1. What was the author’s intent? And how successful is this film in communicating that intent?

2. How did the experience of watching this movie make you feel? What properties of the film affected those feelings? In short, what is evoked by the experience of viewing?

I was so captivated by the video of the young men explaining how they don’t watch films that aren’t “enjoyable,” citing the example that The Wolf of Wall Street is “really fun for an hour, […] and then it’s brutal to get through.” It’s such a funny piece of criticism, because it shows an implicit understanding of the film before completely disregarding the possibility that their emotional response was the intent of the film. They see the first hour of accumulation, extractive wealth, sex, drugs, and power as exciting and invigorating, before finding such concentrated excess nauseating and hostile, but are unable to make the connection between the formal qualities of the film which evoke this response and its politics.3 Though these young men don’t see it, they have described a film in which the author realizes his vision so successfully that the film can evoke this feeling of disgust against the will of the audience.

It can be difficult to simultaneously lean into the sensory, emotional experience of watching a film while also trying to disassemble the end product to unearth the purpose of its conception. One must be both inside and above a movie, both the doll in the dollhouse and the child with an omniscient, dioramaistic perspective. I particularly enjoy watching films twice, often almost back-to-back: first, to allow myself to just be present with a work of art, let it wash over me through what it does, what it looks like, what it “is,” and again after learning more about the context in which it was made, the life and practices of the people who made it, and what it “does.” To me, the mark of a truly great film is one that makes this uncanny distance either blindingly apparent (Rashomon, La Chinoise) or totally imperceptible (Moonlight, In The Mood For Love).

And I find that these two viewings require paying attention in different ways, first to what one feels internally and then to what is witnessing, technically, right in front of them. Everything described so far applies not only to film but to painting, sculpture, theatre, music, and dance; but as this essay is meant to serve as both an ontological and pedagogical treatise on film watching, it feels particularly important to speak to film as a unique, specific medium. Some basic considerations I keep my eyes open for:

1. How long is each shot? Are they drawn-out, or is the editing quick, and fast-paced? When the camera cuts, why does it cut? What, in a given scene, is the camera reacting to when it cuts?

2. What is framed by the camera, and more importantly, what isn’t? What can’t we see, and why? Is there anywhere the camera can’t go? Why can’t it (and thus we, as an audience) go there?

3. What is taking up the most space in a given frame? Why?

4. Where is the light coming from? What is illuminated, and what isn’t? Is it illuminated naturally or artificially?

5. Similarly, what can we hear? How is the audio actually mixed? Is dialogue able to overpower and sit above all other sound, or does it live amongst ambient and background noise?

6. Who do we believe? Are we meant to “see” the director, an external perspective, in the film, or are we meant to believe the camera and editing are neutral forces?

7. What—through either inclusion or exclusion—is deemed necessary and unnecessary? Why do some things happen off-screen and some things happen on-screen?

8. Where does the film end?

All of these questions approach film as film rather than scripts and screenshots (an approach that is all-too-popular online and—in my own experience—in far too many classrooms). Thinking about film-as-film is not only an academic exercise, but a necessary practice in visual literacy. Perhaps most importantly, it is a recognition of the labor input required of filmmaking, a recognition of editors and sound designers and lighting designers as individuals acting on their creative intent.4 To “consume content” is to fetishize a film into this abstract, unborn thing that was not “made,” but simply “exists.” Not only does this write off the really, truly marvelous feat of cooperation that filmmaking requires, but it makes these decisive acts of intent appear to be either natural states or unintended coincidences. Everything in a frame is included or excluded for a reason, and even if we do not actively dissect this as we watch, we still respond to the moods and sensations that technical filmmaking creates.

These questions can be asked of filmmaking that is challenging, experimental, and complex, as well as films that were made simply to entertain—I’ve previously written about the need for good, informed critique of culture meant to be experienced passively. But there is also a larger purpose in actively engaging with films which are not “easy.” Watching—really watching, looking and listening and thinking and feeling—a film is a fundamentally empathetic act. It is a process in which one exerts themselves, gives something up, for a chance to better understand another person’s perspective. Watching a movie to understand means being part of a conversation with an artist who feels they have something important to say.

Perhaps this willing, anti-empathetic attitude towards art is best exemplified by a TikTok trend5 from around a year ago:

(I am very grateful for my sharp, curious audience who do not need me to point out the obvious, and I am simultaneously aware that I must point out the obvious anyways for the hordes of willful misreaders who populate the internet: I know these posts are jokes. I know very well that boys can be condescending and annoying about obscure filmmaking. I know that sometimes we do just need to turn our brains off and not feel the weight of the world. But most of all I know that there is a truth to jokes, particularly when they become popular and repeated formats, that cannot be written off simply because they are presented as jokes!)(Also, wholly besides the point and purely a petty haterism, but is anything more ““film bro”” than a college-aged man saying his favorite movie is Paddington 2?)

Of these three supposedly unendurable, performatively intellectual films, two are imagined, and one is real (The Bicycle Thieves). All three are “foreign” films, as evidenced by the need to describe their national origin and not the origins of the preferred films, and all three are about socio-political conditions. And, in all three TikToks, the preferred film is a recent, major studio movie that is (perhaps most tellingly) made for and marketed to children. All three of these videos communicate the same attitude towards film: a movie is something that exists to easily evoke a desired emotional experience in a controlled, passive manner.

More importantly, the underlying message these videos communicate is that it is only performative intellectualism that would drive someone to willfully engage with art depicting experiences beyond their own, or that which requires viewers to exert intellectual and emotional effort. What a grim attitude towards community, towards self-expression, and towards politics itself! How can a culture position itself as progressive or left-wing if even the act watching a movie is an insurmountable amount of emotional labor? It is not a cultural inability to seriously engage with complicated art, but a cultural unwillingness to do so that exemplifies the true depths of our unquestioned individualism.

And certainly—there are long and difficult films that are not liberatory; after all, it takes a fair bit of ego to become an auteur. But art that is formally subversive, that doesn’t conform to a singular, commercial vision of “entertainment” cannot be entirely written off as inherently masturbatory and bourgeoisie when so often the inverse is true. That which confronts its audience, which allows a voice to scream and twist and push and pull, is the art with the most truly revolutionary potential. To reject the ease and comfort of middle-class American and Anglosphere market notions of “taste” and" “entertainment” is an inherently defiant act. And so, working with and through art becomes mutually beneficial: an audience learns, thinks, feels, and then becomes part of a community and conversation with the mediation of a film. The artist is heard, not always understood but certainly interpreted, their cause empowered by the mere fact that people want to offer something of themselves to a work of art.

There is perhaps no better conclusion than Julio García Espinosa’s 1979 essay on Cuban filmmaking, “For An Imperfect Cinema.” Espinosa writes,

“There's a widespread tendency in modern art to make the spectator participate ever more fully. If he participates to a greater and greater degree, where will the process end up? Isn't the logical outcome — or shouldn't it in fact be — that he will cease being a spectator altogether? This simultaneously represents a tendency toward collectivism and toward individualism. Once we admit the possibility of universal participation, aren't we also admitting the individual creative potential which we all have?’”

As many of you know, I’ve spent the summer traveling, researching, feeling, drinking, walking, and rambling to put together this little book. I’m so flattered that so many people have asked me about physical copies, so I made a couple dozen!

Order Slouching Here

They’ll ship out of Germany in early November (and ship worldwide!); copies should arrive in North America around the end of November. Each book is 96 pages, full-color, printed on 100 gsm, FSC-certified paper, and I happen to think it is a very, very beautiful object.

Slouching has been made almost completely independently: from the writing to the photography to the illustrations to the countless hours I spent trying to tame the wild beast known as inDesign to the blocky, handwriting font I custom-made for this project. Of course, I couldn’t have made anything worthwhile without my travel companions and proofreaders (thank you Hannah, Gracie, and Ella!).

If you’re a journalist, or literary critic who would like to review Slouching for a print or online publication (or blog or podcast or wildly-successful Tumblr), please contact me for a complementary copy. This project is self-financed and thus limited-run, but if by some lovely coincidence you are a publisher or editor who would like to bring Slouching into the wider world, please reach out!

Slouching is an auto-ethnographic collection of essays, art, and film photography. Made across fourteen countries and twenty-three cities over the course of six months, it focuses on the affective qualities of geography through casual interviews, critical examinations of museums, and personal reflections. The book also considers the author’s role as the recipient of a CIRCE Fellowship, and how political economies of creativity impact not just communities but individuals, defining what it means to be an “artist” or “creative.” Slouching’s central concern is both straightforwardly simple and unanswerably complicated: What is “Europe”? What is an artist? And what role do images play in answering that question?

The essays in Slouching are broad in scope, examining the ideological underpinnings of the IKEA Museum, France’s relationship to its colonial empire, oysters on the half shell, dead horses, anticommunist memory culture in Lithuania, skinned knees, fascist art, eating disorders, stray cats, cocktail bars, and sunstroke. Essays are paired with ephemera, original illustrations, and photographs made for this project. The author assumes the role of the flâneur, combining subjective narration with rhetorical analysis and drawing upon philosophical, sociological, and literary traditions of placeliness.

Paid subscribers can preview the first fifty pages (including an unreleased essay on Versailles) here for the next five days:

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A bit of housekeeping: apologies for neglecting my bloggerly duties the last several weeks! I’ve been traveling more or less non-stop since mid-August, finishing my fellowship and assembling its final project, a roughly one-hundred page collection of essays, photography, and art. I’ll be sending out a PDF copy to my paid subscribers at the end of the month as a thank-you for your patience! Physical copies will be available soonish. This piece is one of five essays included in the book.

The sickness set in before my beer had even arrived at the table. I drank two sips out of the bottle, probably a crass behavior since the waitress (very tattooed, very pretty) had also given me a glass to pour it into, but by then I was unconcerned with etiquette. It took thirty-five minutes to walk to the restaurant, first through the wide industrial road by the train station where the asphalt emits a throbbing heat and the smell of falling down on the playground, then through the old Roman ruins that I didn’t pay enough attention to, then a wide shopping street populated by teenagers and gelato shops and fast-fashion retailers and the stray puddle of urine, then through the Piazza Maggiore where some protestors hang out of some church window and demand someone’s release from prison while the cops and the tourists watch on. When I finally got to the restaurant, I asked if it was okay if I was an hour early to my reservation and if it was okay for me to sit inside, rather than the outside table I had reserved. I asked, they acquiesced, I felt bad for asking. I sweat.

After six bites of salad and a liter of water, I knew I needed to leave for the restaurant for the safety of my hotel room and its blackout curtains and my crocheted Miffy. I ask for a box for the food and pay the bill, I wonder if I look pale and know I do, I seal the box shut, I bump my hip too hard on a chair on the way to the door. I feel too clumsy and gangly and strange. There are no taxis to be found nor buses to take, and in all my desperation I refuse to ride a bike without a helmet, a justified familial anxiety stemming from a cycling accident suffered by my cousin the year I was born (a mountain in Michigan, two decades of paraplegia). The blood has drained out of my face and I know I’m paler than the Roman marble statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum and their plaster-cast doppelgangers in Italy. I walk fast, even now, or at least faster than everyone else. Sometimes I’m proud and sometimes I’m self-conscious of my wide gait, now I have no time to moralize my footsteps, but they certainly set me apart as a foreign body in the meandering machinery of Bologna. I always forget my European shoe size. In America, I’m a ten or a ten-and-a-half, the top edge of mainstream retail in-store offerings, here I’m something like a forty-one or forty-two. Big feet. Short legs, though, stout and white and thick. I carry my height in my waist and neck, proportioned like an American Girl Doll, giant front teeth and all. 

Stumbling, pale, disproportionate, and unwanted, I feel like a stray greyhound on a losing streak. Too skinny in some places, too wide in others, gambling on my odds would be cheap and stupid. I can feel my canine teeth stick out when I open my mouth. All day, I pant like my heart is about to explode, which it might; I keep waiting for someone to take me off the streets and abandon me in some chain-link enclosed parking lot. I walk past good-natured grandmothers with their leathery kneecaps and their melting green eyeliner, shiny men in wrap sunglasses with oversized watches, teenage girls with black hair and cackling laughs like ravens. I’d be convinced they were walking, living in a different frame rate if it wasn’t for how fast they were talking. I wasn’t built for Southern Europe. There’s too much ham.

There’s no real easy way to get back to my room. There’s nothing I want more. I spent several days on Lake Como and in Milan before that. It’s beautiful, so beautiful, and everyone is so nice, and all the food smells amazing, and there’s a lot to do, and I’ve never been more miserable. It’s no fault of Italy or the Italians. I’m trying to get back to my hostel room, but it’s a forty-minute walk, and I will later learn I have heatstroke, and like all illnesses its immediate symptoms are compounded by my stress about having heatstroke. And there are no taxis. And there are no buses. And there are no bike helmets, let alone bikes. In Milan, I spoke with some Australian strangers (aren’t they always?) around my age, having to explain to them that I don’t do well in the sunshine and I don’t do well when things are slow and that I miss to-go coffee and a world that’s open by eight in the morning. Only when I revisit the conversation on this walk do I realize how awful I must have sounded.

I should have been relaxed, unwound by the lake, but I wasn’t. These giant mountains, the water that is always just the right temperature for swimming, nowhere I have to be and no one I have to see. There is no erratic, frenetic energy; no immediate and obvious violent ambition; no neurotic hare-brained freaks… and it is precisely the lack of these things that only further draws them out in myself. My first full day on the lake, I walked five miles into Lecco to get an iced tea from a small shop, passing some big industrial factory tucked behind a walking trail and a reproduction seven-part map of the Roman Empire dated to 1888. Later research reveals it’s a reproduction of the now-lost eighth century Tabula Peutingeriana made by Conrad Miller, itself adapted from a still-extant medieval copy from the 1100s. This map, half a meter tall and four-and-a-half meters long, sits tucked away in a covered pedestrian alleyway, unmarked from the outside but accompanied by a plaque revealing its installation and preservation are sponsored by the industrial goods manufacturer 3M. 

Near the tea shop, another inscription, not in letterpress, but in spray paint: NO G8 NO GUERRE and G8d: GENOVA 2001 VINCE LIBERO! A Wikipedia search reveals that it is referencing the 2001 summit of G8 in Genoa—when Russia was still a member—where anti-globalisation protestors were met with police brutality so severe, it resulted in a European Court of Human Rights tribunal that concluded with Italy’s admission of wrongdoing and a commitment to pay €45,000 to each victim of its violence. It is unclear to me what spurred this graffiti in this place at this time, and I think back to it as I try to return to my hostel room. I see a bus stop whose bus should be heading in the right direction, but when it arrives and I attempt to flag it down, the bus driver just looks in my direction and continues driving. Somewhere between the sunstroke and the isolation I begin to wonder if I’m dreaming or dying. But even if, somehow, I’m not really here, I know I am bound to plot conventions of the physical plane. I know I must continue towards the hostel.

Everyone I’ve met in Italy has been incredibly kind—the older couple operating the hotel in Valmadrera, the girls who make me a peach bubble tea and tell me what it’s like living in a place that is very beautiful and very boring, and the pair of sisters working at Valmadrera’s only restaurant with a vegetarian menu. Everyone except many of the staff at the Museum of 20th Century Art in Milan, who scowl and tell myself and my cohort of visitors that we must exit the museum for fifteen minutes while they take photos, glaring at me and my notebook and my shoes. I spot a beacon of hope in my journey to the hostel—Via Antoni Gramsci, whose name I could recognize from a football pitch away in six-point font. Gramsci’s street in Bologna reminds me of the museum in Milan, where many visitors ran past the art to get to the great big windows facing the Duomo (which, according to a massive screen covering one of its sides, is apparently sponsored by Samsung) and the luxury shopping mall across the square.

So I had much of the first two floors to myself. The first featured prominently many works by Marinetti, mentioning only the first half of his manifesto writing career. Quotes from The Futurist Manifesto appear on the walls, by paintings of cyclists and cityscapes and horses. Quotes from—or any acknowledgement of—Marinetti’s later writing, The Fascist Manifesto, are conspicuously absent. The second floor, which focuses on the interwar art of Carlos Carrà, Arturo Martini, and Mario Sironi, contends that while they “publicly expressed their approval of Benito Mussolini's seizure of power in October 1922, proclaimed themselves fascists for a long time and directly participated in the public decoration programmes promoted by the Regime,” the art shown in this exhibition contains “neither fascist symbols, nor representations of contemporary history, nor overly explicit references to fascism's values of national rebirth and exaltation of Roman identity.” Past this text, visitors will see (or won’t, if they’re rushing to get their photographs with the Duomo) paintings of a Roman bust paired with sheet music and a violin (described as the artist’s “aspiration to the Classics”), muscled men building civic works, and empty, hostile cities. Morandi is depicted as particularly important to Italy, who was “estranged from the poetics of subversion of the past that were contemporary to him,” resulting in “a return to ancient painting in non-nostalgic but modernly conceptual terms.” His paintings “represent the dramatic condition of loneliness and anguish of contemporary man: he rendered it in paintings that were often simple and bare, violently material, with skilful tonal construction,” and gallery text about Valori Plastici, an interwar art magazine which Morandi worked on, informs audiences about the relationship between Morandi’s philosophy, aesthetics, and place in history. It reads: “‘The ‘return to order’, through a more composed and legible painting [...] is another aspect of the modernity of these years.” I suppose it doesn’t really matter what the inscriptions say, given no one seems to be reading them.

As I approach my hostel, I pass by the ruins of the Rocca di Galliera, a fort built by the papacy some seven-hundred years ago. I saw it on the way to dinner, telling myself I’d look closer on the return journey, but I can’t manage to divert myself any further. I need water or darkness or quiet or simply something other than what’s happening now, as I can begin to see a rash that later inspection will reveal occupies around a third of my body. I feel like a failure of a machine, an animal that cannot adapt, a greyhound who can only run one course. The hostel is just past the main train station, the end of a street containing a few blocks of housing, lined with a population of functional and non-functional cars. I’m only a few hundred feet from the front door, standing outside a decommissioned train station. Resulting either from the heat or my overthinking about violent artistic expression, my body decides to perform its own act of biopolitical speech; when I look down, I see I have vomited on a collection of four objects: a rusted hubcap, my own shoes, a weathered poster for the Fratelli d'Italia, and an empty bottle of Birra Moretti.

Summer is ending soon—or it isn’t, but I’m telling myself it is—which means we ought to reflect on this season’s vices. I spent half an hour trying to explain to Charles the difference between a “summer indulgence” and a “cheap thrill,” the former being a vice whose decadence can be corrupting if over-consumed, while the later implies a flimsy and momentary satisfaction. He didn’t get it. The summer indulgences of summers’ past remain beautiful, brilliant, and decadent (tinned fish, Aperol spritzes, kitten heels, sourdough croissants), but now is the time for looking forward. With that in mind, allow me to detail my list of Charlie’s Summer Indulgences (2023):

Espresso Tonics

An espresso with tonic water and a splash of orange juice (or just a well-expressed orange peel)—it is unlikely and delightful, the summer version of the Terry’s Chocolate Orange, a safe adventure best enjoyed in a transparent plastic (or biodegradable corn-plastic) cup so all of the world can see your tricolor earth-toned beverage. Bonus points if your outfit matches, ideally a splash of 1970s power-clashing patterns with wooden clogs.

Asking Questions To Strangers

Not in the big, “Question Authority!” sense. In the asking-the-stranger-on-the-subway-what-they’re-reading sense. Asking-the-construction-worker-what-they’re-building sense. This may be easier for those of us who are Pathologically Nosy (myself included), but the best way to begin invasive chattiness is with small talk that turns into conversation. Ask your waitress how her day is going—and mean it—and ask follow-up questions. You’ll get to know someone and you’ll get information with all the thrill of gossip and all the politeness of convention. My personal favorite is asking strangers at museums or exhibitions what they thought of the art (the best answers are always the most negative). The questions you ask your friend when you’re walking down the street (“why did that restaurant close? Where does the antique shop owner collect her wares? What is that person drinking? It looks like coffee with tonic water and orange juice..?”) all have answers, indulge yourself and look for them. Funnily enough, this invasive-but-polite nosiness is easiest to embrace when alone, shielded by the strength of anonymity. If you get comfortable enough, you can even reach the highest and most rewarding stage of this indulgence: friendly arguments with strangers.

Gingham

A picnic basket, a piece of ribbon, a puff-sleeved dress. Perhaps this is not a new summer indulgence but the most classic of all summer indulgences. Still, then, perhaps the indulgence is not gingham but leaning into iconography. Cloth gingham napkins at fresh-fruit picnics in the park. Sunbathing in the gingham bikini by the pool with a matching headband. It’s a rare form of proletarian glamor, best enjoyed with Diet Coke in a glass bottle.

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It happened once, and then again the next day, then the day after that, too. I opened up Instagram to share a picture of my dinner (delicious) or the view from the lake (more delicious) or the Funkadelic song I was listening to (most delicious), but instead of seeing my vacation photos reflected back at me, I had received a digital slap in the face. A gentle suggestion courtesy of Meta: Do you want to share this post as a reel? accompanied by a slideshow of film photos from a hazy college summer, with the inevitable and intimate headshot of the ex-boyfriend in the dairy aisle.

We had broken up, mathematically speaking, over three and a half years ago. Emotionally speaking, it may as well have been a geological epoch ago. I was eighteen and then nineteen, an art major then a history major. He was twenty-two and then twenty-three, balding and then salaried. I was desperate to feel wanted by someone closed off, to pry them open with my teeth and bitten-down fingernails like the last, most difficult pistachio. He wanted someone to pry for him, someone he could abandon with cruelty and the confidence they’d return, to feel like he was worth prying for. I was burning mixtapes for him in the radio station office. He missed my birthday. 

The third (or fifth, depending on how you count them) breakup was the last, three days after New Year’s Day. Three months later he called, asking for forgiveness. I know I said no and that I had been drinking heavily (vodka and room-temperature tap water) and listening to Jagged Little Pill (on CD, from Goodwill) to prepare for the call. I hadn’t thought of him in years. It doesn’t matter. Or, I guess, I thought it didn’t matter, until these algorithmic apparitions started haunting my phone. Then the nightmares started again. I woke up twice last night, making sure the doors and the windows and the shutters were locked and double-locked, I dreamt that a man with his face broke into my room and stabbed me between the ribs with a kitchen knife and in my dream I both hoped he thought I looked beautiful bleeding out in the moonlight and knew he couldn’t care less. I know that’s not his fault.

It doesn’t feel like a very spiritual world. Can’t sleep one night, since the blue light burned its way to the back of my brain while I was writing a dozen cover letters for a dozen entry-level job applications that will be thrown away by an algorithm before a human being ever sees them. Passing by the homeless man and his dog on the street, reaching for my pleather wallet, realizing I have no coins or bills to drop in his McDonald’s cup because my phone pays the subway fare. Can’t sleep the next night: took my Vyvanse too late. A new coffee shop opens up, it has a self-referentially generic name and a bevy of venture capital firms behind its real estate acquisition. The old coffee shop that used to be there had orange walls and an old leather chair that I mindlessly scratched my initials into while I was supposed to be reading some book to impress someone, or the internet, or myself. I can’t remember. Sometimes I feel more like a board-game piece (yellow was always my favorite) than a person. 

But there are ghosts in the machinery of this lithium-ion life. Sometimes white and wispy, sometimes red and bleeding. They are summoned by the “Suggested Memories” of the photos app, an “On this day…” from a social media app, a stray birthday reminder respirated from the dying gasp of Facebook. They feel different, somehow, from the reminders of former friends and lovers that live in shared summer songs played over drugstore speakers, or the stolen and stale-smelling t-shirt in the back of the closet. Maybe it’s the ulterior motive of memory, a company trying to find a way to squeeze one more post out of you, one more hour to obsessively check likes and engagement and passively scroll by more ads in the process. Maybe it’s the strange and plasticine way these algorithms sort life into boxes: days at the beach, Summer 2016, photos of cats. I suppose the uncanniness of this sorting would be preferable to my phone being able to detect the real and rhizomatic nature of memory, generating slideshows behind license-free jingles with titles like “nights when I missed my dead dog” or “pasta dishes I pretended I wasn’t scared of eating.” The live grenade of pain and discomfort embedded in camera roll photos and social media posts is not detonated by the surprise of its suggestion, but by the callous and transactional reason for which they are suggested.

There is one obvious solution: delete the photos. Delete the photos, delete the memories, delete the pain. “Delete”—a fundamentally technological notion that’s become all-too tangible, almost violent, the usage of the term first gaining popularity with the mass-marketing of typewriters and then again with the computer. Its usage is down from its peak popularity in 1997 by about a third, probably because we don’t even really own files anymore; pictures, music, movies live in a cloud where they don’t need to be erased to free up storage space. Everything’s just there, it can be there, then sometimes it’s gone. There are plenty of pictures on my social media and in my camera roll of family, friends, and lovers now removed from my life, some slowly and some swiftly, some painfully throbbing and some wholly unmoving. I’ve taken a small handful off social media, either pictures that were too couple-y or pictures of people with whom our relationship strained because of something selfish or shitty I did. The reason for the former is a mix of pain and utility: I wouldn’t want any future suitors to think I was unavailable. The reason for the latter should be obvious. It’s social media, there’s outward projection, there’s an audience, there’s etiquette. 

But then there’s the question of the camera roll. The power to take—and keep—so many photos has never been so greatly democratized. At present, there are 37,459 photos on my camera roll, 349 of which have been marked “favorites,” spanning the course of exactly 2,400 days, averaging out to fifteen photos a day. Granted, each photo is not unique, most taken in sets of five or ten or thirty to ensure the best lighting and framing and composition. I tried to cull the crop a few months ago, keeping only fifty to a hundred pictures per year that were worth remembering and deleting the rest. I made it through three years before the slow iCloud loading time irritated me, tossing the USB stick in what Charles calls “the scary drawer” of my desk. Most of my life since I was a teenager lives, documented deeply and thoroughly, perhaps more attention paid to the tragedies than the successes, in an iCloud account that I pay ten dollars a month to maintain. I try to take fewer photos, I inevitably fail, I justify it to myself by saying I’m an artist and it’s all part of my art, I know I’m bullshitting myself, I don’t stop. I’ve only ever gone through and erased one person totally from my camera roll, someone I wish I never knew, someone I wish I didn’t have to remember, and most of all someone I wish was unable to remember me. I feel queasy when I think about how I—or some constructed version of me—has to exist in their head, trapped in their memory and subjectivity and perception. I wish I could get my memory out of their head, erase myself from their consciousness completely, a cinematic jailbreak worthy of the big screen.

I can bring myself to remove the most intimate photos from social media, for utilitarian and compassionate purposes, but I can’t remove them from the photo archive of my life. It would be a dangerous and elective biopsy, masses of myself that grew into and then with me, a disingenuous operation to disregard such foundational parts of the person I am now. Moreover, it would be a painful surgery (even if anesthetized with red wine) that would require poking around the most tender parts of myself with a pair of very sharp scissors. Besides, when could you possibly schedule the procedure? Too soon and you might learn the photos are benign, destroyed and deleted in the event of forgiveness and reconnection, leaving you with a vacant hole in your camera roll where something, someone used to be. Too late and the damage might already have been done, or worse, you rupture a healing wound and open yourself up to a septic infection of grief and mourning. 

Before the nightmares started, in anticipation of a research project about Paris, I went down to the English-language bookstore by the vegan brunch spot and picked up a copy of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, hoping for the Edna St. Vincent Millay translation and settling for William Aggeler. While I was there, I found a cheap used copy of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, one of the books I’d lie and say I’d read, and picked it up to finally read on the train. It is yellowed and milky-smelling and I made notes in the margins in embarrassingly poor handwriting with navy-blue pen between subway stops. Barthes hates being photographed. “I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from any effigy.” He writes that being photographed “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” I underline the phrase taking as it appears in relation to “taking” a photo. In my handwriting, at the bottom of page eighteen is the note “photography = taxidermy,” and the exact same note is repeated in the margins of pages thirty, thirty-eight, fifty-five, and sixty-seven. 

Perhaps these photographs of my life aren’t, as I have believed them to be, an archive. Social media has always been the contemporary art museum, curatedly confessional and selectively spontaneous, the idea of audience at the forefront of every post and story and caption and comment. The photos app and its 37,461 photos is not a basement with its filing cabinets filled with perfectly-preserved and metadated primary sources. The photos app is the Natural History Museum, hallway upon hallway of dioramas, dolls, taxidermied bodies of myself and my friends eating resin lunches in front of painted backdrops. These photos are taken, they are removing something from my life and my memories, subjects becoming objects and objects becoming props. There is museum upon museum dedicated to myself within the geography of my phone, and like all museums they are fallible to misrepresentation and selective curation, and like most museum-goers I choose to believe they are peddling me an objective truth. 

But I can’t pretend like it has no power over me. My camera roll is fallible and nostalgic, but so is my memory. My camera roll and my memory are not distinct entities. But my camera roll is a collection of images, of photographs, and my memory is a collection of feelings. I really should continue the cull, placing most of these images onto thumb drives and hard drives. I want the painful memories and I want the unquestioningly wonderful memories, but I don’t want them with me all the time. I wrote this essay as an exorcism, but it is not the ghosts of friends and lovers past that haunt me the most, constantly conjured by algorithmic seances. I physically carry my phone with me every day. It is an object with weight, and within that object are 37,464 photos documenting—truthfully or not—every day of my life since I was sixteen years old. I could delete the photos that are the most upsetting, but I’ll still be suggested new ones, images that hold nostalgia now but are ripe with the potential to sour. 

When I was twelve or thirteen, I took weekend film photography classes at the local art college using my mother’s old Olympus SLR from the 1970s. The instructor, a middle-age man who seemed ancient to my adolescent self, smelled like cigarettes and repeated his mantra  almost hourly in a thick Virgina drawl, “We’re not takin’ pictures. We’re makin’ photographs.” These photos, the ones I carry with me every day in my corduroy pocket or canvas tote bag, are shown to me because my phone (or, more accurately, some California megacorporation) believes I will respond to them. And I do. I don’t know exactly what data they base this on; probably some combination of time, location, AI-analyzed subject matter. I don’t know exactly what’s in it for them; probably some combination of reinforcing my already crippling screen addiction or making me emotionally volatile enough to respond more to targeted ads. And to be certain, I don’t want to safeguard myself against experiencing difficult emotions or reflecting on painful pasts (though I also very much do not want to make an Instagram Reel out of them, either). Perhaps the solution—or at least the antiseptic—is to know when we’re taking pictures, when we’re making photographs, and when to turn the camera off entirely.

I’m sweating. I’m shiny. My teeth are too yellow, and I’m wearing all the wrong clothes, and I’m making some sort of pained face, and that pained face is probably going to give me awful wrinkles, and I’m an awful bad feminist for thinking that right now, and I can’t stop thinking about myself, and that’s probably why no one wants to talk to me. I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I follow all the rules: eye contact, but not too intense. Ask more questions than you answer. Avoid too-small talk but don’t get political with strangers. And I try very, very hard to follow all the rules, but also to seem like I’m not following any rules, and like I don’t need rules at all because it should all seem so effortless and natural. And it works for an hour or two, but then something happens and everything falls apart, and I’m back standing in the corner, sometimes on the verge of tears, begging for someone to notice me and crumbling when they do. It feels so pathetic. I feel so pathetic. I feel like a child, holding onto something I should have let go of a very long time ago, and I feel guilty about how pathetic I know it all is and how I am unable or unwilling to do anything about it. How do you explain to adults that the reason you always look terrified and nervous and jumpy is just because you’re shy? That you’re scared of small talk and small judgements, that you’re scared everyone will resent you for the intrusion of your presence? Is there anything more embarrassing?

I can smell the Bay of Biscay and I wonder why doctors ever stopped prescribing barbiturates. I know why. I know if I jump into the water and swim in a straight line west I’ll be back in Maine, not too far from the house I grew up in. The new owners painted it blue. It looks better that way.

It’s cliche to binarize personalities, but I really do think shy people come in two varieties. There’s the perpetually shy, the mousy sort with big eyes and an air of mystique, almost endearing in its demureness and humility. It’s a very literary quietness, romantic, twee like earl gray tea during a rainstorm, and though this has never been me, I often wish it was. But I never learned how to step quietly, and my thick ankles stem into shoes which thud when I cross a room. Instead, I am boisterous and bawdy, rambling on, unafraid of confrontation or disagreement, filled with trivia and anecdotes and mildly embarrassing stories. I dress like a jackass—I love vintage clothing with loud patterns and clashing colors—and probably sound like one too; I like to talk about art and film and music I find strange and captivating, and I am fatally opinionated. This version of myself exists for the first two social hours of the day, before sprinting out the front door and disappearing into the street, taking whatever charisma and bravery I possess and leaving me with nothing but my anxieties and the psychosomatic rashes they produce. I am suddenly still and stiff and silent.

 The corner of the room begins to feel seismically magnetic. The walls are yellow, like flu phlegm, but I and my fellow minglers are contained in a pen walled by airport-security-style line dividers. How do they do it, everyone else? Why aren’t they afraid? I’m mortified, perhaps not of judgment or even rejection, but of the possibility that my presence is so universally grating and draining that I look like an idiot for being the only person in the world to not notice as my victims are trapped by the conventions of  politeness to endure my proximity. If I knew who hated me and who didn’t, it would be so much easier, but my worry above all others is that everyone else knows I don’t belong in this room or at this party or around these people and they’re all collectively watching as I perspire desperation and obliviousness (and coffee breath, and body odor).

I write in my journal. I have more to say to myself than to anyone else, and I know there is something deeply narcissistic about my anxieties, that they are the byproduct of obsessively thinking about myself and believing everyone else is also thinking about me. But. But. What if? If they’re true, I’d rather be too self-obsessed than not self-aware enough; if I believe everyone hates me and as a result I retreat into the background, the worst that happens is that I feel like shit. If I tell myself that it’s all in my head—but it isn’t—and I continue to socialize, then I’ll have ruined everyone’s lunch. It’s like a Punnett Square, isn’t it? I’d rather assume all the risk myself. I may be shy, but I’m tough enough.

I don’t belong in Spain. I sunburn easily, I walk too fast, I can’t stand the omnipresent and inexplicable smell of ham. The non-profit think tank that is funding my trip has given us a two-day schedule, and everyone is very nice and nominally liberal and very normal, and I am petrified to admit that I am petrified of eating in front of strangers. There are no less than four scheduled blocks of light, unstructured mingling accompanied by light, unstructured snacks; I accompany myself to the bathroom each time for a light, unstructured cry which has less to do with the anxiety from the food and more to do with the anxiety over the anxiety of the food.

If you spend enough time thinking about yourself constantly, you’ll come to an uneasy alliance with your brain. The intellectual capacity for so much self-hatred typically comes with the intellectual capacity to know when you’re being irrational, a schism between head and heart in which the anxiety doesn’t stop, but you know it’s all in your head, but that doesn’t make it stop. It’s nice to know when you’re acting crazy, because at least you know you’re acting. The real problem comes when the data arises.

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“Don't ask me, I'm just a girl!” -Malibu Stacy

When I tell people my parents were forty-five when I was born, the usual response is: “That makes a lot of sense.” There are a handful of side effects that come with having older, second-wave feminist baby boomer parents; mainly being very good at talking to adults, building a vocabulary by overhearing backseat NPR broadcasts, and childhood bans on all things deemed “bad for women” or “consumerist.” In our house, there were no Disney princesses, no Uggs, and certainly, absolutely no Barbies.1 I know plenty of people my age with similar upbringings whose form of rebellion against their parents was dressing in hot pink and sequins and dosing themselves with Bath and Body Works Cherry Blossom body spray, but in all honesty, that was never me. I wore my suede Keens, cut my hair short, and called the pretty girls who couldn’t read chapter books “airheads” behind their backs. And to their faces.2

Naturally, I was a very opinionated—and almost certainly very annoying—child. I’ve been a vegetarian since I met my first cow at age seven. My childhood hero was Rachel Carson. And when Mrs. Wheeler’s fifth-grade class was tasked with writing opinion essays, as my peers opined papers about school uniforms and saving polar bears, I delivered a piece on the usage of prison labor in Walmart’s supply chain, making my family promise to boycott the brand. I’m sure it was unbearable. In other words, I was, and remain, a total Lisa Simpson.

Video from “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” The Simpsons, Season 5, Episode 14. 1994.

If Greta Gerwig’s Barbie lives up to anticipation when it is released this July, it will become a generation-defining depiction of a brand that took in $1.7 billion dollars in profit last year. A quick Google search for “barbie feminist icon” revealed many, many, many, many, many articles lauding Barbie (full name Barbara Millicent Roberts) as a beacon of women’s empowerment. I’m certainly excited for Barbie; it looks fun and silly with a fantastic cast and a wardrobe to die for, but I’m not ready to buy Ms. Roberts’s liberatory power quite yet. Our contemporary Barbie Revisionism is lacking something, something perhaps best addressed by the last great Barbie Polemic, the fourteenth episode of the fifth season of The Simpsons: “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy.”

“Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” is a relatively simple, toned-down episode of The Simpsons. Lisa receives a talking Malibu Stacy doll (our clear Barbie stand-in), but is shocked to find that Stacy only speaks in antiquated, demeaning quips. She sets out to create her own doll with the help of Malibu Stacy founder Stacy Lovell, a doll who will have “the wisdom of Gertrude Stein and the wit of Cathy Guisewite, the tenacity of Nina Totenberg, and the common sense of Elizabeth Cady Stanton!  And to top it off, the down-to-earth good looks of Eleanor Roosevelt.” Lisa’s new doll, Lisa Lionheart, and its sudden popularity pose a threat to the makers of Malibu Stacy, but they’re able to condemn Lisa’s doll to total irrelevance by simply introducing a new Malibu Stacy, this time wearing a little hat.

The episode was written largely in reference to the Teen Talk Barbie controversy of 1992, which occurred two years before the episode’s release in 1994. This Barbie doll came pre-programmed with four randomly selected phrases out of 270 possible phrases; most of which were harmless (“I love barbeques!” “Let’s make some new friends!” “I’m going to be a veterinarian!”), some of which were questionable (“I love shopping!” “Want to go shopping?” “Meet me at the mall!”), and one which caused quite the stir: “Math class is hard!” The episode also makes passing reference to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a feminist action group who swapped the voice recordings of Teen Talk Barbies with G.I. Joes and put both dolls back on the shelves for consumers to bring home. While parents were horrified to hear Barbie say things like, “No escape! Vengeance is mine!” followed by gunshot noises, kids didn’t seem to mind; when describing a G.I. Joe with a Barbie voicebox, one young girl said, “I like it because it isn’t so violent, it makes it more funny.”  

What is so interesting about “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” is that it doesn’t take the anti-Barbie stance one would expect from a Lisa-centric episode; Lisa wants a Malibu Stacy doll. She owns dolls, she doesn’t think they’re inherently frivolous—she stages her own dolls to form a model UN. Much like Barbie, Malibu Stacy is a very employed woman, and when Lisa enters the Valley Of The Dolls (har har) section of the toy store, you see Stacy as a country music star and a stand up comedian… though these iterations are relegated to the bargain bin. When Lisa begins her crusade against the Malibu Stacy corporation, she mostly just wants an apology. She knows the role these dolls play in shaping girls’ identities, and she knows they can be used as a tool of empowerment. In fact, when she meets Stacy Lovell, the Malibu Stacy founder offers almost immediate assistance on Lisa’s quest. The meta-stance of The Simpsons episode is not that Malibu Stacy—Barbie—is a misogynistic object, but that her misogyny is part of her brand identity, one that the all-male board of directors at Malibu Stacy headquarters isn’t willing to part with. Misogyny is not so much the issue of Malibu Stacy but the vehicle through which the company is able to push its real moral agenda: consumerism. 

Lisa, criticized throughout this episode (and most others) for her cynicism, ends the episode optimistically when she sees one girl choose Lisa Lionheart over Malibu Stacy. “You know, if we get through to just that one little girl, it'll all be worth it!” But it is now her optimism that must be shot down, as Stacy Lovell retorts the episode’s final line: “Yes. Particularly if that little girl happens to pay $46,000 for that doll.” Lisa Lionheart is not defeated in the marketplace of ideas, but in a much more simple marketplace: the mall. 

“Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” touches on so many of the themes people want to find in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film: feminism, girlhood, empowerment, the power of iconography, the relationship between objects, their makers, and their audiences… but its central theme addresses an issue largely missing from our discussion of the Barbie film—the issue of teaching consumerism.

The 2023 Barbie film is a commercial. I’m sure it will be fun, funny, delightful, and engaging. I will watch it, and I’ll probably even dress up to go to the theater. Barbie is also a film made by Mattel using their intellectual property to promote their brand. Not only is there no large public criticism of this reality, there seems to be no spoken awareness of it at all. I’m sure most people know that Barbie is a brand, and most people are smart enough to know this and enjoy the film without immediately driving to Target to buy a new Barbie doll. After all, advertising is everywhere, and in our media landscape of dubiously disclosed User Generated Content and advertorials, at least Barbie is transparently related to its creator. But to passively accept this reality is to celebrate not women or icons or auteurs, but corporations and the idea of advertising itself. Public discourse around Barbie does not re-contextualize the toy or the brand, but in fact serves the actual, higher purpose of Barbie™: to teach us to love branding, marketing, and being consumers. Take, for example, this tweet that is based on the assumption that the Barbie film is paying brands to do corporate tie-ins:

Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia, edited by Claudia A. Mitchell and Jaqueline Reid-Walsh, recounts the history of dolls and Barbie from a third-wave feminist perspective dominant at the time of its 2008 publication. The book describes how Ruth Handler, the designer primarily responsible for the development of the original Barbie, modeled the doll based on her observations of young girls’ play. These girls didn’t want to simply infantilize baby dolls, but to use their imagination to play with aspirational figures whom they could admire. A major part of Barbie’s brand identity since her inception has been her resume; she’s always been a working girl. In fact, a boundary-pushing career-driven Barbie has existed for far longer than some may think; the first astronaut Barbie was released in 1965, almost two decades before Sally Ride would become the first American woman in space (​​Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut, achieved the feat two years before Barbie). If anyone can “have it all,” it’s Barbie: she’s gainfully employed, owns a home, has a cute and kind-of-gay boyfriend (every woman’s dream), a dog, and no kids. The original success of Barbie was in her fundamental adult-ness; the cornerstone of her design, her humanity being what separated her from both the baby dolls and fashion dolls she competes with. Barbie has always been a woman first and foremost—or rather, a representation of womanhood. 

If Barbie is a prisoner of culture war, pushback has only made her stronger. The feminist backlash against Barbie to be more inclusive, more empowered, more “real,” recognizes and actively creates a cultural truth: Barbie’s job is to teach girls how to be women. The fight for a Better Barbie was born out of genuine concern for girls’ body image and self worth, but it also serves an unintentional purpose as free market research for Mattel. Lisa Simpson’s quest for a better Malibu Stacy begins with a plea to the company itself—she wants them to create a product that will teach girls empowerment. For better or worse, Barbie is an American icon. She was born into the Cold War, she loves to shop, and she lives on the Malibu coast—the last stop on the journey to Manifest Destiny. Teen Talk Barbie met controversy for her line about thinking math class is hard, but perhaps we should have been more concerned about something that seems far more mundane: her predilection for shopping.

It’s true that femininity is seen as inherently weak, that things described as “girly” are subject to unfair derision, and women that take on a more feminine appearance are frequently treated as if they are stupid or vapid. For girls that dream of taking the MCAT in stilettos, Barbie is undoubtedly a source of unapologetically feminine empowerment in a man’s world. But while teaching girls that femininity can be empowering, Barbie simultaneously teaches girls that asserting womanhood comes from consumption. Barbie has always been flawless. She has been a doctor, a pilot, a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, and a cat burglar. She has been so many things it’s almost impossible to say what Barbie consistently is, but there is perhaps one defining aspect of her being that has remained unchanged since her inception: Barbie is beautiful. Not only do girls learn to want Barbie dolls, they learn to want shopping, makeup, wardrobes full of clothes, not in addition to empowerment but as a fundamental requisite for modern and complete womanhood. Barbie has been many things, but if there’s one thing she’s never been, it’s a minimalist.

The casting of Gerwig’s Barbie film shows that anyone can be a Barbie regardless of size, race, age, sexuality. Barbie is framed as universal, as accessible; after all, a Barbie doll is an inexpensive purchase and Barbiehood is a mindset. Gerwig’s Barbie is a film for adults, not children (as evidenced by its PG-13 rating, Kubrick references, and soundtrack), and yet it manages to achieve the same goals as its source material: developing brand loyalty to Barbie™ and reinforcing consumerism-as-identity as a modern and necessarily empowering phenomenon. Take, for example, “Barbiecore,” an 80s-inspired trend whose aesthetic includes not only hot pink but the idea of shopping itself. This is not Marx’s theory on spending money for enjoyment, nor can it even be critically described as commodity fetishism, because the objects themselves bear less semiotic value compared to the act of consumption and the identity of “consumer.”

Perhaps it seems silly to place so much stock in a fun summer film that hasn’t been released yet, perhaps it seems condescending to insult the critical thinking of adults who want to watch a fun movie. But this Barbie Revisionism as an excuse for consumerism isn’t a future prediction, it’s a present reality—the film has sparked a renewed interest in the Barbie brand for the adult market, the single, no children adult market previously uncaptured by a company that makes children’s toys. Mattel has already planned collaborations with over 100 companies releasing Barbie-branded tie-ins in anticipation of the film, from a luxury candle at Bloomingdales to pink lemonade with sparkling water startup Swoon. Richard Rivas, president of marketing at Farouk Systems, stated in an interview for Modern Retail that “Barbie is iconic when it comes to beauty, but beauty standards are so different now so we developed tools that every consumer can use.” In the same article, Mattel’s chief franchise officer and head of consumer products Josh Silverman notes that,

“As one of the most buzzed-about film releases in recent times, ‘Barbie’ has dominated the zeitgeist for months. This historic moment for Mattel creates incredible fanfare for our partners and consumers alike; we are eagerly looking forward to the film’s release and sharing the multitude of new ways Barbie fans worldwide can celebrate this iconic moment.” 

It would be hard to believe that fans of Gerwig’s oeuvre would so easily buy into this cash grab, but to see how effective it’s already been, one simply needs to look into the response to the collaboration between insurance company Progressive and Barbie. 

“Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” is a classic Simpsons episode because it is such a clear embodiment of the function of Lisa Simpson. She is positioned as fundamentally, politically correct. She is also positioned as condescending and just plain old annoying, which undermines her correctness. It is the same criticism faced by the Barbie Liberation Organization and the Barbie dissidents of the twentieth century. Part of the brilliance of the Barbie brand is its emphasis on having fun; critiquing Barbie’s feminism is seen as a dated, 90s position and the critic as deserving of a dated, 90s epithet: feminist killjoy. It’s just a movie! It’s just a toy! Life is so exhausting, can’t we just have fun? I’ve written extensively about how “feeling good” is not an apolitical experience and how the most mundane pop culture deserves the most scrutiny, so I won’t reiterate it here. But it is genuinely concerning to see not only the celebration of objects and consumer goods, but the friendly embrace of corporations themselves and the concept of intellectual property, marketing, and advertising. Are we so culturally starved that insurance commercials are the things that satiate our artistic needs?

When we speak about Barbie, it is shockingly easy to recognize her personhood, to describe “who she is.” It is much harder to talk about Barbie in terms of “what it is”—a combination of plastics available for purchase. It is no coincidence that Barbie’s creation coincided with the post-War shift in disposable consumer goods; Barbie’s wide array of career options and outfits meant that Barbies could be collected, traded, and disposed of—a markedly different attitude towards dolls than the expensive porcelain creations of the early 20th century. Barbie is a woman (or at least, an evocation of one), but Barbie™ is a brand. It is probably one of the first brands that children are aware of, one with a long history of corporate tie-ins… the first inter-brand Barbie was simply called “Barbie Loves McDonalds.” By placing Barbie at the center of debates about girlhood and womanhood, we have allowed the brand to maintain its place at the heart of our culture. And as Barbie becomes more inclusive, more friendly, more aspirational, and more abstract, we must also become sharper, more critical, and more grounded about what Barbie is actually selling us. In short, as we find ourselves seated for Gerwig’s film in our hairspray and hot pink outfits, we must become Lisa Simpsons.

There is a small, yellow bug crawling on the corner of my book. The insect is no bigger than half a grain of rice, triangular, and his antennae investigate the air with a charming curiosity. I think to myself that I ought to write this down— his ochre color stands so starkly against the Prussian blue of the psychiatrist's waiting room floor—but I decide to keep reading instead; if the image is potent enough to deserve inscription, it’ll come back to me later. The book is Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, and I’m reading the titular essay, written in 1928. A spare Uno card keeps my place in the book and I’ve taken a pen to the margins to make unorganized annotations, usually just stars and exclamation points.

Benjamin grew up in Magdeburger Platz, a short walk from where I’m sitting, by a now-defunct market. His father, an Ashkenazi antiques dealer and banker, owned stock in the city’s zoo, and as a child Benjamin would frequently visit the otters. My yellow creature waddles on the margins of page 69, above a line which reads “Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.” The psychiatrist calls my name, and I close the book to follow him to his office.

We leave for Gdańsk on a Sunday morning after pastries and goodbye kisses left on the cat’s tawny forehead. I am ripe with anxiety; there’s an issue with our train tickets. Someone working at the station tells us it’s fine, but when the conductor comes he insists we’ll need to disembark in Poznan and find new tickets. Charles and I play three games of Uno and I lose each one. I don’t know how I can keep losing—it’s a children’s game, and I’m cheating. Defeated and high-strung, I open my book to read. On page seventy-five, I find a small, yellow, six-legged carcass crushed into page 75. When the creature’s body falls out, it leaves behind a stain. I want to cry. I can’t. Instead I skip dinner, and in his honor, I let the warm and carnal sensation of hunger remind me of this insect’s life and my own thoughtlessness.

Benjamin died in 1940, choosing to overdose on morphine tablets rather than risk capture by Nazis in Catalonia. As we take the train from Germany into Poland, I am suddenly paralyzed by history, by memory, by feeling. Standing still in Berlin feels fine. Feeling the gentle rocking of the train, almost like a cradle, my feet feel like they are made of lead. Are these the same rails that carried the Jewish people of Berlin, the ones with the same crooked smiles and freckled noses as the people I know and love today, to their murder? Did the landscape look the same, at least for the ones lucky enough to see beyond tightly packed bodies and a dense cloud of fear? Were these aspens and the pines—which to me resemble the beautiful and lithe and postured women of Manhattan and California—the same ones seen by the heartbroken prisoners of the Nazi regime? Did their emaciated trunks stab at the skyline, a puncturing harbinger of the starvation and disease that was to come for these passengers? Charles says no, that the Nazi rail, the Breitspurbahn, was a failure and the tracks couldn’t possibly be the same. But the trees could be. 

When we cross into Poland, a new conductor boards the train. We try to explain our lack of seat reservations to the young woman who is now taking tickets; she shrugs and tells us it’s fine before we can finish. Charles asks if I want to play more Uno. I decline.

Gdańsk is beautiful and affordable, and on our first night we eat cold beetroot soup at a hipster vegan cafe that has Courtney Barnett playing on the speakers and colored pencils in a bowl on the table. I draw the cows we saw from the train in my little red notebook. 

Over breakfast the next morning, while discussing which museum we should visit, Charles and I try to name famous Polish-Americans. There’s Casimir Pulaski, like the Sufjan Stevens song, and Tadeusz Kościuszko, whose namesake bridge in Albany has almost resulted in more than one car accident as I try to sound out the pronunciation while driving. There’s Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist that assassinated William McKinley, and we joke that he was probably mostly trying to impress Emma Goldman, and conclude that she was certainly a woman worth courting. As our discussion shifts to presidential assassins, we realize we have somehow forgotten the name of the man who shot John F. Kennedy, but we both remember the name of the man who shot the man who shot John F. Kennedy. Jack Ruby—a midwestern nightclub owner with an eight-letter name, a Colt Cobra revolver, and a dachshund named Sheba—is there anything more American? Later, we learn that Jack Ruby was born to Orthodox Jewish, Polish-born parents. I don’t think that means much.

Most of what I know about Poland after the second world war, I learned in a college course on the Cold War. It was probably the only “traditional” history class I took, names, dates, treaties, battles, and alliances to memorize, and I did poorly in the class compared to the courses where we read Hegel and Foucault and talked in circles about historiography and subjectivism and narratives. When we arrived in Gdańsk, I knew little more than that Poland was one of the first countries to leave the Eastern Bloc, its population mobilized by the Solidarność industrial union and the Catholic church under the guidance of Pope John Paul II, the first and only Polish Pope.

“EUROPE STARTS HERE!” reads the sign on the front of the European Solidarity Centre, a museum and library dedicated to the history of Solidarność, which was born out of the shipyard then known as the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and led by industrial electrician and eventual Polish president Lech Wałęsa. A sign in the atrium informs us that we have entered the “Cradle of European Freedom.”

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“Maybe the best any of us can do is not to quit, play the hand we’ve been given, and accessorize the outfit we got.” —Carrie Bradshaw

Very few things feel rare on the internet. The digital world is a landfill of content, saturated with images, opinions, e-commerce, pornography, artistically neutered Bandcamp EPs, abandoned Geocities pages, Facebook albums of long-dead family pets. And yet, as our online (and arguably offline) selves stew in a dearth of mystique, Liz Franczak remains fashionably, refreshingly elusive. Franczak co-hosts the wildly popular podcast True Anon, but unlike many of her peers, she rarely appears in photos (but when she does, always looks effortlessly radiant) and generally dispatches Tweets no more than once a week. As a day-one True Anon listener, I’ve long been piqued by Franczak’s off-handed comments and asides on the podcast—throwaway references to Alexa Chung, Trey MacDougal, American Apparel—and I am beyond delighted to have had the pleasure to discuss the state of style today with the one and only Liz.

Liz! Hello and welcome! Thank you for popping into my corner of cyberspace! I’m sure many of my readers are familiar with your presence on True Anon, but for those that aren’t, I’d invite you to introduce yourself as you see fit.

Hello, hello! I’m Liz. I co-host a podcast called TrueAnon. I think our tagline is: a podcast about your enemies, made by your friends. We started the podcast almost four years ago, when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. When we began we were focusing on that case — he was killed not too long after we started — and since then we’ve done episodes on everything from Elon Musk to AI to the Troubled Teen industry and the history of NATO. The show is basically whatever we want it to be, which is certainly a luxury. 

The podcast itself largely focuses on politics, but some of your and your cohost’s interests make their way into the show. I always enjoy hearing your comments on basketball and style, though I’ll admit my only knowledge of the former is the uniforms of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic team… I remember reading somewhere, ages ago, that you used to work as a vintage buyer for NastyGal and I’ve been curious about your experience ever since. Is there anything you’d want to share about your experience with that role, either its actual labor demands or the culture of 2010s Indie #Girlbossery?

Well, there are sort of two sides to this right? There’s the ‘working in vintage’ part, and then there is the ‘working at a start-up’ part. I worked at a vintage store for about seven years before working at NG, it’s how I knew Sophia, and when she was looking to hire someone to manage the vintage business for the first time since she handled it, she called me. 

As far as ‘working in vintage’ or ‘being a vintage buyer’ — I think it’s a bit different than people might imagine it to be. I spent a lot of my time basically sifting through garbage, and I do mean literally garbage, like trash. Whether at people’s homes or, most often, at extremely sus warehouses in remote areas, digging through dumpsters full of clothing, pulling out shit and lugging huge bags of clothes around, messing up my back. It was pretty physically demanding but also mentally: deciding in a split second whether or not something will sell to someone and for what and how it could look on someone or how it will look on a website and styled on a model, etc etc. And having the confidence to make those choices extremely quickly and efficiently—just a very bizarre skill set to develop. 

And doing all that was in stark contrast to the, as you call it, 2010s Indie #Girlbossery, or just the plain old startup vibes at the company. I didn’t fully fit in when I arrived, I’ll put it that way. I was intimidated by a lot of the women there, because I don’t think they really got me, and I never really got them. I had never had an “office” job before, or what felt like a “real job” before, which I was insecure about. I was all self-taught, basically self-educated. And I felt a lot of pressure—mostly self-inflicted I think—to assimilate: I was self-conscious of my role there, because I felt like a real outsider, doing this weird vintage thing that was sort of removed from the rest of the team. I was embarrassed by my lack of experience with a corporate job, really any kind of professional training. So I always felt a bit removed from the whole enterprise. But I think a lot of people there, especially in the early years, in creative positions, felt that way. It was a real rag-tag team for a minute. 

All of it hit a fever pitch after the book and all the rest. I think everyone knows the story of the company. It was definitely a moment. But I’m still best friends with some of the girls I met there. 

That’s super interesting—I want to circle back to that idea of clothing as “stuff,” but before that… Your work with True Anon takes a very historical materialist approach to contemporary politics and rhetoric, which I think is great grounding for the show’s broader examination of histories of power. There is so much to say about the fashion and textile (and broader consumer goods) industry and its environmental and labor impact, but I want to center our conversation on the relationship between aesthetics and political economy. You’ve been on tour recently and seen a lot of the country. Of course, there is never a single dominating look but multiple simultaneous trends; what ideas or motifs are you seeing a lot of, both in big cities and more suburban environments? Where do you think these trends are coming from?

I don’t know if I saw much of anything on tour! It is true what touring bands say about never really knowing where you are. I honestly can’t tell if that was because of our schedule or because so much of America, when you are on tour, looks the same. I never saw anything of any city, it was very fly in/fly out, drive in/drive out. But the internet can be of great use here, less so at the level of micro trend forecasting and more so on the level of social interaction and behaviors. 

The most singular development in the 20th century in America is the dominance of the middle class — and yet we still go to great lengths to deny its existence and influence, even as the American middle class and its consumption tastes and patterns power the globe. I think when you live in a middle class dominated society (as in, who drives the trends, consumer preferences, tastes, and so on) consumer goods dominate any and all discussions of culture. We look to these moments to tell us something deeper, as if Ben Affleck making a movie about sneakers is some great social disclosure, or HBO’s latest offering has Something To Tell Us About _____ and so forth, all of it warranting a series of theses. Thems the breaks when you live in a consumer capitalist system, I guess. 

I think most people have a love/hate relationship with this. I certainly do! And not just creators but increasingly everyone, now that we all get paid in likes and subscribes and follows. I think we all subconsciously understand that to someone, somewhere, our attention has value, (or maybe we simply think it should, since we see other people’s attention certainly does) and we can withdraw that in protest or deploy it to show support. We are all sort of in the throes of this thing, which commands us to comment and create more content for other people to comment on, like one big social-cultural cottage industry. When you start to carve out the shape of this thing, it makes sense that all cultural production feels so recursive. How could it be otherwise? 

It can certainly feel like we’re all passengers on some commercial vessel riding the Trend Waves, which becomes much more stressful when the focus moves from clothes to our actual, physical bodies. Certain body types are seen as trendy (though never straying outside of certain parameters, like a degree of thinness), and it seems like the era of volume (BBLs, lip fillers, etc) is ending as waifishness and gauntness once again return. Why do you think this is? Is it just the passage of time, or is it tied to something more? 

There is always a pendulum swing, no? The excesses of one trend spark the reaction of the next. There’s obviously other dimensions to this, it isn’t that simple. Advancements in plastic surgery and non-surgical interventions shaped (no pun intended) the BBL/Filler craze, and the same of semaglutide treatments like Ozembic. Medspas are something like a $5.5B industry in America and growing. 

I’m sort of obsessed with the beauty industry—not just because I do love a good serum but because it really has grown so so so much in the past ten, fifteen years. And it’s projected to get even larger. There’s obviously a huge correlation between the rise of HD cameras and the proliferation of lasers, the glass skin trend and so on. Everything is just so smooth now. It’s like we can’t tolerate friction, which I think eerily mirrors a lot of our experience with and expectation of social media and interactive technology, and in general, our inability to handle things that make us feel uncomfortable. 

I don’t think there is just one easy answer for these shifts in taste, how much we are control of what we chase after and objectify, particularly when it comes to bodies and faces and especially now that everyone from toddlers to your random aunt are so thoroughly mediatized—all these changes feel much more fractal than linear, a bit more hectic, unpredictable and schizo. 

Shifting gears a bit: the voice of what is “stylish” (as well as what is “trashy” or “unchic”) comes from many places—fashion magazines, designers, celebrities, artists, influencers, the public, nostalgia… do you think that we’re headed towards a more democratized idea of taste, or do new channels of influence just obscure the mechanisms of the Culture Industry?

I think we live in an era of democratized taste. This was sort of Virgil [Abloh]’s whole thing, no? Everyone can make a brand, here you go. I think this is empowering and freeing to a lot of people. The avenues are there, to ‘make something happen’ if you will. Just look at the rise in small business owners! It’s not just the tax system that incentivizes it. 

I also think it results in the production of a lot of mediocre shit. How could it not? And more than that just tons more shit. We produce so much. Just so much, and so much useless shit, useless content, useless noise, useless everything. It’s sort of hard to think about, it makes me feel dizzy and a bit sick, the sheer amount of shit we are producing and uploading every day. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. 

Is there any way for fashion and style to be subversive, or does everything become recuperated into marketplace machinery?

I don’t know. One thing working in vintage taught me was to not be too precious about things. When you go through 200-300 things a day, you see a lot of stuff—some really, truly amazing things and a ton of garbage just the same. You see it come in and go out, come in and go out and you just sort of get used to not being super precious about things. 

At the same time, I love things. I love old things, old books, old houses, old clothes. I spent years in high school searching eBay for early McQueen and Galliano and convincing myself I was going to be a fashion designer. eBay was good back then (lol). I love tailored clothing and well made furniture and good food—I am very much a Libra rising/Taurus sun—but I am also extremely embarrassed by all of this and conflicted. 

On the one hand, my experience with vintage, I think, can lead to overconsumption, cycling through shit and being reckless, which I think I am guilty of. On the flip side though, I’m super conscious of this image of the collector—I guess now in the digital era we call people curators, a term I loathe. I don’t ever want to be some bourgeois hoarder of trinkets, living in a museum of my commodities, just me and my things. I really don’t want to be a person of things. I’m still trying to figure out how to split the difference. 

We’re producing more unneeded clothing, accessories, “stuff”, than ever, but their visual characteristics still feel tied to the material and economic world. The “hemline index,” which theorizes that hemlines get longer as unemployment and cost of living rise and get shorter when economic conditions stabilize, was introduced over one hundred years ago. Plenty has been said about the relationship between style movements like cottagecore and its almost Jeffersonian ideals, but few inquests have been made into the relationship between style and transforming economic systems themselves—finance capital, cryptocurrency, gig economies—how do you think that speculation and precarity have affected trends? What are the visuals of this new political economy?

I was in Nordstrom and they had one of those Ettore Stotsass mirrors, the pink squiggle one. I’m so tired of that fucking mirror. I feel like I’m staring into a TikTok when I look at it, like the mirror comes preloaded with a filter, so when I look at my reflection I’ll see some instagram version of me, I’ll see myself as a post. Like a fucking digital funhouse mirror freak show. 

It’s funny, Nordstrom had all this stuff — they had so much stuff! So much novelty everywhere! Things absolutely no one asked for like fuzzy purses with tattoo embroidery and jelly bean jacquemus purses made for posting. Just the most obvious dumb shit. But weirdly, no size runs of anything. And this isn’t just the case at Nordstrom, there’s a lot of places that just do not have the things you are looking for. Doesn’t matter if it is luxury or high-street or the grocery store or a car dealership. Like we don’t even have the commodities for us to buy. But there’s new, always new, always more and more new. 

A lot of people have written about/remarked on the ‘micro-trend’ phenomenon, especially during the post-Covid, TikTok frothy euphoria of 2020-2022. Danish Tulips as Dyson Airwraps and so on. Social media has increased the speed at which these things circulate so much and are consequently produced and just-in-time demanded. Truly the annihilation of space over time. 

I think that’s really interesting—I wrote about this phenomenon of plastic objets as signifiers-of-taste in an earlier piece about Instagram Store Core home decor—and I think the sort of aesthetic meaninglessness of consumer goods does really reflect the emptiness of a gig economy. Everything is perfunctory, disposable, replaceable, lacking in any specificity but just sort of gesturing at whatever amount of “personality” that will satiate consumer desires. At the risk of sounding like a hippie or a knock-off Marianne Williamson, there is something that feels… spiritually devoid? about adorning ourselves and our homes with items that are “stuff,” made to be bought and not used, before being “clothing” or “decor”. Commodity fetishism has this internal snowballing effect that comes from the aesthetic homogenization capital produces; as markets dictate exploitative labor practices and deregulation, commodities lose their specificity and charm and, really, their humanity--it then becomes so much easier to believe that these things simply come from nowhere and will go nowhere after they are disposed. I don’t know if there’s a direct question in here, but I wonder if this sense of spiritual impotence of style resonates with you.

I’m curious what you would include in ‘style’ here — when I think of our, like, consumer self, our consumer being, I think okay, yeah, it is the things we buy, but more often it’s the things we ‘like,’ the things we post, the jpegs and videos we catalog or (as they say) curate away. Everyone is so obsessed with vibes, the ambient feelings that we cull for ourselves. It’s the interactions we have online, the people we follow, the topics we engage in, the content we consume, the content we produce. It’s difficult to weed out what is and isn’t a ‘commodity’ proper here, which is to say, it’s all commodities all the way down. 

And when we talk about the anxieties of consumer capitalism, and especially this form of it, I think what we are constantly running up against is the impossible “problem” of identity, or the impossibility of finding a solution to it: we are sold these so-called avenues of self-discovery and self-formation, social media platforms as tools of creation and expression and discovery (most with a ‘buy it now’ button built in). But really what they offer is a narrowing rather than an expanding of the self—into something extremely narcissistic, reductive, compliant, and dependent on recognition and reassurance from anyone and everyone; a self that relies on constant feedback—through likes, comments, mentions, etc but also on reflections of ourselves and our consumer lifestyle choices (what we know call our identity), a sort of social security-blanket. But I think it just produces more anxiety, confusion, self-doubt and yeah, that feeling of ‘spiritual impotence’ as you say. 

Not to be corny but we all contain multitudes, which means contradictory and contestable forms, memories, ideas, etc., most of the time hidden even to ourselves. I know I keep bringing our conversation back to technology, but I think it’s really important. There’s no outside this stuff, especially when we are talking about the current and future prospects of consumption practices. Social media, predictive algos, all of it, stopped being voluntary a long time ago, and I’d argue it never really was. 

Clothing isn’t the only outlet for fashion and style trends—home design and graphic design are just as susceptible to trend cycles and aesthetics with fundamentally political undertones. Brad Tromel is always great at identifying and decoding these looks, but I’d love to get your read on it, too. Are we finally leaving the sans serif purgatory we’ve been trapped in? And what feeling is millennial and gen-z marketing trying to tap into aesthetically?

I think we left the Blank Sans Serif style behind a while ago! Now everything is very ornate. It’s Ghia x Flamingo produced sober tinned fish imported from portugal, exclusive to Gah Shoppy Shopperies. Tide goes in, tide goes out. I look forward to everyone getting back into mid-century furniture once they are tired of the British paint-flooded walls and Deco inflected maximal print interiors. 

I’m not sure gen-z marketing people know what they are trying to tap into aesthetically. Do they even talk to gen-z kids? Almost everything feels geared toward millennials, even when it isn’t meant to be, because it’s all millennials making the decisions. I don’t think this is even that unique to gen-z or millennials. Euphoria is a great example of this. It’s a tv show about gen-z, made by millennials to flatter millennials. It’s gen-z safari. That’s ok, but we don’t need to pretend it’s some revealed social truth. Unless we’ve got some more content to make. 

It definitely seems like advertising is completely geared towards millennials, even for products that are geared towards different demographics—though I must admit I am horribly protective over my tastes and hate to see the things I love trend and then manifest in mass-market imitations in H&M Home… But I digress. The messy-chic squiggly line moment does seem to reflect a desire for things that feel handmade and local, even when they’re not, and perhaps overall less “clean” than the sleek Helveticas of their predecessors. To me, it seems like a lot of people want this slowness and connection, even though that desire is often satisfied with mass-produced Just More Stuff. There is, perhaps, optimistic sweetness to this, one that I am often (by my own admission) too cynical to see. To conclude on a more upbeat note, I’d love to know if there’s anything you’re doing in your own life that is slow or inconveniently laborious or imperfect or antiquated that feels meaningful and real to you. :)

I’m sorry to be so downbeat! I don’t consider myself a negative person, but I think “appropriate cynicism” is probably apt. It’s always good to be realistic about things. 

I spend way too much of my time gardening and I love it. I recently planted a couple rose bushes — my mom was a big gardener, but I never really took to it until I moved into the place I’m at now. I’ve got all these guys planted, peonies, lavender, we have a big strawberry patch going, some dahlias that I’m waiting on, and I am currently on aphid duty every morning with the roses. I like to take my coffee outside and go around and check all my little guys. It’s very nice to get back into working with my hands.

Fast & Silly Questions:

Film(s)/television programs or characters with iconic style?

There’s too many to mention. I’m always cycling through. Right now I’m on a big “East Coast Summer” tip so I’m feeling some classic Joey Potter Capeside vibes. I should probably dig out my old copies of A&F Quarterly. 

The oldest thing in your closet that you still regularly wear?

Oldest as in age or oldest as in thing I’ve had the longest? I think my robe is the oldest? It’s a like, turn of the century/1910s silk kimono type thing, with painted flowers. It’s totally rotted but you gotta just wear these things until they shred off of you. I’m not sure about the thing I’ve had the longest. I have an old Balenciaga moto bag that I just can’t part with but also feel a bit RealReal-Zoomer wearing it—it’s really early, back when the line was called Le Dix. I was a Ghesquiere obsessed teen. 

Least favorite recent trend(s)?

Just because you can get that vintage purse from the 2000s doesn’t mean you should. 

Favorite style movement(s) or niches throughout history?

I really like moments where old decades are interpreting trends from previous decades. So like, those garish ugly prints from the 90s when they were doing the 60s. I mean, I hate them, but I think tracking down and identifying those moments is really fun. 1970s doing the 1930s is great.  

This is super niche but there’s this little enclave of resort brands from the early 1970s that I really love — they are called like, St. Tropez and things like that. It’s all very gauzy, glitzy, bohemian sets. The pants always fit great and the color palette is always lovely, like warm and dusty and sandy. It is not really my vibe or what I wear, but I love them. 

Which figure that you’ve covered on True Anon has been the best dressed?

Gotta be one of the housewives. Alex McCord, and Simon of course. 

Next big cosmetic surgery trend?

My understanding with the tech is that it’s really just all about Lasers. Lasers Lasers Lasers. I also think mini face lifts are going to get more popular now that people are turning against all the volume— I don’t know how I feel about that—lower lifts are becoming more popular with younger people, and influencer types are foregoing injectables for minimal surgeries (implants, lower lifts, blephs, etc).

Practicality or whimsy?

Practicality. 

You and your co-hosts sat in the courthouse to give day-by-day coverage of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. How do you dress for the courtroom? What was your favorite courtroom look? How do you dress for the courtside??

Omg as if I’ve ever sat or will ever sit courtside. That would be very cool and insane. I can’t imagine seeing a game that close. Whenever I go to a game, I feel like I’m watching a bunch of giants run around, I can’t imagine seeing someone like KD three feet in front of me. You forget how tall these guys are when you are just watching them on TV all the time. 

When we covered Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial it was December and also it was super strict Covid time, which put a damper on any kind of real outfit planning. In my head it was very Ally McBeal — David E. Kelly always “understood the assignment” (apologies). It was 1000% less glamorous than that but I do love a turtleneck and a sensible separate!

On this day two years ago,1 I was twenty years old, two weeks from graduating college, very anorexic, very blonde, and beaten up in broad daylight by a stranger outside of the library. It was fifty-two degrees outside and sunny. I ended up with bruising on my skin, muscles, and bones, and a very nasty concussion. Once the initial terror subsided, I was panicked with the thought that my concussion meant I would not be able to drink and revel with my peers in the days leading up to commencement.  

I cried when I got back to my car. I cried twenty minutes later, pulled over into a parking lot, when I was halfway home. I cried when I got home. I never told my mother. I cried one more time, three days later, when I was brushing my hair and a strand of my attacker’s hair fell onto my pillowcase. I promptly washed my sheets with the hottest water the washing machine would allow and then washed them again and then dried them twice, double-checking that the lint trap was emptied so I wouldn’t set the old, yellow, wooden house on fire.

It was a strange event. I was wearing a vintage square dancing dress. It was the afternoon, a Saturday, and I was portaging Ryann’s camera and tripod in one hand and a tote bag (probably stolen by some ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend) in another. I smiled a half-smile at a woman sitting on her stoop, I looked at the empty school playground across the street--I thought it was funny that even the gentle weather and promise of swing sets and hopscotch was not enough to lure children back onto school grounds on a Saturday. I smiled a half-smile at a man a few steps down the road. I passed by him, or at least I tried to, and then I was on the ground, wrists pinned down, freshly-bleached hair on the asphalt. Of course, I screamed and I screamed and I screamed, or maybe I just thought I did, begging him not to hurt me, asking him what I did to deserve this, pleading with him to tell me what he wanted. 

Moments or hours or days later, he stood up and offered his hand to help me up. And then he apologized.

He told me he thought my black metal tripod was a gun. I thought, why would I be carrying a gun out of the library? He told me he was very sorry. I thought, you can’t bring a gun into the library. They have metal detectors. He told me he thought I had a gun, and that he was very sorry, and that he didn’t mean to hurt me. I thought, this tripod is three feet long. Why would I be carrying a machine gun? That would be heavy. Probably too heavy to hold with one hand. He told me he had recently been released from prison, that it had really messed up his head, that he didn’t want to go back, that he was very sorry. I thought, why would I be carrying a gun out of the library? I asked if it was okay if I went home. He apologized again, said he didn’t want to go back to prison, and again I asked for permission to go home. He asked me not to call the cops, I said I wouldn’t, he asked me not to call the cops, I asked if I could go home. He said he was sorry, I said I wouldn’t call the cops. And then I said “I’m sorry. I’m going to go home now. I won’t call the cops. I’m sorry.”

The Troy Public Library is a beautiful building; the floor on the upper level is thick, frosted glass and the stair balusters are made of heavy iron. I don’t remember the man’s face, and I was embarrassed that I was coming off as rude when I was unable to make eye contact during our conversation. The memory is fuzzy and too-sharp at the same time, I felt my knees and elbows buzz and burn and while I can’t recall my attacker’s face I remember that there was a pink and orange glow in the background, a Dunkin Donuts at the end of the block, across the street and a bit to the right.

When I told the story to my friends and my professors--the concussion made it difficult to complete my final assignments--I always made sure to tell them I had been jumped. They would say, concerned, You were mugged? And I would say no, because when you get mugged you get robbed and I wasn’t robbed, just beat up, and thank goodness for that because I could not have afforded to replace the camera or my phone or my out-of-state drivers’ license.

I don’t like to use the word traumatic, because its usage is so omnipresent that it feels it has lost all meaning, but I suppose that’s the clinical term. It wasn’t the “most” traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me, probably because the seeming randomness of the attack lacked the sort of deep and existential weight of violence from people you know and trust, but the banality of it all was frightening in its own right. It was the afternoon, it was sunny, it was the fucking public library. There were people around, not huge crowds, but couples walking their dogs and the woman on her stoop, who did nothing except disappear. The feeling of total normality shattered at random is a panic perhaps plausible to anyone, but indescribable to those who have not experienced it firsthand. 

I know the man who attacked me understood this feeling. He felt it himself when he saw me.

I don’t know him. Maybe he was lying to me, but I don’t think so, given that he could have stolen all of my things or kept beating me until I was too bruised to speak, but he didn’t. 

Squirrelly is an adjective you don’t hear often. It’s one of the first words I’d use to describe myself. Nervous, erratic, glancing around a room wide-eyed, left leg always bouncing and always ready to dart out the door at the wrong sound or movement or nothing at all. Squirrelly is only a suffix away from my own last name, and perhaps I was fated from birth to be this way, either in last name or neurochemistry, possessing an obsessive-compulsive and mercurial nature that would leave me flitting between psychiatrists and therapists and psychologists and pharmacists and waiting rooms for the entirety of my adulthood. Sometimes I hide it well, sometimes I crumble and dissolve the way chunks of baking soda do when you pinch them between your fingertips. Almost exactly a year before my attack, three police officers arrived in my driveway a little before midnight, lights flashing and illuminating the cul-de-sac of shotgun houses. They wore their stab vests and those awful, ugly sports sunglasses and the youngest one stood in the front and kept his hand on his gun as he informed me they planned to put me in the back of their car and send me to the psychiatric hospital. I said I would not like to go. They said I had no choice in the matter. 

When I think of my attacker and myself and my involuntary hospitalization, I think of two groups of people. There are the people that are scared and confused and full of feelings far too big from words and there are the people that say you need to come with me and people are concerned and think their monotonous voices give them the authority to tell you what to do and where to go. 

 I think of people who are nervous and afraid, people who are convinced of an imminent threat and acting in a way they believe is a rational response to that risk. I think of people with wide, nervous eyes, shifting weight between their legs, apologizing and talking in circles, mumbling or crying. Sometimes an alarm goes off in my head, telling me I need to look behind me, just to be sure I know what’s there, just to quell my anxieties. I whip my head around and scan the bus or the grocery store or the park, dart my eyes quickly, and return to my forward gaze. Inevitably, I think I have seen something out-of-place, something worrisome in a shadow or at the edge of the frame, so I count to ten so as not to seem panicked and turn my head around again, and inevitably upon second glance I can find no evidence of any cause for concern. But if I thought I saw something the first time and upon checking it was gone, that means my memory is fallible, which means if I thought I didn’t see anything the second time it’s entirely possible that was when my perception was wrong. I try to wait until the count of ten before my third over-the-shoulder glance but I can only make it to five before I check again. There’s nothing there. 

I know I must look insane, always scanning, counting out loud as softly as I can. If I’m dressed well, with my hair brushed and my cologne emanating from my wrists and ankles, no one notices. But some days all showering means is seeing my own body, and stripping off some familiar layer of humanity and grime for a cleanliness is terrifying in its emptiness and inevitable violation. Getting dressed in proper clothes means deciding how I want people to look at me, which means remembering I have a body. When I am already feeling frenetic and self-conscious and squirrely I leave the house in the largest t-shirt I own, the smell of sweat and cheap men’s deodorant mixing as they waft off my body, I am wearing a tangled mess of damaged hair and a face of red rosacea bumps and a set of slimy and yellowed teeth where the bottom center-left tooth snaggles like an old tombstone. I check over my shoulder once, twice, three times and now people are staring, at least until I look at them, at which point they promptly avert their gazes. I want to tell them that I’m not crazy, just nervous sometimes, and that I’m not crazy, that there’s a logic to it all, you see because if I see something different the second time that means my memory is fallible, so it only makes sense to check again, so I’m not crazy, I just get nervous sometimes, and it’s actually quite funny because my last name is just a suffix away from the word squirrely, which isn’t an adjective you hear often, but does describe me quite well. But as much as I want to, I don’t say this or scream this because I know that the easiest way to get labeled insane is to tell people you are not insane. Unfortunately, the easiest way to feel insane is to know that other people think you are.

I worry that many people do not understand that strangers are real human beings. I think they know it intellectually, and they know that they should think it, and they especially know they have to say it. But I worry that people do not understand that the people they walk past or read about in the New York Post or watch on vertical iPhone videos are real people, people who can hear the blood pounding in their ears and people who can feel the weight of humidity when it hangs heavy in the air in August and people who know the strangely warm crawling of hunger when their stomachs are empty. I worry that many people don’t understand that others’ thoughts and feelings are loud and urgent and real, and that everyone’s rational needs and irrational thought patterns are filtered through an internal logic that makes perfect sense to whoever feels them. If you have needs or anxieties that go unaddressed, and then you are treated like you are crazy or insane for having needs and anxieties, you only feel crazier and more separate and more in need and more failed by the people around you. That’s the logical response. 

I did not enjoy being beaten. I would not like to be beaten again, by a stranger or otherwise. I would rather the whole ordeal never happened. And I think there’s something very important to say about how women in particular are treated as crazy for being vigilant or afraid of very real, persistent threats of violence. But to treat the comfort of those in positions of material and psychological security above the physical safety of the mentally ill and formerly incarcerated and homeless is irresponsible at best and socially violent at worst. People who are angry at or confused by a world that will actively and continually de-stabilize your life and then criminalize you for being unstable are called crazy. When they ask for recognition they are ignored, when they scream for it they are jailed or beaten or killed. 

When we call for sympathy and empowerment for those at the furthest margins of society, a chorus of voices will echo in response that a homeless person or a mentally ill person made them scared or uncomfortable. Do they consider the fear and discomfort the homeless and mentally ill face, including from them? Do they consider the fear of having the cops called on you, the discomfort of having your medical and psychological needs not met, the utter devastation of people refusing to look you in the eyes no matter what you do? This is not to say that verbal harassment is insignificant or unworth addressing, but instead to challenge the position of victimhood shouted by so many that is predicated on the immediate belief that their feelings are necessarily more important, or even real, than someone else’s. Would I have been just as likely to be beaten if my attacker was never incarcerated? 

There are innumerable ways in which I am incredibly privileged, socially and personally, and I am beyond grateful for the support systems in my life. But I also know that there is a schism between those who have power, who dictate the limits of acceptable behavior and punish that which does not align, and those who must live as subjects of control even as they are driven further and further away from the center by the structures that subjugate them. I know that no matter how well I dress or how hard I suppress my most divergent behaviors, there will always be a part of myself that is socially undesirable and waiting to be punished. And I know that even if I did not possess these traits, those who live on the margins have feelings and needs for recognition and security and compassion just as I do, and that alone should be enough for the public to demand their support. Maybe, one day, it will be.

Author’s note: the first essay I ever published on this blog was also about this moment in my life, specifically within the context of the tension between “women’s safety” and abolitionism. If you’d like to read it, you’ll find it here.

The biggest news: At the end of this month, I’ll be leaving my full-time job to focus on writing and researching. This is very scary! But very exciting! I’ve begun a fellowship with the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE), and as part of this fellowship I’ll be spending the next several months traveling, reading, and writing. I’ll be writing for this blog, so I’m incredibly excited to send out some thoughts from the (rail)road as I absorb many, many new places and ideas. In June, I’m leaving for Gdansk and Vilnius and Riga and Stockholm and Copenhagen (and a few places in between) and I can’t wait to send you all my little love notes as I travel. One can only hope for a very Before Sunrise / Eat, Pray, Love (have never seen/read it) / that one scene from La Chinoise experience. If you’re a full-time or part-time creative living in the EU and want to chat, let me know! I know I’ve been slacking a bit on my blogging duties as I try and balance an office job and writing, so it’s been a bit chaotic recently, but the calamity should be dying down quite soon (and making room for stranger, more fun calamities).

(This is all to say: if you work at a media outlet and are looking to commission something for your magazine/ periodical/ newspaper/ zine etc. etc. etc. don’t hesitate to reach out!)

Also, some recent publications!

“i hate the term biological clock, but lately I feel like it's been ticking” For , I finally answer the age old question: can women—and academics—ever really have it all?

dear mixed feelings,

I'm 29 and on track to becoming a professor. I'll be in school and subbing for a while. I want kids. I know I'll have them when I'm ready, but so much of me thinks that I'll be too old, or too busy. I used to hate the term biological clock, but lately I feel like it's really been ticking. How do I get over the fact I'm doing some work first to give my kids a steady future, while also worrying I'm running out of time?" — Wendy, she/her

and you can find “Influencing in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in The Dry River and in real life! If you’d like to hold a copy of this gorgeous periodical, you can buy a copy here :)

featuring Dove Clarke, Eliza McLamb, Alex Goldman

EXERPT:

Online personalities, even those that are only loose adaptations of their source material, are treated both as characters in imagined narratives and personal friends in our own lives. Debord writes about the decrease of political potency in the neoliberal world, how a lack of agency turns into a desire to be a part of a story of progress. But neoliberalism doesn’t only reduce our capacity for political potency, it also creates a dearth of intimacy (and what Lorde describes as the erotic). Finance capital puts geographic distance between people as speculative real estate markets gentrify and remove entire communities from cities, de-unionization efforts have destroyed public transportation in the United States, and increasingly, free time is devoured by precarious contract labor and demanding bosses. These personalities, especially when they speak to us in the form of podcasts or Instagram Lives or YouTube vlogs offer a sense of friendship and company, yes, but also something more basic: the sense of knowing someone else, and, in turn, the possibility that we ourselves may one day feel known. We want to participate in something meaningful, whether it be a relationship or an event, to assert that we exist, that things happen for a reason, that we have any power over the passage of time. To interact with a face of the zeitgeist is to do something, even though we intellectually understand that their personas are curated and filtered.

All three creators spoke about navigating the difference between their internal selves and their online personas, but they also all firmly insisted on expressing a sincere gratitude for their fans and the communities of people who engage with their work. In all of my conversations—with Goldman, with Dove, with McLamb, with my friends, with myself—there is always a sheepish admission of enjoyment that comes with the positive attention of internet notoriety. It’s a rather silly thing to be self-conscious about, the simple and very human fact that being appreciated feels nice, that people come to you for your thoughts and opinions about the world. It’s a tedious balance, being sensitive and observant and wanting to share those observations with the world, and also having an internal life that gets to remain private. We say the things we do because they feel important enough to be said and we feel that the things that are important enough to be said are important enough to be heard.

Okay, that’s all for now! Thank you all for being patient with me as I try and balance everything my heart pulls me to (and as I try to invent a 25th hour in the day)…! Springtime wishes, sending all the best, xoxo,

Charlie <3

When we go to the bakery, I get an extra piece of bread to feed to the magpies. It feels childish to empathize so deeply with birds, believe them to be these strange and all-knowing and beautiful creatures, but it feels so inhuman to not. There are magpies in America, but they don’t fill the cities like they do in London and Berlin; these big, smart birds who hop across the grass and let their iridescent feathers catch the sunlight, but only at just the right hours of day. There are hooded crows, too, who caw just like you’d imagine from Edgar Allen Poe poems and black and white movies. I talk to them, say hello, ask where they’re going. It’s nice to talk without feeling like you’re fated to be misunderstood, even if just because they can’t understand you at all. There are bright green finches and woodpeckers whose colors are only rivaled by the electrically neon beaks of the blackbirds and starlings. Then, there are the pigeons.

There are rock doves and wood pigeons in Berlin, never any bigger than a large cup of coffee, their flapping and cooing blending with distant streetcar sounds and barking dogs. I quit my job last week, and I know that I’ll learn that I am far too uninteresting to sustain myself as a freelance writer, and I don’t know if that will give me bittersweet closure or just frenetic fragility compared to the perpetual what-ifs of inaction. When I was eight or nine years old, we took a field trip to the Maine Audubon. We walked around the tall marsh grasses, pants tucked into socks to prevent tick bites, and smelled low tide and stared at the cattails which we were not allowed to touch, much less pull apart their densely-packed fibers as our small hands yearned to do. When we sat, cross-legged, inside, a woman brought out a taxidermied bird and explained that it was called a passenger pigeon. They’re extinct now, she told us, but the skies used to turn black as they’d fly in massive swarms. There were billions of passenger pigeons across the United States in the late nineteenth century, they had lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years, shaping the landscape by planting the once-dominant white oak trees that have since been replaced by red oaks. They slept in piles, right on top of each other with their beaks buried in their breasts, in such great numbers that tree branches would often snap under the weight of their bodies. 

A slow decline became a mass slaughter of the passenger pigeon, beginning in the 1870s. A single shotgun blast could kill sixty birds. Hunters shot their nests, burned sulfur to draw them out of their homes, gave them alcohol-soaked grains to make them disoriented, and clear-cut forests to displace them. The final wild passenger pigeon died in Ohio in 1900. A decade and a half later, the last, lonely passenger pigeon would die in Cincinnati at almost thirty years old. Her name was Martha.

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