Blog #23: 28 IS NOT A REAL AGE
Really great month to be in New York City. A lot of ideas about what it takes to be a New Yorker have re-entered cultural conversation which is annoying. Are you a New Yorker once you’ve paid taxes here for 5 years? 10? Is it having lived here for 10 years? Longer? Is it dickriding to be excited about the Knicks? Can you be a transplant Knicks fan? At a certain point I reach a point of exhaustion where it’s, like, if you have that many questions you’re not from here. If there’s anything I’ve learned being here for 10 years (the first 4 began at NYU, 1 and a half at Columbia, and then 4 and a half as an adult-adult) is that people from NYC are unconcerned at a certain point. I cannot be a true New Yorker not just because I wasn’t born here and haven’t spent the majority of my life here but because I have a bit too much of a capacity for shame for shit that New Yorkers do not. Not the Larry David kind of embarrassment, but true shame. I talked to my dad on the phone about this because it’s father’s day and also because he’s my best friend and he said he was going to think about shame for a bit. Will be reporting back; he’s a professional shrink so his take is gonna be good.
Shame…I’ve battled it my whole life and choose to protect from it with armor (clothing). I realized this while surrendering to Dorothy at Surrender Dorothy yesterday. I did a closet sale with some writing friends: Nicolaia Rips, Whitney Mallett, and Tanya Bush whom I already hang with, Mikaela Dery and Danya Issawi whose work I read a lot of and now whom I get to say I hung out with on a nice Saturday. We also did a reading with the theme “closet eulogies.” Nicolaia led the organizing because she’s a Leo and a natural people-putter-togetherer. So, we’re at this closet sale peddling our wares, and I’m looking at my rack of Japanese streetwear typically worn by men and select rare Junya and cooked Comme and Yohji trousers and I’m thinking: man, do I manufacture this. And I mean, we all manufacture the way we dress; there’s all the mumbo jumbo about “the natural body” when technically if you shower and brush your teeth and put on deodorant you’re technically unnatural because you’re not in your natural state of stank. And on this rack is like a forced examination of my battle-tested armor. Truth: I feel most powerful when I am in some style of dress that confuses people. Or when my tits and ass look really good but I prefer to only release the kraken (my natural body shape) when I’m not alone because I honestly hate being looked at as an object unless I’m with other objects (friends). But truth: I feel best when I can dress to create discomfort from others, and not the I-feel-funny-below-the-belt kind. That’s manufactured. The manufacturing is the fun part because it proves personality, as it is communicated outwardly, is never fixed. Something will be fly because I did it; how I do it can always change. But there will always be shame and fear of shame, so there will always be a need to manufacture. We human beings never stop being. All us girls made some money and some memories and some new friends. Danya got us all coke zeros because we all wanted one after seeing this girl walk in with one in hand, we took a boomerang cheersing.
I used to be afraid of appearing basic until I remembered what living in New York taught me, which is that it does not matter, like, at all. When I dyed my eyebrows back, I worried for one split second that I’d have to go full psycho with the wardrobe for my personality to make any kind of narrative sense, and then I remembered that I am in fact not a character but a person, and then I decided to quiet that part of my ego down and just wear the Addison Rae jeans and the white shirt (mine is Plain Jane btw, I will be purchasing the remaining sleeve length options because I wear white shirts now) and the Lanvin flats. When I talk to my parents about it they say I’m just older now which is depressing and a bit defeating because it makes me feel like my rambunctiousness is only limited to a time when I was too young to know better, then defining “knowing better” as being more boring, be it in dress or outward behavior. I have a theory that people say Prozac is evil not because it kills your creativity, but that it makes you think you’re just growing up while it just weakens your criticality, making you more susceptible to happy people ideas like products and healthy living and more products. This isn’t a new thought, but I feel it’s more pervasive than Wurtzel’s loose-critique in Prozac Nation, now that therapy terms find themselves in casual gossip, and the very air we breathe hums with advertisements. It’s easier to be thrilled to do normal shit (that almost always involves spending money) when you’re not dissecting or ritualizing every action (me). Being normal; not interesting but fine for now I guess. Looking normal…manufacturing the normal through dress….I feel like I’ve lost my discerning eye for good armor. The spice for life will come back soon once I have “go shopping” money.
I saw I Love Boosters with Kima last month. And like, good. I thought it was really good leaving the theater, what with the dialectical materialism narrative moments and the worker solidarity and the Keke-Taylour-Naomie trio of it all. Love that Poppy Liu’s character always pronounced “clothes” as “cloth-ess.” Loved the practical effects, loved the overall message. The optimistic post-“yay look we destroyed the evil white fashion show”-moment is something that I think if any other director did, I’d find corny and maybe even vomit inducing. But I think it’s because Boots Riley really does practice what he preaches, as in he is a self-titled communist. Didn’t love the pacing of the part with the skin suits and Don Cheadle while the practical effects there were amazing too.
My biggest gripe is the styling in the movie. Which is hard because Sorry To Bother You went stupid hard stylistically, upon rewatch. I get that Riley was trying to make a critique on how department stores mine ideas from Black women, pass them off as their own, and then paint them out to be uneducated and gawdy for…doing the shit they originated. It’s a method of disenfranchisement, for sure. And I’ve seen it in action! But the whole monochrome thing, how each Metro fashions was a different color on the inside, the styling of Will Poulter’s fucked up store manager character, that one montage where Corvette, Mariah, Sade and Jianhu wear like 10 different outfits of increasing degree of extreme as disguises to portal all the Metro clothes back to China…ugly. And not the on-purpose ugly, almost the kind of ugly that takes you out of the plot. It felt just dated and out of touch, rather than maximalist and loud and adorned in my opinion. I don’t think Shirley Kurata did a bad job per se, she’s one of the most in demand costume designers for a reason; there just was a bit of disconnect between the raver-inspiration and the narrative to me. Even if the movie were animated, I don’t think it would have worked. And that’s really my central problem with Boosters: it felt like a director trying to speak on something he didn’t really know about. Riley may know idea theft, dialectical materialism, worker solidarity, and the like; but he does not know what it looks like, or how to manufacture a style that can accurately depict that message. His vision of what it looks like, while made intentionally extreme in the more satire moments of the film, feels like to me what someone who refuses to engage with fashion because it’s fascist thinks fashion is, rather than something an audience member could see parallel to real life. To make it real there should have been some barrel leg jeans. Some fugly hyperspecific trend awareness. That montage moment of the outfits could have been so topical they read as extreme, like the Lakeith fucked-her-to-death scene, chronically vaping coworker at Metro fashions. Instead, Riley used the clothing as an echo of his own personal styling (I mean…look at the similarities between his wardrobe and what he and Kurata created for the movie and they are very similar).
Granted, the point of the movie wasn’t to be true to life, but Riley found a way to meet people where they’re at with dialectical materialism, so I mean…he could have done the same with the styling, but he didn’t. Honestly, that’s where I come around to loving the movie as in respecting the hell out of it, while visually it’s not my taste. My favorite thing about Boots Riley as a director and a Twitter presence is that he actually does not give a fuck what you think, he will not compromise, and he will find a way to do exactly what he wants while not compromising on his ideals. That is punk. It happens to not look the way I want it to, but hey; his movie. He accomplished exactly what he wanted to and was unyielding in it, and I think that’s the kind of spirit more people should have making movies.
I also went to a screening-Q&A of By Hook or By Crook (2002) at Anthology with Harry earlier this month, and found a new favorite movie. I can’t spoil it at all because it’s actually a must-watch in my opinion—Harry Dodge, the actor who played Valentine, was talking about not being an actor but delivered one of the more baller emotional performances I’ve ever seen. Like ever. Logline: the movie is a buddy comedy between a handsome down-on-her-luck butch Shy (Silas Howard) and eccentric masc Valentine on their journey to secure a bag and find Val’s birth mother, finding deep best friendship on the journey along the way. The movie is scrappy, it’s produced and cast and staffed by friends, during the time when you could do that with much more ease than today (you still can do that today it’s just…hard because look at the economy). The Q&A made me want to work backwards and talk about Boosters because one audience member asked them about what movies give them hope, and the closest they got was Boosters in that Boots Riley produced something with the same mentality, even if not the same process, as them. Harry and I talked about Boosters on the way to our new East Village spot and agreed that we don’t like it as much as we respect it, that we want more movies like it that maybe look different, and that By Hook or By Crook is in top-movies territory. I see a lot of similarities in his films and this one, which is honestly beautiful.
On my list: I will see Toy Story 5. I will Manufacture so well. I will NOT dye my hair or do anything super weird to it either. Think about why your late 20s suck so bad and why people in their late 20s suck SO bad.
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