100: ambrosial ascent

THIS WEEK: 3 years, 100 letters, a million kisses, and A SPECIAL GUEST

COMMUNITY BOARD

Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)

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Welcome to the 100th dispatch of Consumption Report, the one thing that assures me that I still have a personality! Sometimes when people compliment me about the newsletter, I feel like a three-headed monster (nothing new!), but I am also incredibly delighted for the attention. I had a conversation recently with RAFTMs Hannah Ziegler and Jess Kasiama about writing for yourself and writing for others, and I brattily was like, “Well I’m never writing for myself!” As I’ve suggested before, writing this newsletter is like leaving voicemails in the middle of the night: a midnight confessional, a secret love note, an opening for infinite correspondences. Thank you all for being on the receiving end and for engaging. A million forehead kisses forever!

I actually hadn’t thought to do anything to commemorate what is certifiably a milestone but the stars…they do align. And so, a few weeks ago, fate had it to put me in a room with someone who is not just important to the existence of this newsletter, but also contributed to the shaping of the personality that makes this joint go around. After we met, I emailed them and asked if they’d make an appearance in the ‘sletter. To celebrate this 100th post milestone, a dispatch from a special guest:

Tavi Gevinson is a writer, editor, and actress. If my older sister introduced me to fashion and Tumblr, Tavi shaped the places online I could escape into and thrive; she cultivated the space for shaping your own complex/vibrant/multifaceted taste. Through her blog, Style Rookie, and then as editor of RookieMag (Rookie forever and ever and ever), she showed me that I didn’t have to disavow mass culture delights to be taken seriously. She wrote with equal passion about Taylor Swift and David Bowie, introduced a generation of teens to Chris Kraus and Hilton Als, and produced writing that had a distinct voice and unique spirit, a secret language that we could all be a part of. I am honored and delighted and thrilled that she agreed to share her consumption report this week. Here’s Tavi:

photo by shriya samavai from tavi’s infinity diaries series, which is essentially my bible

The first book I finish in a long time is Erasure by Percival Everett. I admire it so much. Especially how the protagonist’s scraps of writing attempts show up throughout. The book includes most of a novel that he writes and publishes—an intended satire of black stereotypes that is widely read in earnest and becomes a bestseller instead—and so I also had the unique reading experience of reading a bad, racist book inside of a good one. When the bad book, My Pafology, started, I felt like, I get the satire, I just wanna go back to the book-book, I don’t want to read this!!! Then, because My Pafology is so readable (broad, plotty) and I was kind of speed-reading, I kept catching my brain actually visualizing it, and so perhaps buying into it. Then I’d be disturbed by how readily I’d accepted its absurd stereotypes or reacted like a dummy movie audience to extreme plot machinations–awww, noooo, etc. I also enjoyed how My Pafology includes brief echoes of observations the Erasure protagonist has made. I liked the feeling of watching his more genuine ideas and/or his subconscious form this impulsive document. So I guess that is my review of My Pafology, which is then retitled Fuck.

I read Maya Binyam’s excellent new profile of Everett and love how she echoes his work’s concerns in her handling of a magazine profile’s goal of meaning-making. The last scene is especially rewarding—it’s somehow shocking when he speaks for more than two sentences at a time. (To do: delete entire paper trail and be less knowable……….this was also a pleasurable part of seeing Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s play about Mary Todd Lincoln—I couldn’t parasocially read Cole’s life into any aspect of it because I have not sought out biographical information about them despite being an enormous fan. To be just an artist, to let your work speak for itself–imagine!!!! My other main thought about this show, other than pure joy, was that Mary Todd/Cole was giving the same energy as a child forcing their parents’ friends to watch them sing–while being wildly talented. Quite a combo!)

On the subway I am accosted by ads for a skincare brand called “THE1nKeYLIST.” How do they expect people to pronounce that? Pretend it’s a brand!!!!!

I see a film print of The Heartbreak Kid at the Museum of the Moving Image. This movie makes me so happy, it’s like I’m four and it’s Moana. It’s never streaming but you can watch it on YouTube. My boyfriend’s take is that it can be watched as Elaine May’s response to The Graduate (whether or not this checks out with Nichols and May lore)—The Heartbreak Kid knows that Benjamin Braddock is really a buffoon. Somehow this movie dignifies its characters even when it knows they’re being ridiculous. I would like to be as alive as Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin in this movie at any point in my time on earth.

Days later I pick back up The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje’s book of interviews with the film editor Walter Murch. I first got it because Autumn de Wilde told me it would help with editing of all kinds; I have dipped in and out over the years. Now I am finding it to be a godsend. There are so many books about writing but there aren't many books about editing writing, or at least, I don’t retain the parts about editing that the writing books cover. The two are so fluid really, and I am trying to get myself to see editing not as some kind of afterthought or like, Authority coming in to rein in and fix my unruly writing, but as an opportunity to experience a real change, a reveal, in myself and my project. I find it reassuring that everyone has to navigate a lot of unusable material. I don’t need to judge it as though the thing that needs to be edited is Me.

I am especially grateful for a mention of Robert Bresson’s idea that a film is born three times—in the writing, then shooting, then editing. Let’s say there’s a fourth—the audience's experience—which is actually so varied and quantum that the film is really born like a million times. It's really hard for me to accept that this is what is supposed to happen–to let people have their own experiences of your work. I should say I've also been listening very slowly to the Big Magic audiobook, which is very calming and addresses many of my neuroses; I feel like Elizabeth Gilbert's voice is brainwashing me to be more brave and relaxed.

I listen to new offerings from pop girlies. I think liking pop music requires enjoying the statement-making of it all, like how the joy of watching baseball is really in watching the manager make the calls (I’m told), or how part of watching reality TV is watching the moves people make as brands, e.g. Lala Kent softening because she got too much blowback for being so harsh on Sandoval, or as employees of the show, e.g. the defense that causing drama can get you a raise the next season. Sometimes this is what I love about pop music and sometimes I find it distracting.

I looooooove Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, which follows a production assistant who has to drive around and audition injured workers for a big company’s occupational safety video. I think it’s hard to make explicitly political art that isn’t didactic or sentimental and therefore annoying. Maybe part of what made this one exciting (along with the performances and the last scene!!!) is that a) you aren’t being preached to by a studio in that we know better way, b) the main character is appropriately tactless and bitter rather than virtuous, and c) it views anger as an opening to ingenuity. The main character entertains herself as a coping mechanism for working 16-hour days. There is also a collagey, zine-like energy to the movie’s use of quotations and another Romanian film, Angela Goes On. It reminded me of how first discovering zines, feminist blogs and critical theory felt like receiving a map, not like I was being lectured, even though they did teach, I did learn.

At the airport, I buy a copy of Us Weekly. A journey through the sky needs ambrosia, after all! I am drawn in by a headline promising my favorite topic in publicity: privacy. “AT MY CORE, I’M A MID-WESTERNER,” says “The Real Paul Rudd,” but Us itself is not yet convinced: “Is the notoriously private star actually as nice as he seems?” Only one way to find out!

editor’s note: i’m actually frightened by this image

Inside, I discover how this “A-List Everyman” balances family with career. I consider writing an adaptation of the 15th-century morality play Everyman where the protagonist is a movie star and the pilgrimage is to the perfect house upstate. On this eternal question of being chained to the game vs. cottagecore (or just stoned at the nail salon), Lily Allen is more frank: “I mean, I love them, and they complete me, but in terms of, like, you know, pop stardom, [they] totally ruined it.” Below: On how having kids ended her music career. Above: A smiling Allen, blissfully unaware that a quote that might be endearing on a podcast will appear without context in the less forgiving tabloid. Something something gender, double standards. The rest of the magazine is gleeful and deranging. It reads like fan fiction, conspiracy theories and ad copy written by an office of fraggles. I begin my ascent…

Thanks for reading! You can find Tavi, very rarely, on Instagram and more likely on your screens, most recently in Shortcomings (dir. Randall Park). Coming soon…not my Hustlers rewatch (yet) but some thoughts on La Chimera, which has exploded my brain.

Past guests: Harry Cepka - Emma Cohen - Kyle Curry - Rachel Davies - Aisha Gelb - Tia Glista - Hunter Harris - Jessica Kasiama - Sonja Katanic - Blake Mancini - CaseyMQ - Terry Nguyen - Tiana Reid - Winnie Wang - Tony Zelenka - Hannah Ziegler