130: high art
THIS WEEK: A guest dispatch from Chelsea Rozansky on everything from Walter Benjamin on novels to David Lynch
COMMUNITY BOARD
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RAFTM Rachel Davies, of
, has been working tirelessly over the last few weeks to assist in fundraising efforts for those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles. Not only did they put together an incredibly useful list of GoFundMes you can donate to, they’ve also organized a fundraiser fair to further help those who haven’t reached their fundraising goals. Here’s what you need to know:NY to LA is a fundraiser fair for L.A. wildfire victims that will take place at Common Mollies in Brooklyn, New York on February 2, 2025, from 12pm to 5pm. Profits will go directly to verified GoFundMe fundraisers for people who’ve lost their homes in the L.A. wildfires.
In person, a variety of artworks, baked goods, and clothing will be on sale. New clothing from Samantha Pleet and Lisa Says Gah will be available, plus curated vintage. There will also be new books donated by Triangle House Literary, art prints by numerous New York–based artists, and baked goods from The Dusky Kitchen among other bakers.
There’ll also be an online auction that runs from February 2nd to February 12th. You can stay up-to-date on the fundraiser by following the NY to LA Instagram. Hope you can all contribute/participate in some way!1
Today’s dispatch is a very special guest essay from my friend Chelsea Rozansky, who went above and beyond to write an engaging and vulnerable and smart essay for you all. This is a long one that deserves to be savored. I first met Chelsea several years ago when we both worked together at a store in Toronto. We got to know each other much better this past summer when Chelsea was in New York. As you’ll soon see, Chelsea is a sharp and challenging and well-read interlocutor. In conversation, she doesn’t let you get away with anything—no throwaway comments!—and she’s also incredibly generous so that talking to her is both demanding and a total thrill. I’m really glad to have her share this piece of writing on Consumption Report. And if you like this (not sure how you won’t), Chelsea just completed a collection of essays and short stories, Children of That Thing. For the agents and editors reading this, get in touch! Now, here’s Chelsea:
You’ll have to forgive me. Originally I had the best laid plans of keeping diligent track of it all and logging the intake (something I have a predispositional aversion to, because I hate admin, which is why I’m opposed to Letterboxd). But when Akosua asked for my dispatch, I was having one of those all-at-once periods, having just gotten back to MTL after a joyful and dense NYC trip, and immediately dove into a hole, writing on a deadline. I found myself obsessing over artworks outside the timeframe she gave me, letting thoughts bleed, dreaming epically though sleeping little, plucking out and projecting the same ideas into everything. Besides, everything is all connected anyway. Writing this list felt a lot like setting out to make an omelet and it inevitably turning into a scramble. This is also a long way of saying I watched a few things I was thinking about before Akosua texted me, and didn’t want to limit myself to the designated week.
I struggle with the use of the word “consumption” as shorthand for media-consumption, and am finding myself hesitant to use it here—I love you, Akosua—because its connotations are eating and using, and I think something crucial is at risk when we think about our engagement with art this way, when we level all to digestible material. For this reason, I also don’t use the word “content”, which collapses all distinction between works, nor “creative” as a noun, which levels out capitalists and artists, elevating capitalists and reducing artists. I had a professor back in the day who began a class asking us what we thought the word “information” means. We all said it had something to do with knowledge, but this is already an interpretation. Information actually just means “stuff”.
As the World Turns Slow, DJ Screw (//How To Tell When We Will Die//Do Everything in The Dark//The Storyteller//Song of Salvation//Love Will Find a Way//Baldwin in Paris)
I’ve been obsessively listening to the DJ Screw mix As The World Turns Slow since mid-November, which is not an official Screw album, but one of the some-fucking-thousand compilations released posthumously (I feel like I have to say this in case real fans get annoyed about misattribution). I mean obsessively, like every day. In Johanna Hedva’s introduction to her fantastic essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die (2024), she recounts distinguishing metal’s many subgenres with a friend. She writes, “I found myself describing my two favourite kinds, ‘Death is fast, and doom is slow.’ Of course, this is not only true about metal.”
She’s talking about life, but I thought of this album when I read that. I think there’s a lot of overlap between doom metal and chopped and screwed. I was listening to the mix for a long time before considering its title, and realizing it was poetry. I think it suddenly jumped out at the realization that we’re living in an auspicious moment. The world is changing. And it's fast and slow. My friend, poet and fashion designer, Zӧe Rivard, once said to me, “life is like: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, EVERYTHING.” It’s surreal to realize that you’re living through a moment in time. It feels really trippy, and slinking around Toronto, MTL and NYC to this mix feels appropriate. I did a little research/procrastination for this piece and came across an obit for DJ Screw called “The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw”. It's a stupid, albeit informative, piece of music journalism, but the title felt right on.
Yeah, the slow, heavy lethargic feeling—the irritating dream-lag sensation where you want to run but the atmosphere’s too dense—applies easily. Chopping and screwing is manipulating time. Drugs, too, are about manipulating reality. Manipulating time. People are always reading codeine into the act of making, so the act of listening to, his music. I guess that's because that's what Screw, at age 29, died of, and the storyteller, as Walter Benjamin famously writes, borrows his authority from death. So, here is an example of life being slow, then fast. Nothing, nothing, nothing, EVERYTHING. I don’t think it's necessarily reductive to associate an artist with the drugs that prematurely killed them. I just think it's part of legacy’s peculiar tragedy. Think of Benjamin’s turning the sentence, “A man who dies at the age of thirty-five is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five,” to “A man who died [my italics] at thirty five will appear to remembrance [sic] at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” I imagine that, in this impulse to pathologize, to project a coming death onto our immediate engagement with art, we are reading our own fate into the fates of our heroes, as Benjamin writes of the reader of a novel:
The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
I’m excited by this realization that chopped and screwed is manipulating time because I’ve been fixated for a while about this idea of getting to The Moment, and how art can represent that: on one hand, it can document time, and on another, it can represent the struggle of being present in time, in the clash between form and content, like a video buffering, or a lag in sound. Because it’s too much to get into here, I’m copy-and-pasting an email exchange with my friend Joe Pepper, one of the most astute critics I know (also a vintage book reseller. Get on the vanguard of this one and follow Red Books right now, if only for the rare pleasure of reading some of his thoughts, and/or visit Joe’s collection at Jaspa Shop in Toronto. When cool guys get together, there’s no telling what’ll stop them).
Years ago, Joe and I were discussing the importance and difficulty of saying what you mean when the opportunity arises. He said “opportunities are rare. You have to be brave.” I try so hard to live by this, Joe, but I am so afraid. I swerve, when it matters. That’s part of the draw to make art. It's an après-coup.
Like no time had passed, and since friendship operates in a mystical timeframe confirmed by the borders of each other, Joe emailed me in reference to that conversation of years prior, which—because of the confluence of the shared idea which lives static in the space between besties, ready to be tapped into at all times—needed no introduction:
I've been thinking about how bravery and telling the truth requires a bit of speed, people tend to refer to the "lightning flashes" of conscience speaking inside of them but I'd like to go beyond the frame of the metaphor and add the charged ground inside where the charges rise from, from the layer of the gut the charges meet in the sky and strike if you let yourself (that's how you blow the lid btw) and you'd better because if you don't let it rise it goes down and the earth becomes overcharged and infertile and it can take years to recover....
My response (again, forgive me. I’m writing like this because I’m too lazy and too overwhelmed to re-write):
Well, I was thinking about what you said about bravery and speed, and I emphatically agree. For the past year I’ve been workshopping a theory about The Moment. Basically, my idea is that Being is all about getting to The Moment, by which I mean synching up with Right Now (when people talk about striving towards authenticity, presence, Being w a capital B, Enlightenment, I actually think that this is what they are striving towards. My thinking is that so much of our defences, trauma responses, and even just regular out-of-tunements re: love and connection are these elements that move us further from the moment. For instance, I freeze. Or disassociate. It slows me down. Or: I’m nervous so I speak a mile a minute, it speeds me up. The person across from me is doing some version of the same, and we fall more and more out of sync, further and further from the moment. Or: we process things at different speeds. Same thing. So we gotta get to The Moment. Gotta be like clocks tuned to Time. It’s hard, but I think all the variants of self-work are about being able to get there. I think cinema can explore this. At least, I plan to explore this in film.
It’s interesting to think about people’s internal time-zones, and how you have to sync with them if you want to be together, or just be together. A few times in the past couple years, I’ve found myself lugging my body around an airport, severely jet-lagged and sleep deprived. There, my whole body enters a state of alarm about the very fact that it is awake. This is wrong, it feels. All of a sudden, I’ll be thrown back into my relationship with my ex-bf, because I lived in that airport state when dating him. We had what my therapist politely referred to as “a toxic co-enabling dynamic”. He lived fast. I did too, I’m not absolving myself, but not fast enough, and it often felt like all the coke I was fucking funneling at all times was just a matter of getting into his time zone, getting onto his level, so that we could meet. Sometimes when you break up with someone, you realize that you have been tuning yourself to another like clockwork, and all of a sudden you’re thrown into a new space and time. You think you’re attracted to spontaneity, but addiction, as it turns out, is the most predictable thing in the world. You can set your clock to it. Obviously what I’m talking about is pretty codependent. But I think what I’m getting at are two types of attunement: one is timing yourself to another person, a form of doom, and the other is sharing time with them, a form of flow.
Art also requires you to pace yourself to it, to get into the plane of existence it's operating in, to get on its level. That’s why speed matters so much. In Gary Indiana’s introduction to Do Everything In The Dark (2001), which I’ve also been obsessed with since reading around the same time that I started listening to Screw’s mix, he writes: “I also wanted to write a novel in which the two Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, were at work simultaneously, chronos being linear, consecutive, and irreversible, while kairos, ‘the moment in which things happen,’ offers people an opportunity to employ time as a flexible medium—to write books, paint pictures, fall in love, or walk away from unfavourable situations.” From the perspective of remembrance, we can read the speed of death and the slowness of doom simultaneously, and see these two forms of time working in tandem: the long, irreversible unfolding and the moment when things happen. In Indiana’s novel, we get these quick flare ups (Death’s perspective), a constellation of vignettes, sometimes petty and sometimes desperate, of people who come and go, and the morose meditations on death by the novel’s narrator (Doom’s perspective), a proxy for Indiana himself, made all the more poignant by Indiana’s recent death (RIP). Inside the prism of Indiana’s storyteller (written while depressed, which slows you down) these two forces—the future-facing of forthcoming, impending, inevitability; and the looking-back of remembrance, the narrator’s borrowed authority—rush up to meet each other. Time collapses as he anticipates his own death, and writes back from death’s perspective, compounded now by Death’s perspective. As for us, we read some version of our own fate in the dead novelist. We can, if only peripherally, anticipate our own demise.
I had my first date with Ronaq on Christmas Eve. Going to a bar to write on Christmas Eve is a private tradition of mine. I like being alone in the world when everyone else is inside. It makes me feel giddy, like I’m trespassing, like I’m operating on stolen time. And I feel solidarity with the other loners and drifters. Anyway it was good timing that he was a Christmas loner too. I was listening to the Screw album while walking to the bar. When I got there, Ronaq told me that in Hindi, kaal means time and it also means the god of death. There’s a saying, “Kaal kills everything.”
Before, on the train to NYC, I listened to the Death-Doom album Song of Salvation (2022) by Dream Unending. Holy shit, it’s so fucking good. I don’t know much about metal and don’t pretend to. But holy shit. It’s so fucking good. The first time I heard this album, I was at After 8 in Paris (one of the world’s coolest bookstores) and the salesperson was playing this album. I literally stopped dead in my tracks and, like a loser, I was like what the fuck is this? It's metal but it's also experimental jazz??? On the train, I was swapping music with my lifelong best friend and collaborator, the artist Max Lester. Every, like, two years, we remember to share music with each other. We usually don’t think to because we tend to assume we know each other's thoughts already. But when we do, we’re both like wtf. this is so my taste, why did you gatekeep this from me? and the other says something like, well, it's so you, I figured you knew it already. Anyway, I was listening to it because I was reading Hedva’s book and connecting doom and chopped and screwed and I suddenly remembered this album and shared it with Max, who said “Ohhhhhh this is one of my fave metal albums of the past few years!” And the knowledge that I first heard this album in Paris, while texting Max two years later on the train to New York, while he happened to be in Paris, to then find out from him that one of the members is from Tomb Mold, a Toronto band (our hometown), made the world feel small, made situations in space and time feel like flickering, eternal constellations, and made me feel so close to Max, who is so far away.
You hold the world in every friendship. Every relationship contains a world of its own, so every relationship contains the world. When you think together, when you tap into the inner life of the mind with another, when you can convene in That space, you realize it's not just the two of you there. Friendships can be portals to the dimension where art lives. I get fucked up when I think about my frienship with Max. We met at age five. How did we know? How did we see each other? Now that he lives at the end of the world/the Netherlands, this eternal dimension where two friends meet in feels all the more pronounced, since we’re existing across a six hour time difference at all times. Our conversation is ongoing, unending. The dream is unending. More poetry. Art flares up when you need it. The space between us, within our separate lives, charges the endless conversation. We drop off, have an experience or two, a funny anecdote or two, an idea or two, and come back. We pick up where we dropped off. When we come together again, we discover that when we stepped away, we were individually working out the same ideas. We come back to share, and hurriedly finish each other’s sentences.
I’m writing something right now that’s hard for me to face. Or, I’m avoiding writing something right now that’s hard for me to face. I’ve tried to put it to bed for about a year. I keep trying to kill it. But every time I sit down to write, I find myself writing it. It’s waiting for me in this eternal, endless stasis, and all I have to do is tap in, whenever I’m ready. It’s all right there: the whole piece, a contained sphere. In January, I’ll sit down to write what I’ll discover to be the set up for a punch line I forgot I had written last April. This is what my friendship with Max feels like. It feels like this sphere between us, waiting to be tapped into at all times. If I didn't have someone to think together with like this, I would despair. Sometimes it's 3 a.m. my time and 9 a.m. his time and we’re both awake and my day is ending and his is just beginning, and we can convene between time, rarely, but sometimes, when we’re both awake. So I was walking home listening to the Screw tape early one morning, after a night that was raining in NYC and Tommy and I couldn't stop laughing. I turned my doorknob to go home, to go to sleep, and Max had woken up and was responding to some text I forgot I wrote: “Haha ily,” he said, and I thought haha ily.
The world feels so crazy right now. Like we’re in a moment in history. It’s the moment where things happen, but time inevitably unfolds. Fascism is on the rise. The world is burning. And though the ceasefire has been called, the genocide rages on, and the damage is done. That pain will be an energy that pummels itself through future generations as that pain has energized itself through the generations that caused this shit. It’s so hard not to despair, yet you have an ethical imperative not to, for if you despair you may as well be dead already, and you’re not dead yet. “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable,” Foucault writes as a treatise on micro-fascism in his intro to [Deleuze and Guattari’s] Anti-Oedipus. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately, through all the shit that’s nearly killed me, and all my own perverse coercion with that death drive, is that if it killed me it would have been simpler. Kaal kills us all, but the fact is, damage may be done, but it hasn’t finished the job. We’re alive and we have to deal with it. As I write this, Pharoah Sanders’ Love Will Find A Way swells, and I’m reminded of James Baldwin saying “the world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. I love you, Max.
A final thought on DJ Screw. Allegedly, he used to hack records he didn’t like with a screwdriver. According to Wikipedia, that’s how he got the name DJ Screw. I’m reminded of a dream I had a while ago: I was at the birthday party of a young child who, in the dream I thought was my ex-bf, though my therapist tells me it was me (ugh). The kid told me he was pissed off about something so he jammed a screwdriver into his brain. Somehow this moment made me understand this child’s pain was beyond me: the problem was bigger than anything I could handle, anything I could ever fix. If you hack with your brain to fix it like a record whose melody you don’t like, and now cannot play any longer, what you get instead is some busted up shit, the glitch, and the fix, which comes to replace the original tune. Sometimes, the player gets stuck on the glitch. Skipping, skipping, skipping over the same moment. It can’t move forward. But what was it? What was so unbearable that you had to hack it like that?
Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder (//Bad Timing//Postcard From the Edge//In a Lonely Place)
One of my nerdiest habits is to look up every film noir I watch in my Film Noir Encyclopedia (Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1993), Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward) that I found at John K. King Books in Detroit, another one of the world’s coolest bookstores. Noirs tend to be my comfort viewing, which probably says something about the cold discomfort I’m habituated to. Noirs have everything I look for in a movie: wit, style, sex-appeal, cool factor. I look for these qualities in life too, which is no way to live. I am doomed. I watched Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) the other night—god. According to my beautiful encyclopedia, this film is a shining example of the genre’s fatalism. Its protagonist Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) understands from the beginning that his initial meeting with Barbara Stanwyck is a fatal encounter, and is aware that his own obsession, underscored by his sex drive, will be his demise. And yet, he is hopelessly resolved to see it through.
What I love about noirs is that their fatalism actually says more about film itself: about the fatalism that is narrative: that when characters meet, there is something they have to see through. In this case, the recurrent metaphor is a trolley ride they can’t get off: “they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line”. You don’t have to see it through though, the sexually-charged encounter. But it's hard not to let libido drive. After all, it is our life-drive. It just sucks if you got your wires crossed somewhere down the line, and it’s also your death drive. I think maturity is something like knowing where the story goes, and that it doesn’t go anywhere good, and getting off the fucking ride. Life is not fiction. In life, there is choice. But fiction literalizes the psychic drives that are often at the wheel, and in that sense, can feel truer than life, so fiction can tell us something about life. Fiction distills our subconscious entanglements to narrative causality. Fiction creates a fiction of cause and effect, and for this reason, can teach us something about ourselves. Sometimes, fiction offers some truth that life can aspire to. Though not in noirs. In noirs everyone is doomed. You already know how the story goes. They may look so cool and so sexy, but the cool guys are doomed. They strike matches with snapping fingers like Neff in this film, and in the end (SPOILER, if that’s even relevant here), we know he’s dead because he slumps over, gun-wounded, puts a cigarette to his mouth, and can’t strike the match.
This movie is such a good example of self-reflexive movie dialogue: dialogue that calls out film’s fatalism. I am a sucker for this shit. One of my favourite examples of movie dialogue-movie dialogue is in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980): Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russel—who will strike up a disastrous love affair—are eyeing each other at a party. Russel goes up to Garfunkel, cocks her head and almost shrugs as she says: “We’re gonna meet. It might as well be now.” Because the film is told in flashbacks, this line comes directly after Russel is rushed to the hospital, Garfunkel already her lover, and the doctor warning, “this’ll kill you in the end.” That’s movie dialogue-movie dialogue. Fate-exposition. Or, the entire script for Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950), another film noir movie-movie about movie dialogue-movie dialogue. Its script enacts itself as the film unfolds because Bogart plays a screenwriter with an “artistic temperament”. Obviously, "I was born when she kissed me…” is the line, but the one I think about most is the scene in the kitchen, the love scene about a love scene: “A good love scene should be about something else beside love,” says Bogart, and the camera cuts to reveal the set when he says, “for instance, this one…. Anyone looking at us could tell we were in love.”
Another example is in Postcards from the Edge (1990), when Gene Hackman gives Meryl Streep-as-Carrie Fisher his grand speech about freeing herself from her abusive movie-mom (Shirley McLain as Debbie Reynolds. Talk about perfect casting). He says, “You have to say, fuck it: I start with me,” Streep, half-in her own life, half-out, goes: “I like that, did you just make that up?” And Hackman says, “You just like it because it sounds a little like movie-dialogue.” That’s some anti-fatalist movie dialogue-movie dialogue, and fittingly, that movie is about liberating yourself from the damage of the movies.
Anyway—Double Indemnity:
“It can’t be like the first time. Something’s happened.”
“I know it has. It’s happened to us.”
FUCK!
Gia, Michael Cristofer (//High Art//Oh, Canada//And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos//?//Never Felt Like This Before//Faces)
I decided to get back in touch with my lesbian side via staring at Angelina Jolie in butch drag for two hours, on the recommendation of the girl I’m getting back in touch with my lesbian side for. After, over a conversation about the appropriating gaze of the camera (lol), I said “Have you seen High Art (Lisa Cholodenko, 1988)?” She raised her brow and said, “Have I seen High Art?” UGH! I’m realizing how awesome it is to be gay because it means desire is shaped in tandem, so desire is shared (not an at you, but a with you). Because, of course, we were both moved by that film, and of course later, we would be moved by each other.
Over coffee, we were actually discussing Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (2024), which we just saw (sadly, stupid. A must watch). Maybe the only intelligent part of Oh, Canada is a Sontag-induced conversation about Eddie Adams’ “Saigon Execution” (1968), and the question: does he live forever? Or is he dying forever? Again, I’m thinking about Benjamin’s invocation of the past over present tense: forever a man who dies at thirty-five, or forever a man who died at thirty-five?
Back to my question about songs of/as salvation vs. novels, I suppose songs are closer to poems and photographs than novels. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984—a breathtaking read), John Berger writes, “all stories are about battles…everything moves towards the end, where the outcome will be known.” Whereas a poem, present still on the battlefield, is much like a prayer, offering “recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” If narrative is written retrospectively, as a looking back from the perspective of the end, poetry, by contrast, offers an eternal moment. “Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.” I don’t know if I’m contradicting what I wrote above. I’m trying to figure this out. I guess it's meaningful that Indiana represented Kairos in his novel through his character Jesse’s photographs: images as flickering prayers.
Anyway, I was reminded of this amazing moment in High Art when Ally Sheedy leans back and stares at her friends shooting up at the bedroom vanity, and in this drole monotone goes, “You guys are so glamorous.” This moment is brilliant to me. It’s a perfect example of sarcasm as an alibi, because, at this point in the film Sheedy is consciously struggling with her and her girlfriend’s drug problem, so sees through the image of glamour. And yet, literally playing a heroine-chic photographer, she also means it. She also sees the image. I know this tone of voice. It gets misunderstood as critical of someone else, when really you mean to criticize yourself (and to whom, you and God? Because you’re not engaging with the other person when you say shit like this. You’re saying it to you, to your own private fourth wall, about them), by calling beyond the frame with some sorry self-awareness, like yeah, I know I’m doing this, I know what this looks like. And when you’re an artist there is something humiliating about recognizing your own eye, and, seeing the history it's steeped in, the bullshit it's steeped in, and nevertheless seeing is a turn on. But Berger says that in poetry, language itself, not God, bears witness. So maybe the sarcastic half-in/half-out is also a desperate prayer. You’re saying it to hear it said.
I once read a critic—I can’t remember who, which is unusual and something I’m ashamed of (I believe in citing my sources), but I do remember that I read this critic in the wind up to a tragedy in my personal life, because I remember what I was wearing, and whose bed I was chilling on—which is how I know that that’s how I don’t know—who said that irony is misunderstood as elevating one meaning over another, when in fact, it merely presents the possibility of multiple meanings. Sarcasm is a kind of irony, the way a square is a rectangle. I held on to this idea at the time, because it meant I didn’t have to say what I mean. I didn’t even have to say what I mean via saying the opposite of what I mean. All interpretations could be true, so saying something could equal saying nothing, and I could hide behind the obfuscations of language and performance forever. I like to think I’ve grown up since then. But I’ve still got these old tricks up my sleeve.
My crush told me that if I like High Art, I would LOVE Gia, the ’98 HBO movie about Gia Carangi, The World’s First Supermodel, starring Jolie as Gia and Faye Dunaway as Willhelmina Cooper, of Wilhelmina models, Carangi’s agent and maternal figure.
This movie is a perfect piece of middlebrow-camp, though all its paratext are high camp, which the movie doesn’t do justice to. High Art is what some might call an Excellent Film, which Gia is not. But it's an amazing emblem and I’m glad it exists. So many of the movie’s most outrageous moments are real: Gia Carangi actually did carry a knife around with her everywhere (like Angie!); she actually did carve her name with it into a secretary’s desk; she really rode off on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle in the middle of a photoshoot, clad in borrowed designer clothes, to score. And she actually did start dating makeup artist Sandy Linter, who really was spontaneously asked to pose nude with Carangi behind a chain link fence for Chris von Wangenheim, and Gia really did send Sandy all those roses. AND even the diary entries—the child-written fables about a beautiful girl whom the world devoured and left for dead—which the screenwriters had a fun time riffing off (how could you not?), are all real material! Yet, the film is kind of whatever. There’s one HARROWING scene—it’s so cruel—where Gia, sick and dying of AIDS, is on set for some European fashion mag (IRL, after she got a reputation in the industry for being an unreliable addict, her American career tanked and all she could land were European shoots, usually nude or semi-nude). She’s zonked out, flopped on a table, and the photographer’s assistants are lifting and placing her limbs around like a lifeless doll.
Gia Aranchi’s life was brutal. She became famous overnight, immediately got hooked on heroin and was among the first known women to die of AIDS, at age 26. And for the real misery of her life, the film is difficult to watch. It portrays the fashion industry as an evil bazaar in which the devil finds work, and in which his chic-obsessed worshippers, the sick, depraved, and glamour-wounded, mercilessly go round in their pursuit of shallow, shiny surfaces, at the expense of all morality, and in the end, of life itself. I find myself taking back my middlebrow-label. That shit is pure high camp: the morality v. glamour thing, especially when it's a morality tale and not a glamour tale. It’s a pretty terrible watch. Would highly recommend.
I went down a rabbit-hole after, and came across a fabulous article called “Gia: The Tragedy of a Lesbian Supermodel", penned in DIVA magazine. It’s a shame the movie wasn’t called this. Made for TV movies should lean into B-movie type pulp, even if made for HBO.
As it turns out, I'm more of an Ally Sheedy-tank-top-and-tiny-tits kind of lesbian. I keep thinking about this later moment in High Art, following the “so glamorous” line. Sheedy is lying back on the bed, and the film’s protagonist, Syd (Radha Mitchell), sits on a chair at its end. She crawls onto the bed to lie next to Sheedy. That’s it. That movement is so bold. It’s so erotic, the move towards, because it's so intentional. When I think about it, I’ve got the line from “Never Felt Like this Before” by Charlie Smalls in my head, which sends chills down my spine (I’m not gatekeeping music anymore. This is one of my favourite songs. It’s from the trailer to Cassavetes Faces (1968), which is a work of art unto itself): “Whatchu doing standing way over there? I want you to come stand over here”. My point is, that chair is so far from that bed.
The Joy Commodity, Puggy Beales
This is somewhat of a plug because I just directed a music video for “Verona”, the reverb-heavy synth-y love ballad off the album (I’m outing myself as a Lynch fan below, so you get my style). Even if I wasn’t friends with Peter, I’d be listening to The Joy Commodity. Peter is so talented. He’s truly a grandchild of Alan Vega. And maybe a distant cousin of James Murphy. Sexy, cool, fun, funny, chic. Makes you feel sexy, cool, fun, funny, chic. So catchy. Gets stuck in your head.
HBD Jim Jarmusch
On Jim Jarmusch’s birthday, he IG storied a bouquet of red roses sent from Anthony Vaccarello thanking him and @YSL, followed by a bottle of whiskey from RZA, designed by RZA. When cool guys get together, they are unstoppable.
RIP David Lynch
When Godard died, filmmaker and writer Blair McClendon wrote about seeing Pierrot Le Fou (1965) for the first time, and how that changed his understanding of art. This, for an artist, is a life changing event. I’m pretty sure Claire Denis said this too, but I can’t find it now. This also happened to me, seeing Pierrot le Fou for the first time: it changed my understanding of cinema and it changed my life. To find out that this is a shared experience is emboldening, because it underscores the impact of the original encounter, and corroborates its significance. I’ve had this experience a few times in my life. Before Godard, of course it was Lynch. Seeing Eraserhead (1977) was the first time I understood that movies were something beyond the fabric of ordinary experience. They could be portals. Every Lynch film is a portal.
Cellphones, at their best, are also portals. It's been so moving to see everyone on my Instagram feed pay tribute to Lynch and offer some version of the same sentiment: how the first encounter with Lynch changed their lives, was the reason we all became artists.
There was a period when people got jaded and didn’t want to admit this. Lynch’s influence is so pronounced that certain colours, certain fabrics, are instantly associated with him (red and blue, and miraculously, different shades of the reds and blues that are instantly associated with Godard). I don’t blame anyone for this abandonment. It’s simply the process of individuation. But it is heartwarming to bask in the reverence of his influence on us all, to remember that a personal encounter may also be a collective one. Lynch knew about this, the collective tapping-into that his work achieved, which is why he never fully took credit for his work.
A true story: the night before Lynch died I suddenly FUCKING NEEDED to text Max that we have to rewatch Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). A similar thing happened to me when Robert Frank died. I woke up one morning thinking about a line from Jack Keruoac’s introduction to Frank’s The Americans (1958), about hearing music wafting from a funeral home. I Googled Robert Frank to find a PDF of the text, and found out that he had died some hours before. People have stories like this, about suddenly being jolted awake moments before the telephone rings, announcing the call of their parent’s deaths, or something like that. I like that this happens to me with artists because artists are my real parents.
Last Summer, Max was home from the Netherlands and we were both depressed. As a rare fluke, we were also both unemployed (I had just been laid off from my copywriting job. I was replaced by robots—so cool, I’m part of history). It was like a real summer break. We spent the entirety of August camped out in his mom’s basement, experiencing some sort of adolescent regression, shunning the heat, smoking weed, and rewatching Lynch's oeuvre. It would take us ten hours to get through a single movie, because we kept having to pause, enter the friendship portal into the collective consciousness where art lives and where the subconscious lives, talk talk talk, then return to the film, causing us to re-enter the portal.
Again, my point about the moment. About manipulating time. Lynch’s films utilize speed so meaningfully, because you’ve got to slow down to enter that transcendental space. His films slow you down: they space out the beats of monotony to blow up what’s going on between them. People want to call his work surreal. But it's not surrealism in the sense that it's a departure from realism, an abandonment of reality. In fact, just the opposite. It’s hyper-real. But slowed down, something starts to leak: our subconscious drives, our shared psychic landscape. For instance, Leiland Palmer’s abuse of Laura at the dinner table in Fire Walk With Me (1992). I’m not talking about the incest, not directly (can you?). I’m talking about the scene where he yells that her fingers are dirty. His capriciousness. His fixation on surfaces. And the knowledge (does he know?) of how her fingers got dirty. Yeah, you could say Lynch is exaggerating. Like: that’s bourgeois hygiene injected with horror. As if ordinarily, outside of film, this bourgeois scene is NOT one of horror. But I know this scene. I know he’s not exaggerating. Slowing it down just makes it big. It gets you to notice.
I have a bone to pick with, like, everyone about Lynch. (And thank you, Akosua. I know I’m really going overboard with this dispatch, but you gave me a platform, so I am using it.) I am so tired of people criticising Lynch for what they perceive to be his misogyny. I honestly believe that when people want to critique Lynch’s misogyny, they are merely encountering their own, like bumping into a mirror. The mirror reverses the image. I think there are a lot of people whose own misogyny prevents them from recognizing Lynch's project, one which I believe he’s dedicated his whole career to. I mean, this was a man with a mission. The fact that he was able to smuggle this mission, for a moment, onto primetime television is a stunning feat. I’m talking to those straight guys and their sympathizers who think his work is merely cool and trippy, and who arrogantly assume they sympathize with women when they want to dismiss Lynch’s work as sexist. Because, truly, I have never seen an artist dedicate himself more seriously to the real horror of being a women trapped inside a misogynistic world, who has unearthed the traumatic transferences of incest, rape, and the suppression of this libido, and characterized them in Bob, who is but one example, as the symbolic face of human evil.
One day, Max and I will write a book about this. We decided last Summer. Any bites??
The most obvious example of watching Lynch through a mirror, this misogynistic misidentification of misogyny, is Roger Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet (1986).
Basically, Ebert thinks being stylish is sinful. He misunderstands irony’s multiple-meanings. “Everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony;” he writes, “characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes. Meanwhile, the darker story of sexual bondage is told absolutely on the level in cold-blooded realism.” Ebert isn’t able, or maybe doesn’t want to, hold these two tones together. Irony doesn’t dismiss content. It puts the content in bold.
Amazingly (I haven’t read this review in years), while Ebert sticks his nose up at Lynch, who he thinks is trying to be smug for putting Isabella Rossellini in a cool movie despite her harrowing performance—get this!!!—he contrasts Blue Velvet to what he believes to be the seriousness of Last Tango in Paris (1972):
That’s what Bernardo Bertolucci delivered when he put Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider through the ordeal of “Last Tango in Paris.” In “Blue Velvet,” Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character.
Okay, this is crazy. Famously, Bertolucci and Brando conspired to sexually assault Schneider on camera for the perceived-sake of art, which Schneirder spoke out about her entire life to mostly indifferent ears. She hated Bertolucci after the film. Even Brando felt taken advantage of and refused to talk to Bertolucci for fifteen years. And Ebert? In 1972, he saw the film and wrote: “It’s not sex at all (and it’s a million miles from intercourse). It’s just a physical function of the soul’s desperation.” This is amazing to me. Ebert was watching sexual assault play out before his eyes, was aware enough to see that it was not a sex scene, and could not let himself see far enough to see what he was really seeing. To believe his own eyes. He praised the film as “one of the great emotional experiences of our time,” and dismissed Blue Velvet as smug, self-important trash because he made the mistake of assuming the image of the shallow is superficial, and the image of depth is really deep. This is what misogyny does. It takes what’s sitting on the surface, what’s screaming at you before your very eyes, and says, “No, that can’t be true. That can’t be real. It’s too obvious. It's too on the nose.” I guess I should say, that’s what denial does, of which misogyny is only one form. It’s like when people hear someone cry out “help!”, wave their hand and dismiss it as just a cry for help. Bertolucci is too close to his camera, but Lynch makes a grotesque caricature of the male gaze (think of Lill, the dancing lady in red at the beginning of Fire Walk With Me, to be read for clues). What I really want to know is why people are so quick to charge Lynch with sexism when they see his portrayal of sexist violence. Is it because his actors are beautiful? Are you mad that it turned you on? Or that he placed you in a horror and not a romance? Are you hurt that, unlike Bertolucci—who takes you very seriously for being turned on, who respectfully associates you, the audience, with a great, manly genius like Marlon Brando—Lynch is making fun of you?
Ironically, while Ebert thinks he’s praising Rossellini’s acting for her bravery, he actually dismisses her autonomy as an actor (as he does to Schneider, in refusing to watch the film from her perspective, to look into her eyes, which the camera hangs on during her rape scene). This is the worst form of faux-sympathy, and the reason the male-feminist is a loathed archetype. In stark contrast to Schneider’s lifelong outspoken condemnation of Bertolucci’s abuse, Rossellini’s lifelong collaborations, friendship with and love for Lynch (ditto for Laura Dern, Sheryl Lee, Grace Zabriskie, Naomi Watts…) are a testament to his humility as a director, and his respect for film as a collaborative form. Lynch is among the few directors who have spoken out time and again about directing needing not to be an act of manipulation. And in contrast to the forced upon method-acting of directors like Bertolucci, who aim to catch his actresses not acting, Lynch actually has respect for and belief in the strength of his actresses. Their performances are a testament to that. I hope this will be his legacy. Finally, Lynch’s oeuvre is a shining testament to the power of art to explore trauma without recreating it, a feat so many other male artists, and their champions, seem to be disinterested in, even though this is one of art’s great functions.
I know it's intense of me to rage at a dead critic right now. But I think he’s a good case study, because I hear echoes of his inverted critique all the time. A few months ago, I was having a conversation in a green room with a coked out cancelled artist about Lynch’s so-called misogyny, if you could call it a conversation. I was the only girl in the room, also the only art critic in the room, but, in the green room, my twofold expertise does not matter. I couldn’t get a word in, which, of course, is an example of misogyny in practice, but the irony was lost on everyone. When I was finally granted breathing room, I offered some version of the above, of Lynch treating real horror as Capital H-Horror. Waiting for me to finish, the cancelled artist responds, “Yeah, well I think it’s okay that his work is misogynistic. He doesn’t have to be perfect,” as if I’m some stupid little girl who refuses to push daddy off his pedestal. “It can be nuanced,” he said to me. “It can be complicated.” Like I’m the one who lacks depth here.
A Note on what I won’t be watching
Many years ago, I was trapped inside a dizzying mindfuck of a relationship. It was psychologically, emotionally and sexually abusive. All in all, it lasted about three years, but mostly it was one year, over the course of which I was desperate, panicked, terrified, exhilarated, obsessed, manic, delirious, ecstatic, hopeful, crushed, despondent again, and desperate again.
All this in, like, a day. When I think back, the main feeling was sheer confusion, sheer disorientation. During the time I knew him, he was working on a movie. When we began, I read an early script, saw an early cut, and fell in love with him in the process. He was such a good writer. His voice was so pronounced. We had stints of attempted collaboration during this period, which never worked. I felt like my ideas, dreams, memories, private fears and private shames were extracted out of me, my words taken out of my mouth, and recited in his. In his voice, they sounded gross, ugly, cold and vain. We used to get so fucking drunk. And he was working on his own movie. Look, I know I was there. I know I let myself into that room. I want to be clear about that. But what happened was I was coerced into revealing some of my most shameful childhood memories. At the last minute, he’d run the camera. I feel nauseous as I write this, as I remember. That’s my material. And I wasn’t ready to face it yet. Anyway, after it finally ended, we were having one of those “lets be friends” trial hangs. He invited me to his editing suite to see the final cut of that film. What I saw was a year of my own abuse flickering before my eyes, and much earlier traumas that I had confided in him, which he used as fucking symbolism, all interspliced with a porno he shot with a former friend of mine, a girl he cheated on me with. He asked me for my feedback, which I couldn’t offer. Instead, I downed a bottle of bourbon and stumbled home and that was the end, finally.
Fuck, I was so young. I really feel for that girl. It took years to build myself after that relationship, years to get his taunts and insults out of my head. During that period, he was widely cancelled in Toronto for like a million other similar reasons from a million others. Though now, everyone moved on. The scene is small and film’s a collaborative form, I know.
The movie he’s showing now is not that one. It’s a new feature, made after all that. And it’s getting lots of hype. It’s having a run at indie theatres all over the place, in NYC, LA, and London, and screened at the small cinema around the corner from my apartment in MTL the other night. It’s being hailed as this brave meta-narrative, this self-reflexive work of autofiction that dares to blur the lines between art and life.
Look, I know how this guy works. I’ve seen the twinkle in his eye, the unrepressed glee on his face when he realizes he’s breaking you. I’ve seen the dull-knifed rage if you dare not play along, if he fails to control you. I’ve sleepwalked through feverish drunken nights after feverish drunken nights until there is no more daylight. I’ve had tears incised by this guy and then kissed away by him. I’ve lived out my nightmares with him, and been told that it was all just a dream, not to worry, it was only a dream. That he was drunk and doesn’t remember a thing, that none of it really happened, there there, this isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. And I’ve seen the footage later. I've known firsthand the outrageous, vindictive sociopathy executed, excused, and now applauded under the flimsy banner of l’art pour l’art.
I am an artist and I believe in art. I am compelled, unfortunately, to fictionalize my life and those in it. I am compelled to turn this shit into words, images, and sounds so that I can exercise it from me, hopefully so I can make sense of it. Otherwise I’d just be stuck with it. And I know that I will hurt some people in the process of representing. Yet, I think there is something at stake in doing so. So believe me when I say that I am not condemning art when I’m condemning this guy. But art is an après-coup, a re-presentation, an interpretation. At best it's a signal towards real meaning, real experience, and at worst, it’s a mere placeholder, a substitution, and a good one at that. For this reason, art will always fail—this failure is built in—to stand up against real pain, and, if anything, becomes a weird tribute to it. It is not the same thing as intentionally wielding harm in order to film it.
Not that I think I’m such a big draw or anything, but I will be at the fair, likely for the majority of the afternoon, if that (positively) influences your decision to attend at all.