fuck you 2022
It’s drizzling and annoyingly warm for January.
My boyfriend and I found a table at some “elevated” Mexican place on New Year’s Eve where we sat in front of some garish gold balloons and ate overpriced guacamole. It was a small cute space with gentle lighting and packed with the sort of generic Brooklyn crowd that always makes me feel like I’ve figured something out about the tail end of the zeitgeist. We talked about champagne and brought home prosecco, which I would not drink anyway, because alcohol is my one true enemy, next to born agains. I felt the same thing I do every time we go out for dinner, which is that I wish well-designed, non-corporate feeling, not overly self-aware sit-in dessert bars, patisseries, tea houses or café gourmands were so common that you could just saunter into one when the mood strikes and have delicately sweet things and good coffee or strong fresh mint teas until you’re ready to sleep the evening off. I’m not talking hot ticket bakeries optimised for boxing shit up to go (but I see you Levain, I see your good ass cookies. Not gonna mention Ansel because…yawn) or convenient but unimaginative neighbourhood cafes with dry banana bread and stale almond croissants. Ideally, since I’m blabbing on, I’d like one with a slight Asian expression without the student-y, franchise, Instagram babe feel of a Prince Tea House. But I’d be fully satisfied with the kind of space and sentiment I can imagine old school Europeans or Parisians understanding. The couple places that are interesting (but still not quite right) are in the East Village…but…too far, too destination for what I’m talking about. Perhaps I’m being too specific. Maybe I just want a Hong Kong style french toast in an “elevated” cha chaan teng, at the end of the day. Whatever, I digress.
I’ve been reading lots of different stuff on Substack recently and it’s a vast and cool reader’s playground but I also see certain familiar territory: Twitter media vibes except now long form, slick reputation upkeep, tasteful curation, musty yin lower case energy, the curve of the upper lip. It agitates me. I want to lock people in a room and make everything smell of sex and money and just watch everyone giving it 100 like the judgmental little voyeur I am. I’m somewhere at the dank dark junction where boredom, spiritual hunger and existential disappointment meet and create something that carries the admirable stench of anarchy but really is just cowardly and stagnant. Only boring people are so bored, I know. But I need something bloody and alive and I’m growing restless. I’m your voyeur, I’m all yours, you whores. Do what you will, what you ache to do. To make a difference, giving life to all of us, hopefully.
so anyway
Here I am. My chaotic list for the most affecting things of 2022 will be a mix of media (not always from this year, though some will be), feelings, realizations and moments that have remained so alive in my mind and is now begging for release. So I release everything...to the soft undulating land of memory, where everything eventually becomes all mine, beautiful and also a lie.
A great book: Denis Johnson’s Largesse of the Sea Maiden. One line from ‘Doppelgänger, Poltergeist’ burned a hole in me: “The mind held back the whole sky”. Wrist tattoo, I think. This collection felt suffocating and miserable most of the time and then would strike me with such stark electric beauty I obsessively reread the same sentences over and over. Maybe it’s easy to hunger and cling to any small warmth when everything around it is so dark and pleading. But my god, he wrote like a downed beast.
Aging has been the topic du jour ‘round these parts. If there is any song that understands the horrors of coming to terms with the fact that you are not the main character, it’s this one by Bowie. And that’s one major thing I think aging uncovers, besides the realisation that you really should’ve taken better care of your teeth. You are not the main character. But please, by all means, take your time stepping down from that throne.
“Dance dance dance through the fire” is also tattoo worthy. Also “FEED ME NO LIES”. Down my inner arm. Tiny little caps. There is a John Frusciante version floating around on YouTube that I love, too.
Beauty is power: My boyfriend and I were arguing very heatedly one day and I found meeting his eyes difficult - we were being so shitty. I saw his expression change very subtly and his tone softened out of nowhere. We clumsily found each other in the argument somehow and later he told me he noticed that I looked nice in that moment, that my eyes looked pretty. It should’ve felt complimentary and reassuring, I think, but instead I was left more insecure and depressed. Beauty is power. This has repeatedly made itself known to me in the boring light of reality, just day-to-day mundane reality, for years and years, all my life. Experiencing and witnessing the same behaviours in all of us, mostly men, until my eyes bleed. What else captures a man’s instinct to submit and invest, to become motivated? Without his knowing, even. What else holds a man captive in such an effortless way? What else makes him such a fool, such easy prey? It is the cheapest power there is, easily usurped by lips a few centimeters fuller, by eyes that let you drown a little faster. And we all secretly know it and watching people subtly and overtly use their beauty to win is also very…blah now. Beauty offers the fastest path to having all the important human things. He’d call me dramatic. He’d tell me to let him love me. I’d turn everything over slowly in my head while pretending I’m past it. He’d eventually both softly and angrily ask me the question I’ve grown to hate: “What do you want, Ami?” And all I’d do is stare at him blankly, thinking about how weirdly attractive all his friends are.
The weird but generally well-received film, Barbarian. I approach so many modern films now with the question of “will this be SJW-approved/woke/didactic/post-woke/whatever the fuck” and am I in the mood for it? This film sort of hinted at various things (the violence of female experiences, white flight, unconscious bias, toxic masculinity/femininity, the often suffocating nature of motherhood/mothers, etc) but I never found any real clarity or driving theme. So I just went along, without searching for the social commentary or moral lesson in any of it and I ended up just enjoying the ride. The Justin Long character was such a douche written for a movie but, like, you know that guy. We all know that guy. He’s just….you know, trying his best~~~
King Hannah. I think of Beth Gibbons lost in America. Singing out 90’s Bristol blues through a West Virginia filter. I could drink her vocals.
FX’s The Bear. If there was any telly that The Algorithm delivered my way with the biggest most annoying wink, it was this. Jeremy Allen White was awesome - I swear the someone who was overseeing his character was….in touch, because it’s hard to get the sexy dialed up just right with male characters these days. Post MeToo, post Trump, I suppose? I liked the attempt to capture kitchen culture (been there) and the way they showed how the love for “the craft” can become a destructive force (especially if you’re working out of an unstable emotional space), I like that the show makes you feel admiration for and affectionate towards the restaurant/food industry - I want every bartender and waitress I know or those who own delis and builds sandwiches, blends ice cream or cuts vegetables, constantly smells of onion and garlic and just uses their beautiful hands to make things for a living to feel seen. I loved the found family dynamic and how it makes conflict more interesting and hold extra complexity because sometimes there’s less forcibly binding the characters together so love grows in these strange little crevices and some of those relationships have the slow burn flicker I find deeply satisfying. The thirst was very real out there for Carmy but the dirtbag label never felt quite right to me. This guy wasn’t some basic piece of shit that fucks you behind dumpsters, he wasn’t out like, oops, finding himself and his dick in all the
rightplaces or fucking everyone’s lives up and just feeling so tortured and sexy about it all, he doesn’t get away with anything, he sits with it, owns it and actively tries to be a better person. And there’s no hidden vanity. I liked that the pulsing emotional undercurrent is shared among everyone but is often focused on his late, enigmatic brother and not solely on the poetry of Camry’s pain - that was nice and fresh. Carmy, bad tattoos and all, we all thank you for being hot.Men: I wish I had decided to go to Central Saint Martins to study fashion when I lived in London. I would have loved to design clothes for men. I love male bodies. I love putting clothes on them, taking them off, making them feel stylish. I don’t think a lot of us understand what a truly liberated man looks like and I think maybe they are a rarer breed than we might believe.
Death: I know the fear of death is an intrinsic part of every human’s emotional landscape and until we face it, we probably don’t know who we really are, what we are really made of. I recently was put under for the first time in my adult life and as I was wheeled into the operating theater, I broke down and started crying and saying I couldn’t go through with it (it was a proper operation but nothing really serious). The loss of control, the fear of death, whatever you want to call it, washed over me like a heart-stopping Yakutian ice bath and I just turned into a little girl. I became very aware that nobody in that room knew me. I truly believed, for a moment, that I would not wake up. The nurse held my hand awkwardly and limply. My voice sort of trailed off into a whimper. The anesthesiologist, all business, injected me and as my heart slowed, I stared up at the masked medical staff staring back at me and felt the blinding white surgical lights fade. I specifically remember turning my head to look at the main surgeon in the eyes as if desperate to feel understood, connected, please god something, and then saying, very matter-of-factly, “I am starting to feel sleepy.” and then I was out. For some reason, this is how I picture I will face death, should I know it was to come. It is horrifying, disappointing, deeply unremarkable and also very real. Was that me? Fragile, accommodating, pleading, without fight or poetry, pathetic. Factory settings. Was that really me?
Dreams: I rarely dream but lately they come thick and fast and honestly, it’s disturbing. Am I having some kind of slow neurological meltdown? The dreams I remember have been about malevolent supernatural beings. I don’t know what is going on half the time but I’m always being harmed. Being pulled by my hair high up into the atmosphere and just dangled there like a doll, looking down at earth, feeling the atmosphere suck my lungs dry, dragged violently between rooms in my childhood homes, hitting my limbs on hard corners, tongued in my ears, being entered through my bellybutton, my fingers eaten.
Things I need, not want, need: some material I can enjoy in short bursts that will always sufficiently distract me. For example, I’d like a new, updated Luca Turin perfume guide, deploying the same intellectual and aesthetic rigour but, maybe, slightly less scathing despite knowing this is his best trick. I’d also like an almost wordless book filled with whimsical paintings that lie at the intersection of naïve art, the dreaded term “folk art’ and children’s illustration. I’d be happy with a big book full of things that feel like Michel Delacroix, Grandma Moses and Gyo Fujikawa.
Pop pop pop music:
Olivia Rodrigo is like an amalgamation of Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Blackpink and probably Billie Eilish. She perfectly fits America’s current standard of beauty: racially ambiguous but vaguely Asian (see the *hopefully* fading trend ‘fox eye’), thin, pouty lipped, youthful or as Taylor Swift puts it in her song, Anti Hero, “sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby”. Yeah. But honestly, I fucking love this song. It’s neurotic, bitter and very much the hormonal 16 year old I really am on the inside. Not really attractive as I age. Anyway, the song is constantly coming up on my Spotify when I’m working out and it’s been an ear worm all year.
More random pop song ear worms this year: ultimate 90’s song that encapsulates my favourite 90s flavour/feeling, if you will.
Uncomfortably mainstream, melancholic, sensual, yearning, softly softly danger danger. And also, seeing James Iha eyeing all of us down in a dress back then made me squint into the sun.
and finally, resolutions:
Be more discerning. Only spend my precious time with things and people I actually want to be around. Willing to be judged for this and possibly end up pretty isolated this year. It’s just where I’m at.
No more Catherine Maladrino perfumes. I find every single one I’ve tried to be muddy, overcomplicated and overdone like some tacky high end escort. Spend time with cleaner, sharper, greener or citrus scents that I’ve developed more of a taste for.
own my sexual desires
read more
keep a light on for all the rare, sad and mocked revolutionary spirits that somehow still exist.
eat more kimchi
May you all rise.