My Melody Catcher

What you are about to read began as a suicide note for a blog.  Then I noticed that I was already dead.  I hadn’t written in Lipstickeater for twelve months, left it (my digital-textual body) in a vegetative state.  I left it for dead. 

But if in this state, I suddenly wanted to compose a suicide note...it must mean that I am not dead after all!  Suicide notes cannot be posthumous.  Joy!  I am not going to kill myself, but I am still a little suicidal. 

When you are unhappy with living and discover the notion that you can actually end your own life, it is scary but ironically, it returns to you a sense of yourself that everyone else wants to steal only so they can destroy.  In fact, there begins to gather a glamour about it in the very etymological sense of the word “glamour”: a dark haze over light.  Suicide becomes dangerously glamorous when you are ten years old and suddenly kids in the playground begin to torture you because you are obsessed with My Melody.  The years drag on from there as you get tortured for being homosexual before you know what homosexual is.  Then you conclude that all you want to do is disappear from the tangible world. 

As a sullen teenager, I was a stereotype of a suicidal kid.  The world hated me and I hated the world right back.  I was literally the kid smoking under the bleachers while the student government led a pep rally for the football players and popular kids in Guess jeans.  Decades later, as I figure out my place in my professional world—which is the rarified and small one of academia and then, even smaller and more rarified queer academia—I found out that I am still the kid smoking under the bleachers.  It sucked.  It sucked and it hurt.  And hurt me so much that I wanted to kill off the textual body that was ignored and belittled by my professional world. 

Sooner or later you discover Sylvia Plath, and you discover the idea of being suicidal. Plath is more than the gleaming frighteningly blond head stuck in an unlit gas oven.  In life, as a suicidal girl before she performed the act of suicide, she was a fiercely intellectual and doggedly emotional writer who used her pain as material and tool of her art.  What stopped the teenaged me from going on and through with suicidal attempts was the glamour of Plath the Suicidal.  “Being suicidal” is an identity that requires you to be alive.  It is characterized by a constant and nagging obsession with one’s own death, but one in which the death is also infinitely postponed, for if you go through with it, you are no longer suicidal; you are just dead. If you are “suicidal,” it means you are constantly haunted by thoughts of killing yourself, but you are living through it.  You write through it.  You remain “suicidal;” you don’t commit suicide. 

This week, fifty years ago, Sylvia Plath committed suicide.  Last week, I found myself listening to Britney Spears for hours even though I never listened to her during her ubiquity in the early 2000’s, even though I didn’t actually own a single album of hers.  I must be a true vintage whore because most things feel sweeter and brighter when they are at least five or six years too old.  (Britney circa 2001 or 2003 is now truly “Vintage”!!)  History is softer, more yielding, more yielding to one of my favorite feelings, yearning.  So it is with Britney.  Another blond who had suicide on the horizon.  I think of her as always just about to burst into another breakdown, but only just so.  Unlike Plath, Britney’s good at the teeter-totter of living.  She makes dull soulless dance music, where “soulless” means not a lack of interiority but SATANIC!!!  Satanic as in: the refusal of a dogmatic definition of inner life.  The voice that combines a satanic spirit and a temperamental computer.  It takes a lot to soften that voice into something vulnerable, but when it happens it might be really sweet.  Her face is just this side of excessive inbreeding.  Enough makeup (a lot) and she can tread between white trash rough diamond and plastic doll.  I’ve been listening to her 2003 album In the Zone on repeat while struggling through some academic prose on embodiment.  Obviously she doesn’t have the gift of language that Plath had, but In the Zone is kind of like Plath’s Ariel.  It is high-gloss style confessional music that simultaneously signals the end of confessional music.  Music that is all about you yet nothing about you.  I purchased remixes of “Toxic” on iTunes and it sounded so right for the story I was working on.  I wrote the following lines:

Afterwards, I went on ebay and found exactly the same old tour t-shirt I made my character wear. My character isn’t me, but after I wrote him to life I wanted to bend my flesh closer to his outlines.  I get nervous.  We’ll see.  We’ll see.  

friendship in the time of consumerism

What you are about to read began as a love letter. Perhaps it is still a love letter of sorts—it’s definitely an ode, to someone who is all at once fleeting and everlasting. Her name is Whitney. I’ve known her for a couple years now, but I don’t even know her last name. She is a salesperson in the handbag department of the Barneys in San Francisco. I’ve always thought of her as “my” salesgirl but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am “her” buyinggirl.

I first thought about writing something about Whitney while I was preparing to come back to the East Coast from my usual summer in San Francisco. As I was packing my summer loot, I was suddenly struck with the thought that over the last few years, the friends I’ve had in the Bay Area have kind of faded into a distance that feels sadly like the past (This is mostly my fault—self-enclosed solitude is an easy instinct for me). Aside from my dearest sister, I was really not going to miss anyone in San Francisco. Except Whitney. But if this strikes any of you as a pathetic admission (“You think your salesgirl is your friend?”), I don’t care. It is true that Whitney is not my friend. But Whitney and I do have an intimacy.

Whitney is a young woman, probably in her mid twenties. She is tall, and in the teetering stiletto pumps she favors, she’s even taller. Chicly, her limbs are about the width of a toothpick. All of this, combined with the fact that she has a cute, doll-like face, makes her a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model. Her long black hair is usually middle-parted and styled in soft waves that make you think ever so slightly of Farrah Fawcett, but pulls you back right at the moment of full-on 70s retro nostalgia. Of course she is always dressed perfectly, a femininity that seems simultaneously strict and floral. Maybe it’s the fact that she wears glasses (black Ray-bans) and resin earrings in the shape of roses in bloom. Her voice makes me think of raspberry peppermints.

Last summer, Whitney sold me my first Proenza Schouler PS1 bag. In the couple weeks leading up to my finally settling on (of course) plain black leather, Whitney welcomed my obsessive stalking of the bag with salesperson perfection: she encouraged me to test the tactility of various models (urban environment is rough in suede), try swinging various sizes off my shoulders, offered handbag camaraderie as a customer (she herself ownd the Givenchy Nightingale and we bonded about the inability of boyfriends to understand the primacy of expensive handbags). Whitney guided me through my investment with the strategic focus of a general and the soft leniency of a psychotherapist. And unlike a lot of snooty bitch salesgirls old and young who regularly ignore me in high-end shops, Whitney indulged me sweetly week and after non-purchasing week, even though I was wearing a cracked-out Danzig t-shirt and raggedy rolled up jeans.

And out of that came a familiarity that became, this summer, a kind of intimacy. A week before leaving San Francisco, I dropped by to check out the pre-Fall wares, and while we were doing our usual loose small talk, she impulsively (it felt like impulsiveness to me) revealed: “I got engaged this summer!” We hugged and hopped up and down. I felt so happy for her I felt emotions gushing out of every pore. We grabbed each other’s forearms while she told me all the details of how her man proposed to her, when and where the wedding will be, showing me her ring. We were acting like old girlfriends, and so lost in our moment that Whitney almost lost sight of the unhappy-looking old woman waiting to be shown a bag. “See you at Christmastime!” she chimed in that inimitable raspberry peppermint voice as we parted for the summer.

But what is this intimacy between a buyinggirl and a salesgirl? Our relationship is predicated upon the capitalistic system of purchase and exchange. She is the employee of a corporation of consumption and I am a consumer who keeps that corporation going. It could be argued that her friendliness to me is fake, a performance necessary for her job and function. But if she began her friendly overtures to me as the performance of “salesgirl,” is it necessarily so that that friendliness remain “fake”?

Obviously, I don’t believe so. A couple weeks ago, I actually had a discussion about this subject of performing friendliness with my boyfriend (My boyfriend refers to it as an “argument”). We were talking about urban affects, specifically the difference between New York and San Francisco affects. Being a boy who escaped from the South, my boyfriend prefers the bluntly abrasive affect of New Yorkers to the gliding-the-surface niceness of Californians: he found the post-hippie affect of San Francisco to be “fake,” on par with fakey Southern so-called charm, whereas New York aggression may not be nice, but it is always the truth. But my argument (OK Roddy it was an argument) was: performance is always performative. That is, you begin acting a certain way, knowing that the act is a fiction necessary for a certain kind of survival, but do it long enough and you find that you have become the fiction. You have turned yourself into the embodiment of the fiction, you have turned the script into an emotion. You have crafted fact out of fiction.

I believe that the affect of aggressive bluntness is a performance, too. If you are mean or abrasive to strangers, you are communicating a desire for, and in fact, effecting, a basic foreclosure of any desire for future friendship. (No matter how probable or fantastical that future may be.) On the other hand, You may begin “acting” friendly as an act, perhaps because your job requires you to, but if you are any kind of human at all, you do it long enough and you find that the friendliness becomes you because the feeling has actually produced real happiness, detached from the original context of the performance.

This is the way I think about the intimacy between Whitney and me. Behaviors that produce contact points between humans have a tactility. I just prefer that it be soft. Whitney and I bonded over an outrageously expensive handbag. Our intimacy was negotiated and produced over the barrier of a brass-edged glass counter with a discreetly hidden cash register of which we were always acutely and silently aware. So the original form of our “friendship” was, quite simply, hierarchical: salesperson and customer. But with her consistent California salesgirl affect, Whitney pulled me down from the perches of customer and made me instead a baggirl—like her. Her wedding is set for next summer, and of course I do not expect an invitation. But I don’t need one; I’m giddy enough envisioning her as the radiant young bride I know she will be. Even if we never see each other again, Whitney will always be my friend, my California.

feminist art midwife: go perfectly limp

A few weeks ago, I modeled some work for Mariah Tuttle, who is an MFA student in the Jewelry and Metalsmithing Department at RISD. Mariah had created some amazing, aggressively lacy neckpieces made entirely of caulking (yes, caulking—the plumber’s and contractor’s delight). I was flattered to be asked, and totally enjoyed the process of modeling. Being a shy Virgo, I am not the most comfortable kid in front of the camera, but modeling for Mariah was great because I loved her work, and loved having them lay on my body, their weight and texture pressing into and challenging my own flesh.

But as I scanned through the images that Mariah forwarded me, I was struck by a weird contradictory emotion. I felt narcissistically happy that I looked so skinny (I forget I am that thin at times, and I do like to be reminded) but I felt a twinge of sadness about that pleasure. Mariah had created this beautiful body of work, and I was happy to be its hanger/ frame, but maybe I was too happy. I felt this because just a few days before I got the images, I also received from my dear comrade Minh-ha Pham her fabulous article, “Blog Ambition,” in which your true Joony Schecter is featured.

download article here

Reading this articulate, complex work which analyzed this blog was like wearing Mariah’s heavy jewelry. Minh-ha’s summation of my persona as Joony Schecter was so moving:

In forgetting gender, Lee/Schecter refuses to remember and thus refuses to reproduce the two-gendersystem of heteronormativity. Such queer forgetting, Hannabach explains in “Untimely Forgetting,” “is not a passive process, but rather an active venture of tracing the edges of that which must be forgotten in order for subjectivity to be established and maintained.” In the hands of Lee/Schecter, red lipstick is more than a feminine commodity; it is an instrument for making “gender trouble.”

Beyond flattering, Minh-ha’s articulation of my work gave me a fresh perspective of my body. But her words, like Mariah’s materials, and the extreme pleasure they gave me, made me ask myself: am I actually built more to be a model/ muse than maker? Am I too passive a work-maker? Do I enjoy doing nothing to actually making work?

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the heroine Lily receives a warning from her friend (another woman, but one who is married), when she tries to hatch a strategy for landing a particularly rich husband: “Whatever you do, Lily, do nothing!” This is a caution not against the delicate minefield of gold-digging, but actually a dictum for feminine self-embodiment. Lily is directed not to be too intricate in her scheming because the very act of activity in fact will give her an aggressive, and thus masculine, aura. In other words: to “do” anything is to do oneself out of femininity.

This is why in feminist terms, bodily stasis (“doing nothing”) usually equals a passivity against which a woman must constantly and consciously rebel. But the pleasure of modeling, the pleasure of stilling your body toward the construction of a femininity, does not feel like passivity.

The grandest counterexample to what I see as the false equation between bodily stasis and political passivity can be found in the strategy of protest concocted by the civil rights workers of the 1960s against police brutality. Following to beautifully dogged extreme Martin Luther King’s interpolation of Mahatma Gahndi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, civil rights workers went “perfectly limp” against the physical violence dished out by Southern police. The phrase “perfectly limp” I take from Nina Simone’s song “Go Limp,” a magnificent, complex anthem about racial protest and love. The song also begins with a scene of one woman (a mother) warning another (her daughter) into femininity:

Oh Daughter, dear Daughter,
take warning from me
and don't you go marching
with the N-A-A-C-P.
For they'll rock you and roll you
and shove you into bed.
And if they steal your nuclear secret
you'll wish you were dead.

As with Lily Bart, the daughter in “Go Limp” is warned against (political) activity (“go marching”) because to do so will lead to a loss of her virginity and thus her bounty as a marriageable feminine being. But like all good daughters, the daughter defies her mother—though softly: she will carry a brick in her handbag. Not only that, the daughter goes on to find that political activity, when fighting for desegregation, goes hand-in-hand with femininity-granting body stasis:

One day at the briefing
she'd heard a man say,
"Go perfectly limp,
and be carried away."
So when this young man suggested
it was time she was kissed,
she remembered her brief
and did not resist.

The good people at “the N-A-A-C-P” are giving instructions on how to get arrested while peacefully demonstrating: “go perfectly limp and be carried away”—by the police who attempt to obstruct peaceful protest. But this political pedagogy serves as a feminine one as well, for going perfectly limp and being carried away is in fact what she does to a cute boy with a beard who takes a fancy to her. What I love about the song is not just the complex ways in which it articulates the femme-centric core of the civil rights movement (at least the King, rather than Malcolm, faction) but also the ways in which a political commitment to peaceful protest grants a woman a different way to embody traditional feminine stillness that is not at all “passive” in a patriarchal sense.

I don’t have any urgent political activity in my life that requires me to “go perfectly limp and be carried away” by the police (I have a hard enough time as it is to find a cute boy with a beard for whom to go limp—although I’m getting close). But there is a major, and I daresay, political part of my identity which has everything to do with doing nothing: that of being a teacher. I love teaching my students at RISD. But whenever I get too much pleasure out of it, this old hackneyed adage tears through my brain: “Those who can’t do, teach.” As a professor at the college level, I am actually expected to do both: “do” (make my own work) and “teach” (help students make their work). And while I am constantly doing, there are days when I feel like my “doing” is growing smaller and smaller in comparison to the teaching.

Recently, two of my former RISD students, Tara Perry and Greg Kozatek (as a part of the production collective Hunting Party), sent me a music video they created for a raptress. For the video, they created a fake magazine called "lipstickeater":

see the whole video here

So finally, here was the meeting point of "modeling" (Joony Schecter: Cover Girl!!) and "teaching." It encapsulated my relationship to bodily stasis and art making. I think of this teacherly “can’t doing” as going limp. I let myself be carried away by the exuberance and beauty my student’s making. It is always good to find shards of myself in the work of my students, but I feel like I’m truly doing my job, truly going limp, when I see that I’ve been able to assist/ affect/ nurture my women students to create work that challenges the patriarchal norms of femininity. Then, not only am I doing my work as a teacher of art makers, but I am also doing my work as my own cultural worker: a feminist art worker.

These are some of my women students who let me go limp for them:

La Invitación from Diandre Fuentes on Vimeo.

DIANDRE FUENTES’ video employs warped out pop music to give an aggressive, revolutionary aura to the scene of an adolescent girl’s play with traditional feminine trappings.

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JAMIE KRASNER’s words and videos conceptualize femininity as fragmentation (an idea which I share with her as a bedrock of my own self-creation these past threesome decades). But her embrace of fragmentation shockingly builds a tough carapace of tenderness.

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TAMARA JOHNSON’s performance transforms her petite self into a superwoman—able to hold up a beam that supports an entire building. (The beam is made of foam) Johnson erases her whiteness and blondness by not only shrouding it in masculine workwear, but by making her flesh merge with the “steel” of the scaffolding, she herself becomes the building.

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LEXIE XTRAVAGANZA (née Newman) created, for her senior degree project, a collection of knitwear inspired by Paris is Burning (which she viewed in my class). But this gorgeous work was but a material extension of a fascinating work she’s doing in the re-invention of herself as an “Xtravaganza.” In taking on the moniker (it’s her official facebook name) she is linking herself to the famous drag house, but also digitally re-calibrating the boundaries of her body, so that her femaleness becomes distilled to femininity.

I think (and thank) all of these women create femininities that rancor against patriarchal norms of how a woman ought to connect her body to the world. But I think about Lexie a lot these days because I’ve been trying desperately to grow my hair back out to its Medusa length. (And most distressingly, hair growing is not an act of will) Lexie’s most recent facebook profile photo is a beautiful showcasing of big hair. It looks as though the camera caught her mid-hair shake. I love this photo because it reminds me of my own past facebook profile photos.

Lexie is a twentysomething statuesque blond female. I am a thirtysomething flat Asian male. But we are both girls in t-shirts, luxuriating in our hair. This is how gender and racial bodies get crossed: bodies that create echo. I go limp for my students, but they also let me be carried away into my own body. I was reading over the student evaluations for my courses last semester, and I came across one that really tickled and touched me. After the positive comments about the content of my class and the style of my teaching, there was a wonderfully indulgent flourish: “Joon, if you read this let it be known that you have beautiful hair!” If my teaching, my not-doing, leads me back to this place, I am more than satisfied.

in the mirror of my mind, my drapes match my carpet

My facebook status from yesterday: “GIVING SOME BETTY DRAPER.” I don’t twitter, and I don’t like to use the facebook statussing to inform my meagre 219 friends the extremely boring activities of my daily life: like they need to know that I cleaned my sister’s apartment. But that’s just what I did yesterday (OK I just cleaned the dining area) but it felt significant enough to broadcast in the language of drag. I was “giving some Betty Draper,” as in, I was embodying January Jones’s character on the television series Mad Men. Betty Draper is of course, the 1960s iceberg of a spouse (now ex-spouse) of the show’s protagonist. (Betty is so glacial, when her widowed father and his new ladyfriend come for a visit, she puts them in separate bedrooms. LOVE IT!!)

But this is not a glorification of housewifery. I don’t find anything glamorous about being an indentured slave to some man, cooking cleaning and talking babytalk to an infant all day. I clean house in an old Skinny Puppy t-shirt. The only way I like crinoline is shredded and cigarette burned. But I do like the way the January Jones embodies the tenets of her enslavement: she’s angry. Jones plays a repressed housewife, but she practically seethes in every scene. She’s so tense and clipped that she might as well just wear a sign that says “I HATE MY LIFE.” Repression is the vase into which she pours the flower of her fury. I love Betty Draper not because she is a (gay) male fantasy of a sexy housewife, but because I love the way the female actor playing her embodies the anger of a woman forced to embody the male fantasy of a sexy housewife.

When I cleaned my sister’s apartment yesterday, I wasn’t seething at all. My lawyer sister is a working woman and a former tomboy to boot so domestic labor is definitely not her thing. But the night before last, she complained loudly, “God I hate how this house looks like a hoarder’s house! Stuff everywhere! The kitchen table is a mess!” Which it was: half of it was covered with expired vitamins, dead pens, old bills, court documents, make-up she was bored with. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or thrilled, because even though she was just letting out the complaint into the air at no one in particular, she sounded exactly like some mid-20^th Century upper-middle class American husband. That’s when I decided I’d just take up her challenge and give (her) some Betty Draper.

So what does it mean that I want to embody this hybrid of sexist femme persona and proto-feminist performing female that is “Betty Draper”? Especially at this time in my life, when I have gone through almost a decade of giving various black ladies (Natalie Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Ross, and of course, Mariah) as my everyday persona, I am suddenly wanting to embody...a white woman????

That I see an Aryan lady when I look in the mirror of my brain always gives me pause. It makes me think of Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, in which a little black girl loses her mind due to her consuming passion for Shirley Temple. But that is a novel that is seriously misread all the time. I’d love to explain more, but that is the last chapter of my old Ph.D. dissertation/ first book manuscript, which is still seeking a publisher home. So I’ll use instead a faster and more contemporary example: the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. There is a scene in that film in which the dark-skinned, African-American heroine (who is also very overweight) is getting ready for her day in front of her mirror. We (the camera) are positioned behind her and we suddenly see what she sees in the mirror: not a dark-skinned African-American who is very overweight, but a slim, pale, blond, white girl.

The scene is presumably there to indicate to us the heroine’s lack of self-worth: she wants to obliterate her own body for a white one, which she believes will give her the happiness she desires. As Venus Xtravaganza famously said: “I want to be a spoiled rich white girl; they get everything they want.” In this way, the white reflection in the mirror is a symptom of Precious’s racial self-hatred: Precious wants to be a white girl. However, that is true only if she thinks that the white girl in the mirror as her reflection. But what if the white girl were not a reflection in the mirror, but the mirror itself?

Then we have to think about the mirror itself as a tool of self-creation. I’m not going to go into Lacan here. Instead, I’ll cite a white lady:

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

Thus spoke Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. Substitute “Women” with “White Girl” and “man” with “Black Girl.” According to Woolf, the mirror is useful precisely for its distorting function. There is a difference between the material of the mirror and the phenomenon of the reflection. Being a mirror: you are the object with which the looker creates a certain (amplified) image of one’s self; being a reflection: you are a distortion that the mirror provides. I embody Betty Draper/ January Jones not because I desire to turn my yellow skin white, but because the white femininity becomes the hard glass with which I can make my flesh an unimaginable version of “girl.” “White Girl” can be a mirror rather than a reflection. It is in this way that the mirror scene in Precious is my favorite scene in the film. There is something weirdly punkrock, something subtly rebellious, about a 300 lb. black girl seeing herself as and through a 100 lb. white girl. Through the trick of fantasy (or psychosis, take your pick) the black girl has transformed the cells of her flesh into the cells of her imagination. She was saying a big FUCK YOU to biology. The image of white femininity is not an unattainable goal, but an attained one. The white girl in the mirror is not a glamorous ideal, but something so merely and importantly mundane: a white version of herself. Two girls, black and white, in the same black leather.

de profundis

I’m suffering the loss of my long long hair. Sixty days after the impulsively calculated moment with scissors, I am in full regretful mode, in the pain of waiting. I know it is frivolous and self-indulgent to plunge into mourning for long hair that you yourself willingly and willfully cut, but there it is. Suffering is one very long moment. I can’t divide it by seasons. I can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. It feels like time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Friends tell me it looks fine, but there it is and remains: the knifelike remorse I feel every time I pass the mirror. And I find myself counting the days to go by, obsessing over the fractions of inches pushing out of my scalp and measuring it against the days gone by.

Because my hair has been my diary. Like a certain species of girl writers (Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin, Uma Thurman in the film Sweet and Lowdown), I’m never entirely sure whether I’m writing down the experiences through which I’m living or I’m actually living through specific experiences so I can have something to write down. That is why, right now, in the prison cell of my bobbed hair, I look back to that night I cut off the long braid of hair and wonder if I needed a reason to look forward to a day 365 or 730 days from October 10, 2010. Some people’s lives are a nicely projected vector: they know the exact temporal and spatial point of their destination, and the arc of that movement is like an aced geometry test. My life has always been a heat-seeking missile: I know where it needs to go, but unfortunately, the target keeps moving so my days keep hurling itself this way and that, getting lost, jagging up its path, knowing nothing but the sole certainty that it’s being pulled by the small but definite heat of a dream in the future.

Using the tiny movement of hair growth as the pages of my diary makes my days feel long and slow. But at least I know my hair is a ceaseless change; its growth is a fact of my body. Two years from now, I’m not sure whether I will have a published book, tenure at my job, or a husband. Waiting and working for those things make me tired, precisely because they are moving targets with vague body heat. But hair growth is inevitable: I just have to sit on my butt and wait. The rate at which the pages of my diary gains heft word by hard-earned word is the same one by which my hair will become heavy enough to pull my head back into its destined posture.

But waiting for the day when my hair can again cover my back is still painful; the viscerality of regret is real. The diary is a way to create my body without the benefit of the mirror: my flesh constructed solely through the puked word-particles of my immediate past. In this same way I will try to dissipate my body: to have a less visual sense of my body while I wait for my hair to catch up with my desires. Less mirror-reliant, and more tactility. A molecular sense of self. A more abstract, yet more material sense of my body: air hitting my stretched out neck; the bounce of a good handbag against the tops of my hips; the red warmth of my eyes when it traps the dust of raccooned black eyeliner; how my titties get excited under a soft old t-shirt; the masochistic crunch of toes squeezed into narrow hard leather loafers.

(This piece contains an interpolation of “De Profundis,” by Oscar Wilde, 1897)

children get older

I have a white hair. I had a white hair. In the early morning light of November 9, 2010, that fucking one white lock was glaring at me, daring me not to pull it out. I yanked it out. I want to believe that it is a fluke of vegetarian vitamin deficiency, but I’m afraid that it is really the start of an ambush of aging cells.

In fact, I had a foreboding of this getting old thing just the week before that fateful morning. My buddy Trace and I were putzing around downtown Boston. It was a Saturday, the day before Halloween, and at the Marc by Marc Jacobs store on Newbury Street, cute tweenies were planning a costume party:

“Yeah, totally dress up and come over tonight. We’re having a party and the theme is 90s grunge. It should be so fun!!”

As we walked out of the store, I nudged Trace: “Did you hear what those shopkids were saying?” She hadn’t, so I repeated it, and then got a bit hysterical: “Can you believe this. ‘90s grunge' is a costume for them! But it’s not a costume for me; ‘90s grunge’ is MY LIFE!!”

Which is true. It’s not just about operating my brain to the rhythm of Hole’s “Miss World” and Liz Phair’s “Glory.” It’s putting myself together in a way that grunge music pours of me like a too heavy perfume. This personal aesthetic is dictated by the epic slogan of a Nirvana t-shirt:

FUDGE PACKIN

CRACK SMOKIN

SATAN WORSHIPPIN

MOTHER FUCKER

OK of course not literally. But I take the nihilist spirit of the text and turn it into a styling structure of feminine dissonance: stiff jeans, simpering t-shirts, limpid flannel; careful jewelry and sloppy make-up; big fat hair, small posture; clean skin, filthy mind. I used to think all of these things represented me. But the layers of the years, nay, layers of decades, have fused these things to my skin and I, me myself and I, have become a representation of those things. In other words, I used to think I wore these things on my body to carry with me the ideas they symbolized. But when twenty-year olds see me as an extra in a costume drama about the 1990s, I myself have become the symbol, I myself have become the costume. Bag me up, price me up ($6.66) and staple a cardboard fold-over tag on top: 90S GRUNGE COSTUME.

But unlike how the white hair makes me feel, I like this feeling of being a prepackaged costume for children ages 15 to 25. Like my insides (Born in Korea, moved to Iowa, had bad acne, was gothically gay, went to University of Virginia, blah blah blah ofpersonal history) have been scooped out clean and replaced with a jittery expectation of being filled by a younger body who wants to embody an idea that my body has become.

So growing old means: I’m becoming hollow. Hollow like a costume waiting for October 31^st, hollow like...a handbag. As you may or may not be able to tell on my most current masthead, I have been feeling fused to my newest and most favorite handbag: a Proenza Schouler PS1 in black leather. The intense level of attachment I have to this thing has been something over which I’ve been wrangling with my words, but is captured nicely in the publicity video for the PS1 in patent:

Skin-sheathed body becomes reduced to handbag. When the cute tweenies unknowingly labeled me so old as to become costume, they also turned me into a handbag. And this is not a bad way to learn to grow old: you become not a role model for youth, but a role, as in, a shell to put on over complex flesh.

Being a role, being a shell: If I am an empty handbag, who is going to carry me around? I ask that, rather than: who is going to fill me and with what is that person going to fill me? This is a totally different self-pedagogy of growing old than the tired one of waiting for that one (that man) who will make my soul feel like a blood-enriched vaginal cavity. But what does it mean to think about the sugar walls of my brain as the jacquard lining of a luxury leather good? Rather than mark the passing years by the dread of not finding the man who will fill me thus complete me, I will instead imagine how the children who grow older with me will, in their brain, skin me and pull me around them to have youth adventures in the world. I might not know who or how many have done this to me. But I’ll know that it has been done: my skin has become leather and is having fun, out there, everywhere.