Mary Thompson I love Roy Orbison. I don’t claim to be his most ardent or knowledgable fan, but I love him all the same. I once wrote a short story and read it to an audience as a poorly created excuse to defend my love for him. I’ll make a fool out of myself for him, a fool for love. My favorite of Orbison’s songs are little altars to longing. He was a man dedicated to loneliness and dreams and lonely dreams. Dreaming is for the solitary, done in isolation and silence where the noise of others can’t distract you from creating something beautiful, like the song “In Dreams.” I forget about “In Dreams” until I am reminded of it and then I play it over and over on repeat until I let it drift out of my daily routine. The cycle begins again. Try as I might, I can’t fall asleep to this song or feel at ease with it. I have a bad habit of wanting consume the things I love and inhabit them, but I cannot fully own this song because of Blue Velvet. Lynch’s use of it transforms it from a perfect song into a perfect scene, made creepier and lonelier still. The scene glows behind my eyelids as I close them to sleep, as if Roy or Benny, his sauve impersonator in Blue Velvet, are my very own candy-colored clown. But they are not and they do not bring me dreams. More and more I have trouble sleeping, let alone dreaming. This little essay began from notes I typed quickly on my phone app. It lives right besides another one that I only look at in the middle of the night. I mantra myself into a calmer state and, even though it doesn’t usually bring sleep, it reduces the panic. I repeat, “There is nothing you can do right now. You’ll deal with it in the morning.” Go to sleep. Everything is all right. Do I deal with it in the morning, though? I usually have the same stresses in the daytime, but I am better at ignoring them. When I can’t ignore them, I listen to a playlist I made entitled “Relax, Nerd.” It’s filled with Beach Boy songs (more loneliness) but no Orbison. Occasionally I fall asleep just fine. I even dream. Often my dreams are stress dreams, nightmares of indecision. I wake with bloody lips, my teeth worrying at them the whole night through. But every now and then, if I am lucky, I dream of you. Sometimes I fall asleep and have a pleasant dream in which we are having a good day. You and me. You are 2000 miles away. I talk to you about watching Blue Velvet for the first time. You sing “In Dreams” to me over the phone. You joke as if you don’t have a good voice. We wish each other sweet dreams, a blessing we give back and forth often. Sometimes the wish comes true, like it did last night. You seemed so close then, but only in dreams.
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Sam Johnson
A handy list of ten cursed locations to check out this Halloween, rated for your convenience.
Peter Grieser Imagine you’re the “boy” Vince Staples is dismissing in “Yeah Right.” Imagine trying to tell him your career is about to take off, and he cuts you off, sneers and a mockingly repeats “boy, yeah right” at you ad nauseum. Imagine looking in the mirror in a dingy club bathroom, squinting to see through the graffiti scratches and replaying Vince’s words over and over again in your head: If your song played, would they know that? Is your real talent self-deception? Your ears ring; all you hear is tinny rumbling, a broken car stereo wheezing out its last bass thumps before dying. It’s one thing if you are lying to yourself. But Vince exposes your real crime—you are deceiving everyone around you. Your girlfriend? If she finds out who you really are, it won’t end well for you. Come correct, and she won’t let you in. You think you can handle the situation before it spirals out of control, but Kućka’s haunting whispers sit on your shoulder, reminding you that you “got an enemy that changes dependin’ what direction you’re facin’.” In a panic, you run out of the club, heaving and fumbling for a cigarette in the alley, but you just can’t shake the feeling that Vince and his crew are following you. But at this point, there’s only one thing you can do: keep moving forward. Keep pretendin’, make it real until every cell replaced, erased. You light that cigarette, look up, and a shadowy Kendrick Lamar approaching you, his braids slowly swaying with his confident gait. He starts with a whisper, you can barely hear him. But he keeps talking, walking, getting louder, getting closer. Soon, he’s inches from you, he’s yelling, and with each syllable, moving his head like he’s shadowboxing. K-Dot twilight the zeitgeist. You try to explain your conversation with Vince earlier, but it’s no use, Kendrick is on a roll now. He keeps yelling, and you’re still distracted by the assembly line beat. I don’t fair fight, but I bear fight. What have you gotten yourself into? Madeline Rose Williams
(Primarily written in short bursts after 1am in Notes on my phone when I couldn't sleep.) I used to be ashamed of loving Lana Del Rey. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. People dismissed her as this weird, flipped MPDG: melancholic, obsessive, empty. And I thought they might be right. (Blue Jeans, Video Games, Ultraviolence) But at some point, I stopped apologizing for her, or for listening to her. (That was around the same time I stopped apologizing for myself constantly.) And that was a very good decision on my part. I could get into how she’s a symbol — well, not just a symbol, way more — of representations/constructions of femininity: a kind of frozen 3D-printed mechanical sculpture of idealized feminine behavior. Lipstick, lashes, hair done up to the point where it looks like a frozen Pantene commercial. The whole deal. I could go down a rage-spiral about how people (okay men, mostly men, nearly always men) love to complain about the tangibly crafted nature of this look, about how it doesn’t look “natural,” how it’s a deceptive facade (another rabbit hole). I could talk about how complicated Lana is: the fact that she’s not most people’s idea of a feminist icon, not even mine; the stressful and confusing thread of patriotic symbolism that runs through her work; the rampant appropriation. But plenty of people have gone over all of the above, and done it better than I would. (Meaghan Garvey, for starters.) What I can talk about, though, is why I do love her, almost in spite of myself. (A disclaimer: this is about what I was looking for, what I found in the character that emerges from her music, to me. We're past assuming direct, autobiographical narrative, right? Especially with artists who are women? God I hope so. Also Lana is deeply, deeply — I don’t even want to use the word problematic because that doesn’t even begin to cover it. But yes. That. Anyway; on we go.) When you’re a well-behaved, approval-craving, morally-minded young thing who just wants to please people, it starts to drain you. And when people are cruel, you start to wonder how you can maintain your personal system of ethics. And if you do want to maintain belief in people’s capacity for love and justice, and try to be a good person yourself — whatever that means — you're going to need an outlet. Lana was my outlet. She sang about being heartbroken, sure, but she also sang about not giving a fuck. She’s got songs about falling in love, all while retaining a kind of artistic distance from the whole mess, letting yourself feel without fully getting involved. It’s not that it’s a lie when she tells someone she loves them — it’s just that she seems to only partly believes it. (Shades of Cool, Brooklyn Baby) And she (or rather the character/narrator) finds a way to regain power when being used and drained and taken advantage of. Seems to find power in that very thing; in giving yourself into a kind of powerlessness, always knowing that you can flip the script. Just because you didn’t murder him and throw him in the back of his own truck, knocking back a whiskey and driving off alone into the night, doesn’t mean you didn’t kinda want to. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t. (Kinda Outta Luck) That distance is appealing. And her attitude towards being objectified is a deep relief from the constant battle to be seen as a human being: fuck it, look at me, I’m gorgeous; don’t you want me, she says. Don’t you want to sweep me off my feet? (Burning Desire) The Lana Way is terrifying, but a release. Presenting a version of yourself — well, everyone does that, but this is a total escape. Pulling A Lana means that you can act in ways that the real you never would, you can inhabit a totally different persona: one that doesn’t care much about boys’ feelings, one that doesn’t mind playing along with their fantasies and watching them move like a puppet. Dance, dude. I’ve got you wrapped around my finger, and you think you’re in charge. Smile, kiss, laugh at a bad joke. It’s almost too easy. I don’t really play at that game in the real world, with real people. I actually like meeting people as equals, and connecting with individuals, and I don’t get pleasure out of being manipulative (most of the time). But at a point in my life when I was deeply hurt and fucked up beyond belief, I hopped on Tinder and went full Lana. It felt good to play the part and keep me (the small, bruised me inside) removed. Lana did the talking. But mostly, with a handful of exceptions, just listening to Lana does the trick. It gets the urge to stop caring out of my system. Keeps me from hurting others just because I’ve been hurt. Lust for Life came out last summer. It’s different. It’s not just addictive behaviors and a deep aching desire for fucked up romantic power dynamics, though there’s plenty of that (the stuff that drew me to her in the first place: escapist bad behavior, a protagonist enamored with making the wrong choices with the wrong people.) Lust for Life is it’s own thing — a collection of contemporary hymns attempting to understand the State of the Union. (What union, we wonder; what state?) “Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?” (When The World Was At War We Kept Dancing) Personally, I don’t care so much. Those aren’t questions that really concern me. What are we so worried about preserving? Vast, powerful hypocrisy? Widespread bigotry and racism and so on? But in a country, in a time (so far as country and time exist, which is a conversation for another time) where/when the pus is being drawn to the surface to such a degree that even those (us) who’ve ignored it for our whole lives can’t fail to notice all this rancid poison, Lana’s given us new songs to sing along to. Things are gross right now; repulsive. But they always have been. Her music, like us, is slow to adjust. (Get Free) Still, there’s plenty of anger and bitterness. Thank god — I still need an outlet for that, we all do. “All of my peaches are ruined (bitch)” she sings, breathy, appalled; an offended goddess, and I feel vindicated. I love a good Fuck You anthem. And no one’s got that shit down like Lana. (Cherry, In My Feelings) Mary Thompson
My parents may have handed me my first book of saints. I may have picked it out myself at the visiting library on the church plaza. I could found it on our bookshelf, read and discarded by my older siblings, and finally now mine. Or maybe it was all of these. Our bookshelf had to have held more than one Children’s Book of Saints or My First Book of Saints, or something similar. It possibly had a puffy, plastic cover or was a thin, slim edition held together with staples, the Catholic version of a zine. It doesn’t matter really, how many we had, what they were called, they had all the same stories – abridged and somewhat sanitized stories of bloody martyrdom and hagiographies paired with daily Christian lessons, reasons why we should pray and celebrate feast days. What I do clearly remember is pouring over this book, these books. I loved the saints. They remain my favorite part of Catholicism. I loved the women that turned into men, into non-human or super human figures, who refused their fate through faith. I loved Joan of Arc. I imagined being her, dressed in armor, leading an army, being burnt at the stake, but not feeling a thing – the physicality of my body removed from me. I was a devout child, but I wasn’t always good. By the second grade, I told everyone I planned to become a nun. I was cursed with a temper, though. My father told me that he had a temper too. That it ran in the blood. That I would have to control it. To struggle is holy. I was named after the Virgin Mary, but she was too good for me. I could not imagine myself a mother. In my saint books I found another Mary, Saint Mary of the Desert. This Mary was young and bad. I now know she is Saint Mary of Egypt and she traded sexual favors for money. But at the time, the book was purposefully vague on the nature of her sins and all I knew was that she was so bad she couldn’t step foot within a church. Her wickedness stopped her; her impure soul created a barrier. In the car outside church, I asked my mother if there was any point of going in. I had sinned. I would no longer be allowed into heaven so Mass seemed entirely irrelevant. My mother explained Purgatory to me. To struggle is holy. Jesus doubted in the garden. Denied, Mary of the Desert wanted entrance. She prayed for forgiveness, promised a life of asceticism. She took up life in the desert, starved slowly to death. Removed herself from her body. Became a saint. Her discarded carcass did not decay. In the Southern California summer, I would wear my swimsuit around the house because we didn’t have a pool. I would lay on the cool tile floor of the kitchen with my arms outspread trying to find a little relief from the heat. I wondered if I could be like Mary of the Desert. I wanted to suffer so as not to be bad. To transform from something human into something more. To not decay or rot away. I knew I couldn’t. I was born at the wrong time. It was a foolish hope to want to be lost in something as ancient and holy as sainthood. Saint Mary of Egypt’s feast day is April 1. The patron saint of fools wanting to be pure. Sam Johnson
Andre Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name is not a new work. Considered a staple of queer fiction, it enjoyed a much-lauded release in 2007 and settled into its cult following alongside Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with grace. That is, until this year, at which time I seized the opportunity to do this review, as I still have a considerable amount of feelings about this book, and each time I imagine a room full of Sundance critics, all with their little notebooks and pencils out, watching Timothee Chalamet jack off onto an apricot as Sufjan Stevens plays in the background I have to go lie down in a dark room. To set the scene: Call Me By Your Name takes place in the Italian Riviera in the year 1983 and chronicles seventeen year old Elio “Thirst Has No Curfew” Perlman’s intense quest for the ass of the twenty-four year old grad student staying at the family villa for the summer. Ideally a reader’s introductory experience with this novel would also occur while summering in the Italian Riviera, holding a margarita in each hand, and soaking in a bathtub full of even more tequila. Call Me By Your Name is Peak Beach Reading masquerading as Serious Fiction, which is ridiculous considering it’s the literary equivalent of an uncomfortably erotic yet couture fragrance ad. Peel back the heavy layers of pretension that insist this novel is capital-L Literary, and you end up with a much more enjoyable, if slightly trashy, period romance of the dollar-on-Kindle variety. I won’t lie; this is difficult work. Andre Aciman is white, male, and a professor of literary theory. The prose is dense, and three-fourths of the book is Elio getting a nosebleed if Oliver--the grad student--so much as brushes against Elio’s foot under the dinner table. Elio is a teen as well as our narrator, and there is much wailing and rending of garments as he experiences every emotion at once during innocuous leisure activities that require Oliver to be slightly naked and imminently bangable. While fun at first, this dynamic continues through the majority of the book, only resolved in the last quarter once the reader is fully identified with Elio in his desperate desire for our heros to just fuck already, please God. The unexpected upside to the literary review circuit throwing Aciman their panties and comparing him to Proust (gag), is that their effusive praise lends enough Artistic Credibility to the property to option it for a movie. Which brings us to today. A scene: Armie Hammer as Oliver, hairy-chested and square-jawed, runs across a sunny lawn clad only in a tight pair of mint-green swim trunks, to rub sunscreen all over Timothee Chalamet’s appealingly twinky body. In the clip, we watch as Chalamet-as-Elio’s soul visibly leaves his body to scream his sexual frustration into the void. The camera pays loving attention to Oliver’s ridiculous dinner-plate hands on the Elio’s birdlike shoulder before tracking Elio’s line of sight, predictably deadlocked on Oliver’s ass as he runs past to Play A Sport. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know why it happened. And yet, dear reader, I feel as blessed as if Alanis Morissette herself had descended from the heavens singing isn’t it ironic, and dropped this movie into my lap in our shared national nightmare of 2017. I shouldn’t even call this a movie, it’s a film. It’s Art. Somewhere in this film’s 130 minute runtime Elio will have sex with an apricot--yes, you read that right--that someone else will eat, and Sufjan Stevens will sing mournfully in the background about crosses and turtledoves, and it will possibly be the most tremendous thing that’s ever happened to me. This is the medium that Call Me By Your Name deserves to be told in, the medium that can truly capture the lush, fever-dream atmosphere of the novel while cutting through the gordian knot of Aciman’s prose. Elio is still our narrator, but each clip of the film that emerges puts the heavy emotional lifting on his and Oliver’s body language and the negative space crowding their sparse dialogue. It’s easier to lean into the tropey, romance-novel underpinnings of the book with the visuals conveying so much important information. If there were bodices here, they’d be ripping. If there were members, they’d be throbbing. Perhaps best of all, this movie was picked up by Sony Picture Classics, which means a wider distribution and a lower chance I’ll have to sell my internal organs to see it. I can’t wait. And this time I’ll experience this story in the way it was meant to be experienced; in the full bloom of summer, a little turned on, and saluting Luca Guadagnino with a flask of something terrible. Madeline Rose Williams
I read The Sellout and thought: hey, well fuck. I read The Sellout because an old friend had been telling me to read it for over a year, and finally they just handed me their copy so I thought, sure, fine, and opened it. I read The Sellout and laughed so hard eating dinner alone (I love eating dinner alone, in restaurants, at off-hours; the server leaves me to myself a little bit more than usual, lets me sit at the awkward small table and stay too long, lets me be). I read The Sellout and I loved the cover, the hardback thick-cornered cardboard cased in a smooth white jacket with a little man in garish pink trousers holding his golden lantern over and over and over. Made me think of pajamas and buttons and my cold bare feet. I read The Sellout and stopped trying to give plot summaries to bartenders/strangers/friends who asked me “what are you reading?” and then “what’s it about?” because I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified, and anyway, who knows? I read The Sellout and thought: I’m going to make my dad/sister/Sam/boss/Jess/cousin/teacher/Mary/aunt/mom read this, I’m going to make everyone read this, I’m going to read this again and again. I read The Sellout and when I finished, I set it down in my bed, and stroked the pink and white jacket, touched the heads of the identical little men with their identical lanterns and coats and trousers, and turned out the light and pulled the blanket over my head and loved my tired body and brain and heart, somehow, and loved a lot of people that I kinda hate from under that blanket, somehow, and tried to fall asleep like that, breath heavy and close, book still resting (heavy/close) next to my pillow. |
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