COORDINATES
behind me, right now, and what's ahead
Hi!!
This has been the Eternal Winter —little sunshine, and definitely no spotless mind, if you ask me.
In this dispatch: updates, reflections on ANTM, reckoning with eros, a special workshop, and an intro to a new series I’m starting.
Lots of stuff! One of the first cues of mindfulness is to locate oneself in time and space. Where is the body? The brain? Sounds silly, but does the trick. There’s been some stuff I have been wanting to tell you so I figured I’d space it out this way.
In a vast continuum of grey days, and snow that begins pristine, then dirties, then melts… Here’s what’s up, and what’s to come.
behind me
My triptych for the Paris Review, on the Garden of Earthly Delights. Tasked with thinking of three objects that somehow harmonized, I wrote about the famous Bosch painting, the show The Traitors (US)1, and a kitchen disaster in which I hurt myself and photographed it. The prompt they gave me—a triptych—is, I think, so smart. If writing is elegiac, then the objects of our attention should come in holy threes.
I read Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever. As a person who has assisted some Big Deal Guys on Literary Food Projects (though none close to the badness of Batali and Bourdain… though ask me about the time a famous chef told me I should lose 5–8 lbs) there was some real resonance. She captures the mess and sexiness of the industry, the way that the work becomes a rhythm in the body, the way it all becomes so vital that a person—as I like to say—finds the edge. Also she is just a great writer and so fun to read.
The ANTM documentary, Reality Check, did not feel like a documentary, actually, because I sensed so many different people were told that their story would finally be shared with the world. This meant a lot of people being mad at Tyra, and Tyra producing the documentary. Hmm.
As a kid, I watched ANTM religiously. I loved the girls and their outfits (often, the outfits were just jeans). I loved learning about their responsibilities at home, their quirks, their pain. I loved—maybe punitively—seeing that superficial beauty had limits in what it could transcend, and that fashion and embodiment meant relying on something different. I loved watching Miss J. I loved at the end of the day, when the girls would sit with their feet in a glowing hot tub, drinking wine out of mugs and smoking cigarettes and taking turns with the phone, calling their moms and kids.
The show was so fucked up, obviously. And the doc was not great. But I was interested in the idea, widely written about, that we needed a bigger apology from Tyra. Girls… I’m not sure it’s coming. If only an apology from Tyra would have fixed—and would now fix—the systemic issues from which the show was born. Also, people who have attained major attention for their work are likely not going to apologize in the way you want them to, because it would then mean apologizing for it all. Which they don’t want to do. And if they did: would they apologize to you, a stranger??
Anyway, of course we want to see contrition, and Tyra is freaky and did some bad stuff. I feel like the embodiment of all of this is so deeply her new project: serving Hot Ice Cream, called SMiZE Cream. This woman is busy, with insistent branding, genuinely attempting to alter the physics of the universe.2
where I am right now
Is the fact that I assume an apology is so out of the question indicative of how bad the world has gotten? Nihilism, to me, is useless. But might it be the cousin of Acceptance? So many bad things happening right now are beyond reason. Who knows!
Have been eating a lot of clementines… treating Haribo Peaches as if they are fruit… roasting chicken with pickled jalapeños… looking for brightness, I think.
Anyway, here is a collage I made the other day of what I’d like my life to look like.
what’s ahead
Have been reading Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson and look forward to finishing. She is brilliant, always, though I wonder if I get the point. Desire is lack? Lack means that we are human? Love is safety, and means that we can continue onwards?
I am teaching a workshop at the beautiful GTHR yoga studio in Brooklyn Heights on March 21, called Big Exhale, on Writing the Body. Basically, we’ll relieve tension through some simple, pragmatic somatic practices and then we will write it out. Register here. (If it doesn’t bring you to the sign-up directly, scroll to March 21.)
Come!
FINALLY… INTRODUCING… PALATE FRIENDS :)
A new series! This is where I ask people who inspire me to explain more about their creative work, and how they get it done. I’ve long been interested in what exists outside the product—the things we end up reading, consuming, engaging with, loving. What builds that? What has to happen, so that the thing comes to life? What messes and distractions, snacks and vices, habits and quirks and errors create what we come to call a practice?
Planning on at least one a month and cannot wait to showcase some people I really think are inspiring, smart, funny, honest.
Okay! That felt good to get out of my brain and into yours :)
Thank you for reading, and more veryyyyy soon xoxo
Also if you watched the Traitors this season – I think we witnessed some cinematic history in what happened between Maura and Rob. We’ve all looked at a Rob that way, and we’ve all wanted to sit in a helicopter with his arm kind of around us, and we’ve all gasped as he jumped – hands crossed in an X over his body – into the frigid Loch.
I just need to write an essay about this, I think. Too much to say!!
Looking for brightness 😘