When I first moved to LA, I remember sitting and looking out at the new skyline of my city and my only thought was, “this place will try to make me the same”. I think this was maybe me looking out at a place that I knew I understood culturally more than I did of previous places I had lived. Living abroad, feeling a bit like an outsider at all times, made it that I never was inclined to move with the undercurrents of a city, because I wasn’t really aware of what was going on with the body of water that was the city.
Culture can be both an inspiration and a weight. In some ways, it is a Janus word meaning two things that are at odds with one another. Culture railroads us into norms, without us ever really being aware of what is happening. Being an outsider — not by choice, but by context — means you never have anything you are trying to become; you are free from the undertow. Culture is something we want to fight against while we also create it; it is the bedding of our daydreams. If you’re lucky the bed just has some sweat in the sheets, but there’s a good chance that at some point, someone’s going to shit the bed you’re sleeping in.
I used to live in this apartment with this artist. She was very beautiful and I’d wake up in the morning to look out my open bedroom door, down a hallway in plaster white — everything seems in the memory to be washed in white — to a stove top where she would be wearing square-heeled black boots, black jeans, a loose top. She’d be loading the percolator coffee maker with cheap Tesco pre-ground coffee that smelled like tar and cigarettes, concentrating through perfectly round glasses with one nose pad missing. Her ass always looked amazing.
A few years ago the story of her standing there meant something very different than it does now. I forget quite what it was then, but to me that moment was something about lust and heartache and me wanting to be seen as a certain type of artist. It was about a perceived loss in the moment. Now the details of it are zoomed out and branching to different things. That story of the hallway and coffee is sadly not what it was, but also is thankfully something different. Little details like pillow cases, scars on backs, and cinder blocks that looked like snow, are all grabbed with a different part of my heart, or maybe not my heart at all, but more a connection that I know my body was there.
Outside the window of that apartment, cobblestones were rubbed round, and water, dirt, and old cigarettes flowed through the patchwork maze; driven around by Skoda’s and rain. A marble dropped along those cobblestones would take a new route like so many stories sitting on the backs of particular memories, but ordered in a different way.
And maybe the desire to be in an old memory as it was then is a bit like the feeling of being driven to a certain expression of self by culture. It is a contortion of what I could be, but am not.
Long live CHOP, K-Pop and TikTok.
that is all.
The gift of crows feet is it's easy to tell if someone is smiling even when they are wearing a mask. Who knows... maybe future elective surgeries are around wrinkles that signal.
I’ve been on this kick recently of feeling stressed out about recording/remembering stories from the past. It is painful to feel that I’m supposed to have recorded them in some fashion while realizing that I don’t really remember a lot of the details so that the output isn’t really the memoir of recollection that I want, it’s more the memoir of pollen drifting in meadows.
But why do I even want this memoir to begin with? I’ve been wanting to collect these stories as part of a book I want to put together: How to Become a Failed Artist in Five Years. The book is meant as sort of a collection of writing/journals/emails/work from the period of 2013 - 2018. And I think I’m slowly coming to the obvious realization that what I wrote at the time is all I wrote a that time; the material that makes up the firsthand account is already done, because there’s no such thing as making a firsthand account of something after a certain amount of time passes. (Although there’s a painful period of transition when I realize that the first person has left, and a more prose/poetic person has taken his place.)
Part of me is scared that I’ll never put this thing together at all and that I’m just saying I’ll make this book in fear that if I don’t, a part of me disappears with it. But I think I’m realizing, like all creative endeavors, making expectations in my mind about what it NEEDS to be, versus WHAT IT IS, is mostly what adds to my anxiety. The joy of making most things is the times of figuring out where the middle ground is between me and the object. A certain playfulness and curiosity to an unknown. But when suddenly my mind switches to having to make a certain aspect of the experience be realized in a specific way, everything goes downhill.
I’ve probably mentioned it here before, but I love this quote from Henry Rollins:
That’s why I never say, “I’m a writer,” because I don’t want to shoulder that. I just want to do some writing. “What would a writer do in this situation?” I don’t know, man. Ask one. And don’t tell me what he said, I’m busy.
(You can read the whole article here)
Needing to be seen as something versus being something is such a tricky balance. I think a lot of culture advocates for visibility and the awareness others have for you, which, while possibly beneficial to opportunity, doesn’t have a lot of weight in creating a sense of self and one’s own vision of success.
I’m reading this interesting book right now called In Over our Heads by Robert Kegan. I originally came across an essay he wrote about consciousness and culture that reminded me a lot of ideas of Godel and encapsulation of systems, which I really liked. He frames culture as basically an ever-present school. Culture teaches us what others expect of us if we wish to live in step with those around us. This outlook allows Kegan to make some really interesting points about why we pursue certain cultural norms when overall we state our desires to be something quite different.
I wrote to someone recently about one of my favorite examples:
I just finished this part of the book on adolescence and Kegan (the author) talks about how we miss out as a culture in using the birth of sexuality as a teaching moment. His argument is that culture is the ultimate school, and that we need to apply it to maintain what our expectations are of those within it. In sexuality we shouldn't be focusing on penetration, due to our fear of pregnancy and stds: basically pushing our fears of a teenager's irresponsibility into what the outcomes will be. Instead we should be talking about sexuality as being the creation of climax through touch. Tell teenagers to explore the area of touch that feels comfortable, but penetration should be avoided because of the risks outside of what they are actually looking for: getting off.
Babies come to the world startled, laughing, and crying to whatever their immediate environment is. Eventually, people can start to think of categories abstractly and relate their categories to others’ categories. And above and beyond that I’m not sure… I haven’t read that many pages of the book yet. But I like the thought that our self contains all the instruments of our past self (I can still react to impulses like a child), but also contains this mechanism that allows me to evolve. It’s like RNA/DNA. A record machine that plays a record that makes itself.
And it makes me think about how we can construct internal structures that are consistent to a self but will not fit cultural paradigms, resulting in a person seen as being broken in some fashion. Or lacking. It’s sort of like mathematical constructions that can exist in theory but don’t exhibit themselves fully in the real world. If you’re an intuitionist mathematician, you’d state the Real Numbers themselves are such a construction.
I guess I’m just fitting together how to make parts of myself in a story part of a structure that feels authentic, but also fits in the world. This whole rabbit hole started while trying to remember all the details around meeting this woman Magda, who is a friend of mine in Prague. I wanted to write details about the place we met and what we talked about. But I don’t really remember. And that’s okay, because all I want to actually remember is the feeling. The desire to talk about what it was like to first meet her. Her flat billed baseball hat and throaty laugh that sounded like a half growl and half dare; our mutual love of Peaky Blinders and handbags.
That’s part of the story I would like to tell someday.