Someone recently asked me how summer went and I thought for a second and said, great. It has been a great summer, one of days spent outside, pages toiled over and time moving as it ought to, like I’m awake to experience it. I’ve felt grounded this summer, which is different from good and better than floating slightly off the ground. I can sense that I’m deep in the writing process, both because I’m actually committing words to page but also the way I’m seeing the world. Everything feels deep to me, imbued with meaning. I pay very close attention. That only happens when I’m writing a novel—any other time I’m liable to make easy assumptions and dismiss stuff that might otherwise provide useful for evolving the way I understand the world. I’m much more empathetic too, willing to see things from all sides. My friend’s petty grievances become an opportunity to psychoanalyze and characterize (this is my default setting if we’re being honest) and my own feelings, objects to be turned over and examined, inspected for usefulness.
Anyway, onto the post.
Highlights from August
Sometime in July, C told me she wishes she could redo her 30th birthday—it was a few months after the wedding and we were still recovering, so I set out to make that happen. I gathered our friends and we did a birthday weekend remix—celebrating 8/1 instead of 1/8. We stayed at Eaton DC (10/10 but skip the breakfast) ran through DC with our friends—eating large-format steaks at St. Anselm’s, wings at Stan’s, and doing a tour of speakeasies in DC—from Manifest to Allegory to Mirrors—ending the weekend at the MGM where everyone but Madison M. lost all their money (this tracks). It was a great time and I wish we could do it all again.
Every time we drive down to DC we make sure to read the Delaware highway signs. The copy is always good and funny. This time: who hates speeding tickets, raise your right foot.
There was a litter of kittens in my grandparents backyard. They were incredibly cute and mischievous.
I went to dinner with Adrienne at Pastis and we caught up about life and love. A perfect night.
I contemplated becoming more mysterious and was informed I already am. Works for me.
I’ve been listening to Flamenco Sketches by Miles Davis and feeling emotional. It sounds like falling in love, like laying in a hot room with a fan, topless, head in the lap of someone you love with their hand resting on your forehead. It sounds like people finding their way back to each other. The opening of a door.
I asked Madison M. how you know someone’s your best friend, and the answer has been spinning on a loop since. I’m curious—how do you know?
Dinner at Alex’s girlfriend’s Alena’s where I probably talked too much. She made incredible tacos I haven’t stopped thinking about. I’m also still thinking about that beautiful white rug and the way the two of them find each other in pockets of space. It’s very sweet.
Taszie came to visit and she demanded we go to a Broadway show to see Hamilton. I informed her we do not have three-tickets-to-Hamilton-on-the-fly money. We got pizza and watched the new Proud Family instead. There’s an episode where it’s revealed that the new kids in town have two dads. One of the taunts the kid’s lob at the little kids is that they have "double daddies” Taszie looked at me and C and said, double mommies! Now I’m obsessed with the double mommies thing.
I was on a panel hosted by Here to Stay in partnership with Levi’s to celebrate the 501 Curve collection. It was probably the best one I’ve ever been on because it was about how we found clarity in our pivots rather than offering canned soundbites about how to achieve one’s goals. The following day, I met up with Here to Stay’s founder Zanele, and now I’m planning a trip to visit her in Portland.
I have a few comfort Youtubers, most of them interior designers. Recently I found a new one—John Hutman—who was Nancy Meyer’s set designer. He offers a behind the scenes look at how they approached set design and his thoughts about interiors more generally. This one, about the It’s Complicated house (an all-time favorite), was very fun.
I’m writing an essay right now, hence the radio silence, and needed some supplemental reading. To get a sense for my subject I reached out to The Reading Room, an independent reference library in Houston. I asked for Black art criticism book and they came back with a terrific list. Those, below:
The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism edited by Rhea Anastas
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks
Bad Infinity: Selected Writings by Aria Dean
Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain edited by Glenn Ligon
Fred Wilson
Black Art: Third Edition
Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (not Black, but she said there’s a lot of important Black voices in there)
TRR also recommended the work of Jessica Lynne.
Chamel couldn’t make it to DC so she surprised C and we spent the night watching movies and giggling.
Gladys, a Black lesbian bookstore in Bed Stuy had their soft open and we supplied biscuits. I got to chat with Tiffany, the owner and she gave me a great book recommendation, The Black Interior.
Celebrated Mal’s birthday! She’s moving (crying) so I was glad to be able to get together in the city one more time. We ate at the Tyger and then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. A magical, very NYC, night.
Went to the US Open with Ecobee and sat courtside for the first time. It’s an insane experience, C’s mom called to say she saw us on TV.
I finally dyed my hair again—somehow it's been a year. My hairstylist said it looks healthy.
Our one this summer was to Palm Springs to celebrate Lacey’s birthday. Our travel day was a bit hectic—our flight got delayed so we missed our connecting flight to PSP. We ended up driving from Phoenix to Palm Springs (we had to convince a very nice man at Enterprise to allow us to drive the car across state lines) which ended up being only 3.5 hours. It honestly wasn’t bad at all. Once we got there, we hit the ground running—pool, shots, and sun on repeat. It was an incredible time. My girl is growing up.
Reading
Endling by Maria Reva
Endling is about three women in the romance tour industry who embark on a journey across Ukraine with a mobile lab filled with kidnapped bachelors to save a snail species. It’s at turns funny and dark. What I found striking about it was the ordinary lives that are plunged into chaos by war, how everyone has goals and dreams and ideas that are suddenly thwarted by forces much bigger than them. The book also explores choice and the many ways the mind attempts to imagine various scenarios to solve a single problem. It plays with form in an interesting way to address this, with varying levels of efficacy. I didn’t end up liking this one, it didn’t quite hang together for me, but I see why other people might.
Bad Infinity by Aria Dean
Artist and writer Aria Dean thinks through representational systems in Bad Infinity, asking questions about identity, accelerationism, Blackness, and art. There’s even an interview with Frank B. Wilderson III, a key scholar of first wave Afropessimism. I ended up annotating this one a lot—there were spots where I found her work profound and others where I found myself challenging her assertions, mainly around afropessimism as it concerns art critique. One of the core tenets of Afropessimism is the never-before-seen and incomparable condition of “the Black,” who is essential to society in that they are socially dead. It’s an idea that expands upon Orlando Patterson’s, a Jamaican sociologist, idea of the slave, but binds it to Blackness and declares it a permanent state. In Afropessimism, all Black people are perpetual slaves, that the only condition is social death. There is no emancipation, no arc for the Black, it’s all a flat line.
In Bad Infinity, Dean interviews Wilderson, and he talks about the origins of Afropessimist thought. The framework grew out of failed multiracial coalitions in the Bay in which the Black condition was misunderstood. A group of scholar-activists decided this necessitated a new ideological framework to understand the condition of Blackness within this system—that is, always subordinate and the subject of gratuitous violence. It is a lens of analysis that in the hands of graduate students and art critics has metastasized to become a tool to ensnare Black work that contains narrative or an arc or is interested in mining lived experience as a bald attempt at humanizing the slave or stripping it of the only truth of Blackness, violence. At its best, Afropessimism makes room for Black rage, which is where I find it to be most valuable for understanding artmaking, at its most bizarre, it venerates white production of gratuitous violence as truthtelling. To take it a step further, I think it invents the opportunity to create a flat dismissal of Black cultural production that does not engage in Afropessimist aesthetics while leaving lots of room for white art and its interests. It leaves the system intact, reifies its primacy. It makes sense, in a way. That to understand the Black, a condition invented by the Human, you’d have to search white cultural production in order to find it. But in a real, material way, what of Black art? And what of liberation?
Afropessimism posits that there is no emancipation in this system, that post-Afropessimism would mean there are no more humans and no more Blacks, but something else, a move that would necessitate revolution and destruction. But I’m not hearing anything about that. I’m hearing about Morris and his box and his “great view of the abyss,” and Black artist’s participation in the liberal humanist project. It also doesn’t account for social and professional participation in whiteness. That relationship is elided despite the Human being how we got here. How is Afropessimism squaring that?
Watching
Foundation - I’m a big fantasy girl, so of course I’m watching Foundation. It’s about a society grappling with the prediction of its own demise and a sort of apocalypse. It’s very good. This third season, we see the predictions come to pass and how even the revolution eventually becomes the institution. I love this show, and I’m excited to see how it concludes.
Love Life - The first time I watched Love Life I felt transformed by it. Like I’d seen something that got at the truth of the messiness of love. It continues to be a north star. Now that it’s on Netflix I got to rewatch it and see how it works. The first time you watch something, it’s hard to really evaluate it, but the second time around, because I was watching for construction rather than plot, I was able to see the narrative choices more clearly. It holds up! I do think that Marcus and Mia are both insane, though they’re perfect for each other. The Ola scene continues to be one of the baddest bitch moves of all time.
The Sixth Commandment - This show is based on the real story of a man committing elder abuse in a small community. It’s harrowing and very sad, but the acting was good and I liked the writing.
The Yogurt Shop Murders - This is about a still-unsolved murder in Austin, where four girls were killed in a yogurt shop. It’s by A24 so it tries to do the crime documentary a little differently, rejecting linear storytelling to let the subjects talk at length. It doesn’t fully work but it does make you identify with the various players surrounding the case like the families and the one policeman whose life has been totally undone by this case. When he read the symptoms of PTSD, i got teary, but maybe I just have a soft spot for Black dads. There’s also a moment in episode two when Eliza’s sister writes about her post-grief experience with stunning clarity. It was so sharp and beautiful. It was one of those moments where I said, huh, yeah, that makes perfect sense.
The Gilded Age - I was an OG Gilded Age stan but I’ve been having a hard time locking in. I’m a season behind and working on getting back to it. I don’t have to tell you that it’s good.
Heretic - I rarely watch scary movies but I watched this because Mel was here and she likes horror. This one is about a man who invites these two missionaries into his house. It’s spooky and a little surreal. Cerebral too. The setup was brilliant and the writing was really great, I love the initial scene with the girls talking to one another. It fell apart for me in the end, lots of perplexing things, but I wish it would’ve kept things a little tighter, it could’ve still ended on the same note.
The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder - I can’t stand a reboot, but I am admittedly charmed by the new iteration. I love that the characters are aged up and dealing with new issues. It reminds me a little of Rugrats All Grown Up, which is still one of the best cartoons of all time.
Demascus - A brilliant and funny show about a man who enters into this experimental therapy where he delves into alternate timelines of his life in order to understand the current one. It’s set in DC, which you know I’m a sucker for, and explores grief, love, heartbreak. I also like that it escalates in its stakes and absurdity. I want everyone to watch it!
Hostage - Three words: British political thriller. One more: miniseries. The Brits know how to make us invested in government dramas. In this, the prime minister’s husband is kidnapped by a group that demands her resignation. She refuses so things continue to escalate until it all crumbles. It was good! A perfect weekend binge watch.
Fatal Seduction - I love a South African drama, and Fatal Seduction is no exception. It’s a family drama filled with hidden secrets, sexual scandals, kidnapping and lots of hooking up. The first season is pretty insane but the second is markedly better. It was fun!
The Big Short - I watched this on the flight from DC to Phoenix. It’s the perfect movie for the plane. It’s about the 2008 financial crash which I’d understood on the personal level (my family was evicted from our house because our landlord didn’t pay the mortgage) but never from the macroeconomic perspective. This was informative and thriller-y, in the vein of movies like Catch Me If You Can. Everyone in the movie, even if they seem sympathetic, you understand on some vague level that they’re evil, and that only the people at the very tippy-top make it out unscathed. For the rest of us, the 99.9 percent, we’re left out in the cold, stuck rebuilding and salvaging whatever’s left. Five trillion dollars went poof, but the main players got out unscathed. It’s all a game for them and I hope people are waking up to that, especially now.
Wish List
This dress from Hanifa
An impractical marble sponge holder
This striped hand towel from Autumn Sonata
This sheer tank top from the Pearled Ivory x Sean Brown collaboration
A replacement pair of oval-shaped sunglasses. I like these from Warby Parker
A double-layered shirt from ZN Ali
This PH5 dress
The Loewe bag I saw at Desert Hills
Expense Report
That J Crew bathing suit (it was not cute on me at all)
Tickets to Palm Springs
Paint samples
Two rounds of misprinted menus from Staples
One honey deuce
Custom framing
All the books mentioned above
Until next time!
The PTSD moment in the yogurt shop murders was so impactful and a layer to true crime docs we never get to see usually. I’m so glad they included it.
thank you for putting me on flamenco sketches :)