In one of my favorite internet videos, comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez wanders a thrift store and designates items “tea” or “on fleek.” He points to tutus, shoes, and shirts and evangelizes them with escalating enthusiasm til he wheezes. At the end, he holds the camera’s gaze just long enough and with just enough manic intensity to make me wonder if he’s a serial killer. For some reason, it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
Relatedly, I have a disease, and it’s gay Zoomer lingo. I can’t stop calling things “tea,” “slay” or “on fleek,” regardless of whether it’s appropriate or not. This isn’t conscious on my part: my brain just throws these words at normal thoughts the way monkeys throw feces at passing zoogoers. It causes me problems: I’m constantly having to explain to people that I actually liked a traveling JMW Turner exhibition or a 1972 Buñel film I drily described as having “slayed the house down fleek tea boots sis” because they reasonably think I’m being sarcastic. Girls I’m hitting on ask if I’m gay because I respond to their Instagram stories to tell them they look “tea fleek boots sis fr... like fr fr.” I’ve reached a point where it’d be easier for me to stop saying these words and talk normally, but I can’t. They delight me in a way I’ve only just started to really think about.
I particularly enjoy using them animatedly but slightly incorrectly, the way an enthusiastic but ultimately unhelpful dog would. My friends will text me to tell me our dinner reservation’s booked and I’ll respond “Tea!” despite knowing the correct word is “Slay.” We’ll have a supply issue at work and I’ll somberly nod my head and intone “That’s not on fleek.” I’ll describe a waterfall that filled me with awe for the splendor of creation as “giving magnificence.” It makes me laugh: these add levity to my repetitive days and shine to my life.
When I try to explain why I say this stuff to people, I tell them about how my roommate and I used to foster a cat named Lance in Pittsburgh. The shelter named him Lance because the vet accidentally took out only one of his balls while neutering him. Lance lived on the street before coming to us and he learned an innovative way to entertain himself. He’d find a balled-up piece of paper, turn away from it, and kick it with his back legs so it’d skate across the floor. Then he’d innocently look at you as if the paper had moved of its own accord, as if to say “Who, me?”, before chasing it like he would a mouse. He made his own fun and he was never bored. I learned a lot from him and I try to do the same in my own life.
At some point, “tea fleek boots sis” will slip from my mind the way my prior bit, in which I endlessly complained that “my wife won’t stop spending time with her frickin’ boyfriend!” like a cucked Ned Flanders, did. I’ll look back on old tweets and messages and think “Really? I used to say that?” and “Thank God people tolerated me when I did it.” But for the time being, I’m very grateful those words made their way into the lexicon. I’m excited to see what’ll take their spot in my brain next.
Reading Recommendations
A few years ago, I used to select magazine stories for a recommendations website called Longform.org. I’d read between five to twenty magazine stories a week to select some for the website. Over time, I developed an instinct for distinguishing between technically masterful but emotionally lifeless writing and writing which had what writer Emily Gould called “a quality of aliveness... that’s the opposite of trying to get an A+” in journalism. I still read a lot and I’ll post work I particularly liked here.
I really liked this essay by Siddhartha Deb on American novelist Don DeLillo, especially his identification of DeLillo’s American operatives in foreign countries as “cool, intelligent, and as soulless as the risk assessments they carry out in places where dollar investments have been made.” I also liked his assessment that DeLillo’s American protagonists’ endless appetites “seem to originate from some deep metaphysical cause as much as from something as definable as capitalism,” because I agree with it: I sometimes think certain miseries endemic to the human condition get chalked up to “capitalism” when their roots are more ancient and nebulous.
I’ve only read DeLillo’s Libra, his novel about JFK shooter Lee Harvey Oswald, but I think Deb elegantly describes what makes it so compelling. He writes that “Oswald finally offers DeLillo a character sufficiently fragmented and manipulated for a fictional paradigm trying to grasp the misfitting puzzle pieces of a fragmented world.” I thought something similar after finishing Libra: that modern identity is best understood as a kind of induced schizophrenia and that internet-accelerated identity fragmentation makes it hard to depict with traditional linear narratives. I think post-WWII technologies have changed us and that our storytelling styles should change too. I strongly recommend reading both Deb’s essay and DeLillo’s work.New Yorker critic Parul Seghal profiled Jacqueline Rose, who’s one of our greatest living thinkers. Rose’s lines have rattled around my head like a stone in my shoe for years: her one about fascism “plucking the strings of the unconscious” made me understand its appeal in a new light, her essay on how Marilyn Monroe “carried the can” for 1950s and ‘60 secrets and desires helped me understand celebrity in a new way, and her lines about how sexual harassment “brings mental life to a standstill” and “destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie,” helped me articulate exactly what was so insidiously evil about it. I strongly recommend her book “On Violence and On Violence Against Women”: I think it’s the most incisive writing on the topic I’ve ever read.
One thing I particularly like about Seghal’s profile of Rose is that like her subject, she seems to reject Cartesian mind-body dualism and investigates how embodied experience influences one’s intellectual life. She writes about how walking with Jacqueline Rose is like thinking with Jacqueline Rose, “full of so many routes one can take, each with its own losses and gains.” She also elegantly depicts Rose’s shock that the Freud Museum’s director didn’t understand how important Anna Freud’s loom was to her intellectual work. I felt like I understood Rose’s work even better after reading Seghal’s writing on it.I particularly liked this essay by Jamie Hood on Marcel Proust’s six-part novel “In Search of Lost Time” and how it dovetails with French writer Annie Ernaux’s novel “The Possession.” Very reductively, “In Search of Lost Time” is about a man growing from childhood to adulthood in late-19th century and early-20th century French high society, and “The Possession’s” about its narrator’s obsession with her former partner’s new lover. Hood identifies that in both works, “memory is an occupying force... that displaces the subject from the present tense” and somatically takes possession of its protagonists’ heads, chests, and guts, making them unable to do much else til their obsessions break like fevers. It made me think of obsessions I’ve nursed after my own breakups, in which I filled notebook after notebook to understand why they happened. I didn’t realize that the writing barely mattered compared to the act of it—that, per German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and Ovid, the cure for heartbreak is work.
Auckland Recommendations
I go to a lot of events in Auckland and I’m always evangelizing the ones I like to my friends. I decided it’d be easier to put them here instead.
Violet Hirst’s “Donegal”: I saw Violet Hirst and her band play at Auckland’s Old Folks Association (a venue, not a retirement home) and was blown away. Their sound reminded me of both John Mayer and Bon Iver and it was the tightest, most professional up-and-comer’s show I’ve seen in years. They played with a graceful ease that indicated hours of painstaking practice and they’d clearly mastered their mechanics the way soccer players master drills. That muscle memory let something bigger move through them: I felt like they channeled something that moved through me during their set too. It made for one of the best shows I’ve seen in years. I strongly recommend listening to their tracks, and if possible, seeing them live.
Murdoch Keane and Peter Burman’s “She’s Crowning”: I saw Murdoch and Peter’s play, Minnie and Judy a few weeks ago and enjoyed it more than any New Zealand theatre I’d seen prior. In it, Murdoch and Peter adopted the personas of actresses Minnie Driver and Judy Garland and moved the characters through cooking shows, heist scenarios, and seduction scenes to showcase their complexity. Their elegant deployment of those different genres’ aesthetics and sounds reminded me of Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”: an archival cinema defined by recycling particles of older texts to create a cinematic language that can tell stories far more sophisticated than any one genre’s shot, sound, or plot conventions would allow for. Minne and Judy were hyperobjects: distributed so widely over space and time that taking one position precludes you from seeing the whole. The only way to understand them is to move between vantage points. I think Murdoch and Peter’s approach, where they do that by moving them through different genres, lends itself to a very deep understanding of these stars.
Murdoch and Peter are putting on another show, called “She Crowning” on Wednesday, September 6 at 8 p.m. at Auckland’s Basement Theater. They describe it as “The Crown...but on Poppers,” and they’ll play everyone from Liz, Phillip, Diana, Charles’ homophobic therapist, and the favorite horse of Camilla Parker Bowles. You can purchase tickets here and I strongly recommend going: in addition to being smart, they’re also very funny, and their work’s delightfully self-aware without being self-conscious.