Brilliant. Bad. And a little bit sexed up.
Coverage check 02/2021: cultural happenings in February
I let a friend borrow my copy of How to Murder Your Life, who’s too tired to find that particular part where Cat Marnell refers to teen sex as disgusting. When I reread her memoir last summer, I was floating between writing fiction that would only strengthen her opinion on the subject and non-fiction I was hoping would counter it.
I joined the Beautyshamblers crew when she announced the project in November, mainly interested in seeing her work from xoJane, now with insight on what was happening behind the scenes. #015: XOJANE THROWBACK / THE LOST CRACKED-OUT “EYEBROW TUTORIAL” more than delivered.
Marnell shares her reluctance to revisit this era. She takes us all back at the end of her reign at the defunct digital mag when she had floated over to Vice with Amphetamine Logic. This is where I first discovered Cat’s writing and the opening line that still cracks me up after all these years: “Sometimes when a dick is inside me, I can’t help but think about my family.”
The Patreon post begins with a video she submitted to xoJane after she left them. “I did something bad,” she confesses, sniffling as she progresses with an eyebrow tutorial. The post is plastered with snapshots of write-ups she received during this period, with headlines including “Up All Night with a drug addict” and “Drugs are more fun than work.” Fast forward to 2021 and the party is still on. Marnell, always ahead of the trends, narrated her experience of NYC sex parties in an interview for The Drunken Canal. “I am attracted to the worst of masculinity,” she said. Aren’t the interesting boys always bad?
The other hot blonde whose books have preoccupied me in recent years, Edouard Louis, announced that The End of Eddy and Who Killed My Father have been collectively adapted by James Ivory for television [will it help me land an audition if I say I’m pro full frontals?].
Louis’ work is about violence, but what stood out to me most in his debut was the eroticism in the text, his capacity to transmit desire to the reader, the narrator’s lust for life.
His books have received the theatre treatment across Europe. The Internationaal Theater Amsterdam livestreamed its version of Louis’ debut in January, in which four Adidas-clad actors share the role of Eddy. I saw Pamela Carter’s adaptation at the Unicorn Theatre in 2018, which wiped out the text’s subtle sexual energies. Here’s hoping the TV show won’t (please don’t give it to the director who ruined Melissa P!).
Books are in, according to Hot Local Singles. This month, I’ll be reading Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich, John Rechy and Natasha Stagg [aiming to also revisit some I love, Young Torless being one]. Books I can’t wait to get a hold of include Xanthi Barker’s Will This House Last Forever? and Bryan Karetnyk’s newest Gazdanov translation An Evening with Claire. Hunter Biden’s memoir, Art Hoe, is still a toss up.
In a since deleted tweet, Christian Lorentzen said he’ll be starting a Substack soon. For now, you can subscribe to Benjamin Moser’s. Everyone’s go-to lit critic stopped by Our Struggle podcast to discuss Knausgaard as coming-of-age, the tween orgy in Book #3, how the author builds suspense and what makes the opus stand out from other memoirs. He describes Book #4 as the “great Scandinavian novel of premature ejaculation.”
I revisited Lorentzen’s Knausgaard interview for Vulture, which reminded me that the Norwegian author everyone loves to hate is thinspiration personified, drinking black coffee and a diet coke. What is it with Europeans dreaming of Argentina (I ask, having myself said that Buenos Aires is where I’d rather be). In Our Struggle, the co-hosts describe Lorentzen, who works exclusively as a critic, as a “dying breed.” Ditto for Bloody Mary drinkers, reopen the bars I’m thirsty af.
This month, I discovered the I’m So Popular podcast by Zach Langley. In the episode The Beautiful Boy, Zach and guest Christian examine the power of mystique, the beauty of masculinity, gym culture, the vocal affectations in Czech and Hungarian gay porn and the differences between studio and amateur flicks. They discuss porn via Paglia and in analysing what makes pornography effective, they set the bar for film in general: “it’s much more effective to keep the dialogue kind of limited and maybe just choose a setting. That really gives you the freedom as a viewer to project your own fantasies onto what is happening and I think most of the time what you’re envisioning in your head is going to be better than any story they’re going to be selling you.”
If, like me, you were perplexed to see Rob Doyle back on Twitter, don’t worry, he’s not spiralling, he’s just on a promotional cycle for the paperback edition of Threshold. Lias Saoudi (“the hot one from Fat White Family,” to quote a high school friend) sent him a list of subject headings to write about for The Social. The result sees Doyle reveal that his weekly Irish Times column “formed and deformed” him and stand against excessive productivity. I have to agree with him, he looks better with shorter hair.
In trend development news, it seems the era of indulgence is in full swing, with an 81-person warehouse gang bang being brought to a halt by police outside Paris. Is continental Europe more libidinous? Is this why the Brits were so hell bent on exiting the EU? Was it always about this inability to keep up?
If this chart is to be believed, Greeks are having more sex than anyone else on the planet. Whether sex parties are happening in lockdown over by the Aegean I haven’t yet found out, although if growing up in the country's industrial North has taught me anything, it’s that we’re secretive about sex, preferring to keep our transgressions under wraps [hence, Under Embargo, lol].
Speaking of gang bangs, I’ve been thinking this past month, what the aesthetics of a decade of “vice” may be and what impact they will have on how we dress (or rather undress).
I’ve set a target for myself to read Dennis Cooper’s George Miles books over the summer. I’ve been thinking about what an adaptation would look like and what the characters, who for some reason I see as emblematic of this idea of the “sex fest 2020s”, would wear.
What’s fashion in an age of sexual licentiousness? Hedi Slimane as the unofficial/official artistic director of the decade? Will the clothes be tighter? Looser? Multi-layered? Are we gonna see skaters in mesh tees? Will it become acceptable to just wear boxers over trunks and call it an outfit? I don’t know, I’m asking all you fashion forecasters to enlighten me!
Over at Celine, Slimane’s fresh out of the club e-boys have evolved into neo renaissance princes. If The Dancing Kid was Cat Marnell in Berlin, Teen Knight Poem is Rachel Rabbit White in Paris. Is it possible to exist somewhere in between?
Back in November 2018, we went dancing at the Moth Club for Xanthi’s birthday. That night, I didn’t just offer her a lap dance when Pour Some Sugar On Me blasted through the speakers, I also ended up chatting to Slimane himself about [REDACTED]. Sorry, some things are better left unsaid!
January leftovers
Over at 1storypod, Sean Thor Conroe interviewed one of his heroes, Sheila Heti. “I’ll throw some stuff out there and then we’ll see if anything lands,” he says slightly giggling. Worshipping false idols pops up in the discussion of How Should A Person Be. Heti, in turn, describes Conroe’s book as “really alive.” The conversation covers an array of topics: longing, grief, Nietzsche, an article Heti wrote on a bizarre subculture around Ariel, the little mermaid and how universities destroy writers’ originality and the weirdness that made them attractive candidates to their respective programmes to begin with. They end with a discussion on smoking, as Sean lights a cigarette. “I’m always smoking, I’m constantly quitting smoking,” says Heti, as I’m rolling yet another cigarette.
[Side note: I recently read Heti’s interview in The Paris Review and I could honestly listen to her talk about Henry Miller for hours: “…for us, the whole point was to hurt each other as much as possible and feel sort of invincible in withstanding the hurt. We thought we were living in a Henry Miller novel, basically. Or at least I did.”]
Vice has called it quits with Garage and Dasha Zhukova has bought back the mag, planning to realign it with the synonymous museum of modern art as a “radical art object.” What that may look like is anyone’s guess. I went through old notes to try and uncover some of the pieces I found most exhilarating over the years:
Trey Taylor’s ode to The Basketball Diaries and the scene where a young Leo DiCaprio climbs on a rooftop to jack off. I’m not one for voiceovers, but this flick is an exception: “Just my own naked self and the stars breathing down, and it’s beautiful.”
Rachel Rabbit White’s Sex Scenes, especially her analysis of Fassbinder’s swan song Querelle (full disclosure: one of the films I masturbated to as a teen), in which she describes Genet as the “patron saint of thieves and homosexuals.” White gives a blow-by-blow description of the sex scene, before turning her thoughtful attention to where Genet’s subject matter stems from and Fassbinder’s aesthetic and artistic choices. “For Genet, desire is like a divine voice that calls the outlaw towards his crime.” Second only to her review of The Dreamers [one of my all time favs, which kind of defined my adolescence and that of a group of boys and girls I fell in love with, echoing the film’s “It’s like we had our own cultural revolution.”]. Like White, like Anais Nin, I am predisposed to romanticism, so I guess her choices reflected my tastes. “True liberation is both the liberation of sexuality and pleasure, and from labor; but liberation from wage labor must come first,” White said when interviewed in the magazine herself upon the publication of Porn Carnival.
Philippa Snow’s review of Sex at Tate Modern. No, I’m not suggesting the Lindsay Lohan scholar had sex in the tanks, although let’s be real, we’ve all fantasised about getting some inside the Southbank gallery. Snow describes Anne Imhof’s style as Batailles-meets-Berghain, equal parts nihilistic and hedonistic. Also, “literal hell.” Time, according to Snow, “stretches like time on a comedown, or like time in sex” when you experience the four-hour performance. I too couldn’t quite describe the events of Sex - the sequence seemed to be meddled up in my head as soon as I exited. Trying to tell someone who wasn’t there what had actually happened seemed rather impossible. “Kind of like some sort of bizarre occult ritual about sex and loss of innocence but also about partying,” I told a friend a few weeks later when he asked what my bizarre IG stories from the show had been all about. A goth Blair Waldorf was apparently present the day Snow attended Sex. I didn’t think of Noe’s Climax as a point of comparison till reading her review, but seeing as I almost got thrown out for jumping on one of mattresses lying about and trying to pull ballet poses, Snow might - as always - be onto something.
Hit me with recommendations on books, columns, newsletters, tweets, films and everything in between.
It's so weird that I went to the same middle school as Sky and now we're both mentioned in the same substack. I love that Heti quote and yesss Cat Marnell