round-up: 6/30
recommendations, what i'm reading, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
The war in Gaza has wiped out entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more
What Unlearning Zionism Can Teach American Jews About Israel and Palestine
Housekeeping:
In honor of pride month ending today (rip), behold: some gay things I sell, and some gay things I want:
Selling:
Wanting:
Also, my new obsession is socks with lace/bows.
You can find similar ones here.
What I’m reading:
People Are Coming Out Younger and Younger. Then There Are People Like Me.
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
Quotations:
The ship to appear hip sailed a long time ago for me personally, probably right around the time a whole bunch of youthful fans of a show I was recapping started tweeting "KYS!" at me, which I thought was just a sweet and overly familiar way of throwing a *kiss* at someone. You know, like how people call strangers "besties" even though they've never even had a single sleepover? It was a wildly overconfident estimation on my part, I know that now. I kept tweeting it back to them, in an attempt to seem friendly. KYS! KYS! KYS! to dozens (hundreds?) of schoolchildren. Anyway, apparently KYS means Kill Yourself, and I spent half a season of Pretty Little Liars telling teenage shippers to walk into traffic because I thought they were just being nice to me.
Adornment has always seemed kind of rebellious to me, because of the family I grew up in. This is not radical to the rest of the world, but to me it will forever seem embarrassingly frivolous to care about clothes or decorating a space when we should have, like, weighty matters of the soul on our minds at all times. At this point, I’ve come to realize that where you are, the space you’re in, what you wear, this one body that you’re in for this life—those of course matter because you are really here, you’re not just an idea in your head. And there is something profound about noticing again and again that you’re here. In a sense, it’s a kind of meditation.
You don’t have to be articulate, which I think is important—you can let characters be dumb and stumbling. That is what art can do that talking about art can’t.
I look for what I find beautiful. I look for … what touches me. And then I figure out if they’re good images or not.
All I looked for then was the beauty and the tenderness. Other people came in and wanted to photograph “drag queens.” The people I photographed weren’t any of that to me; they were my friends and I thought they were the most beautiful people in the world.
I’d tell [young fans] to get off their phones. The real world still exists. I’d tell them to live their sexuality. My friends paved the way for them. And I would tell them to find something to fight for. My fight now is for freedom for Palestine.
Part of the way we discover what we like in sex is by encountering what doesn’t make sense to us. One of my childhood friends discovered that she was gay in the most archetypal way: the first time she slept with her boyfriend, the absolute clarity that this was not what she wanted from sex illuminated for her what she in fact did want but had never felt able to consider. It’s sometimes more tolerable to experience a moment of repulsion and differentiation than an unexpected and intense desire. Many of us learn to identify what we like by first articulating what we don’t like.
The word “trauma” derives from the Greek word for “wound,” but the definition that I find rings truest comes from American psychiatrist, Judith Lewis Herman: “Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.” The egalitarianism of that statement sits well with me; the idea that trauma depends on your personal circumstances, and so our perception of it cannot be universal. If a difficult experience changes a person in a lasting way, it’s trauma.
That yearning - it’s bone deep, deeper still, isn’t it?
Queer love, queer life, queer desire: I remember these experiences like notes of fragrance, linking memories to parts of skin and love and moments of such clarity that sometimes reality feels second best. I remember so clearly being smitten with a girl for the first time and memorizing the smell of the realization, the terror and glory of it, the chaos and indecision - when to kiss her? I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I felt like I was growing out of my skin. I remember every time that has ever happened. Cities become landmarks of this: here, in the rain, in the East Village, glasses fogged up by the weather and breath and laughter. And I remember the smell of leather jackets and hair bleach and neck, and knowing how I was so new to this that it felt like I invented it.
I remember waiting for dates in Union Square’s Sephora, sniffing bottles to see what I might bring my crush, like a crow bearing gifts. What would they like to wear, what would they like to smell on my skin? Anything to get closer to them. I used to be so afraid of even holding hands; it felt so dangerous. For many people, it still is.
A film of cinema art shouldn't be about showing what's right and wrong. If you have to do that, then it's not art, it's moralizing.
The first thing that happens when you get off the plane is that you have to fill out a form, and the first question on that form is, state your sex. To me it's incomprehensible that you'd be forced to identify yourself with your sex, that is to say, with your genitals. This is what Anatomy of Hell is about. I wanted to force myself to look at the physical sex, because for me it was unbearable, something that I couldn't stand to look at—none of us can. None of us wants to be identified with the physical.
I’m puritanical, but at the same time I hate this puritanism and won't accept it. But you can't escape your upbringing or who you are.
Lastly I want to quote two definitions of art that I’ve referred to before. First, the reason art is so important is because it’s useless. It serves nothing. It has no point. That which is useful is trivial, and that which is, inessential, that which has no point is transcendent. The other definition, which is far more political, is that art answers the questions that we studiously avoid asking.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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Tofu is gay. Don’t @ me.