Back to reality

"If you're going to write about me at least give me good hair"

In Downtown Brooklyn they spray the mall smell outside Victoria’s Secret. Outdoor mall smell in New York City like are you crazy? I FaceTime Maya 69 being like, They spray the mall smell outside Victoria’s Secret, outdoor mall smell in New York City, isn’t that crazy.

What’s crazy is Maya 69 is across the street and I am FaceTiming her not wearing headphones.

We’re going to Maya Man’s StarQuest at Roulette. A performance lecture about children’s competitive dance. AI generated videos of dancing girls. A bedazzled sweatsuit. It’s recent-retro AI where sometimes it still glitches. The videos become artifacts of their time, and Man’s happy for having made the work when the models were Like This she notes during the Q+A with a Whitney curator whose name I forget: the mishaps heightens the tensions around reality, performance, success. An “imposed pursuit of perfection,” as she puts it in an earlier essay, not unlike how quantification and evaluation works on social media.

Only TV I can watch rn is Real Housewives of Rhode Island and even then I was on episode like two of six until not watching TV became IMPORTANT so suddenly! I wanted to do it. Or maybe I’m just taking more antidepressants, meaning I’m better at staying put, better at staying in bed.

Vancouver today.

On the plane I began reading Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, an apocalyptic queercore novel about a writer named Michelle. “Michelle tended to never shut up and she wanted big drama in bed all the time, requiring her lover to be a roller coaster tsunami.” Ahem. She worries that her girlfriend, whom she’s pretty bad to, would rather “kick her out so she didn’t have to deal with talking to or fucking her.”