Selected Works from Dirtnap Princess, 2023-2024
Through Being Cool
Writing a version of the same thing over and over and over and over in different words. I always struggle with what things are about/why am I doing this? Who is it for? But that’s really the point, the point of uselessness. Of something for nothing. Everything feels so dire these days because it is like how come I can’t find the original soundtrack to Cruising on Spotify that is literally homophobic.
I love when records are fast and short. Everything is so overly considered these days that the it thing object item consumable product is beyond the point of consideration. Beige, slightly damp, something for everyone. I was looking for the original soundtrack from Cruising, 1980, starring Al Pacino and directed by William Friedkin because I’d just watched the film and if you haven’t seen it you really should. Actually, I was watching Alien (also 1980, starring Sigourney Weaver and directed by Ridley Scott), and then reading about alien and I learned how the writers were inspired by mans greatest fear being oral homosexual rape so that’s how they came up with the idea for the face suckers. Now that is what I call consideration. They also insisted that H.R. Geiger be the art director and I wondered wait do movies even have art directors now? Occasionally you see something that your eye gets a kick out of but only ever in like an A24 which even you are starting to track the schtick I mean of course there’s loads of good movies but they feel inaccessible to the mainstream and I would like the mainstream to be exposed to art because they deserve it too. Of course blah blah blah superhero but I mean it’s just crazy to me that in the 80s block busters took risks, and had artists working on them, some might even oh my god make you think but can you imagine its done with subtlety in a way which leaves the film sitting in your head for days soaking in and looking closer like a face sucker, and then all of a sudden you’re Ripley in Alien: Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet), a cloned version of yourself existing half you, half the film. The film informs your every movement and affect.
You can viscerally feel in the vibes of the everyday that no-one is watching films anymore - no one has any style or subtly or flick of the wrist. Perhaps we have already treaded every transgression so there is nothing left to peel away. But as I watch an overweight woman lying in the gutter wearing rags abject poverty huge wounds blood and flies all over while a small blonde women in vintage Chanel flats hobbles by on her way to brunch, I think, that cannot possibly be true. I watched a Christian fundamentalist on the internet scream about little bitty baby bibs for Pride Month at the big box store because they said things like “I’m proud of you” on them. And Cruising came out in 1981. We could never have a movie like this now. Perhaps on the edges somewhere but not at the mall.
Malcom McLaren didn’t pick Sid Vicious because his face possessed the golden ratio, it was because of how he sliced himself up on stage with razor blades and puked a lot. He had acne and a unibrow, can you imagine a pop band now sporting acne and unibrow’s? Can you imagine the Sex Pistols in this era at all? What about SEX era Madonna? Or Prince? You grow up hearing that the older you get the more wild the culture seems but none of the 20 somethings I know have never even heard of a basement noise show, or snorting drugs. They certainly don’t watch movies, and who can blame them with the shit they’re slinging.
You used to be able to rent a big place for you and all your friends. You used to be able to look around and see that there was something going on somewhere that you wanted to be a part of. You used to be able to work 35 hours a week and be considered full time, with benefits and some holidays. There used to be freaks out at night who didn’t just reek of piss and lack of opportunity. There used to be pop stars with a sort of edge, films about subculture and underground, poems written by real poets. You used to be able to hit the thrift and find clothing made of real cotton and wool. You used to be able to live off dollar slices and sandwiches. There used to be third places to sit and talk and not be bothered, no laptops around. The art of conversation was a real green flag. You used to be able to encounter a film with a different plot.
Idk when this schism happened, the withering and rotting of pop culture, the culture at large- you can say you’re anti mainstream and that’s all well and good- but what do you talk about at dinner with other people? Like that poor little girl who melted into the couch, we are becoming fatally tethered to the corporation, the vibe, the brand (yet no one in power seems to be able to tell me what that vibe is exactly). One must appeal to all in the broadest since, white, middle class, and very boring. I can come up with no other reasoning for someone like Taylor Swift’s whole entire deal. Broad but niche, vague, never using adjectives or references the corporate teams skirt around any kind of defining characteristic- preferring to ask ghost writers and stylists and creative geniuses what the score is, but never in definitive terms, never in a way that makes sense.
The signal is going in and out, fading, sharp now - then back to snow. You fiddle with the antennae, a picture swirls up but the audio doesn’t match. Everything in and out of focus.
One often gets the feeling that you’re between two planes. Two of the many which we cycle through in our everyday. Regular lived existence in the public and private realm, eerily dystopian news alerts, and internet sludge pull our shaping of the world in a multitude of directions. What is integral is a pop culture that pushes and pulls you. We deserve better.
This is the result of boiling the artist down to a single drop- idolatry and instagram followers. The secret is, there is no genius gene. Human beings exist and are raised and learn how to look or don’t. Some of them who learn how to look cannot sustain anything else but trying to translate that looking. There are others who are different and try to integrate the looking into the everyday. Neither is better than the other. Both are essential. We have leaned too much into those who attempt to translate, and it has wrought both great beauty and wastes of time and resources. You can’t always show me what you’re doing, in some cases, you need reason and thinking behind it. That great push and pull between Apollo and Dionysus. I need a beautiful building to work with my life. It needs to be aesthetically pleasing and also serve its utilitarian purpose. I need a painting to do the opposite, a painting presents itself and you take it as it is. You find room in your life for the painting - a wall in a certain room, a gift for your dearest friend. Vice versa, when you are making the painting, you are only thinking about the subject of your painting and how to deliver it via the materials at hand. As a clothing designer, you are thinking about a reachable inner pocket that doesn’t contradict the outer shell or lining, how people move, sit, and even sweat.
As children, a lot of us are not allowed to experience art in the mundane. Art classes of all shapes have been systematically sliced from public school curriculums. Without a sturdy art education, children do not learn how to focus, how to sit with boredom, how to lean on ones imagination for escape. This is how you get a general population who doesn’t know how to think or dream, Disney adults, and milquetoast offerings in film and music. Take the most recent Barbie film for example. One wonders if a “feminist message” is valid when delivered via an advertisement for dolls. I had a hard time singling out the message myself, I’m just using the internets descriptors here. I don’t know, imagine if we had a great film for women as the summer blockbuster that wasn’t incepted by a corporation trying to rebrand their product for the masses. I personally would have even preferred the film go even more towards Barbie ad, I didn’t care for the real world pastiche at all. Show me the life size dream house!!!! Show me Rachel show me!!!! (Todd Haynes’s Superstar is the superior Barbie metaphor message, it’s banned but available via a quick google. Do yourself a favor.)
It really feels like we are headed to a post-aesthetic worldview. Post-art, Post-God. Nietzsche was correct in regards to God being dead, the only thing he missed was how Capital took his place. This is the void we are staring into, and yes, it indeed stares back, swallowing us all up into corp-core wastelands, nary a natural material in sight.
Grief Walk
My older brother passed away on January 11th 2024. Just four days, a month, and a year from when our Dad flew up into the cosmos. T’s death isn’t something I’m yearning to dive into at this time, rather, these facts are relevant and need to be mentioned. Grief is a bizarre, long, and deranged process. There is no complete stop, or end moment. One cannot examine grief in a linear fashion. It resembles a voided circle, not a line. It fades and wears in, the edges fray and then it gets a wash and looks good as new all over again. You have no choice whether to wear it or not wear it. It is what it is. The ice pick sharp sad gut wrench rusty knife hits the same every time it does. When T went into hospital, I was in extreme denial. Delusional. Time will pass and he will get better- even though it wasn’t ever looking like time would allow itself to be passed.
It is a strange feeling to be far away from somebody when they die. This is the third time it’s happened to me, and concurrently the third time where distance prevents me from heading to family sooner. First, my grandma in England, Irene. Second, my grandma in America, Patricia. And now third, my older brother in New York City. Our relationship was somewhat terse to put it lightly, and we were fully estranged at the time of his death. However, much like my two grandmothers I was looking forward to getting to know each other better as the years went on. When he was good he was great, and when he was bad he was horrid, which made it hard to be his little sister most the time.
Being on the opposite coast to everyone I’m related to is also hard most of the time. But I think really the most challenging part about grief is the isolation regardless of if you’re surrounded by family or not. Even if you’re surrounded by family you’re expected to show up to work and be productive. Grief creates a wall around everyone outside of your grief. You want to shake every motherfucker that asks you a dumb question by the shoulders and say “how could you possibly think this is important?”
Currently, I’m in school, freelancing, and working at fashion hell headquarters. I am a regular person, who, unlike Joan Didion, cannot afford to entertain an entire year of magical thinking. I have 5 bereavement days (use up before Feb thanks!) and rent to pay. I am a Virgo, so being Earthbound is important to me even inside my most freewheeling melancholic malaise.
In order to not disappear completely, it became integral for me to have a tether to reality in some regard. I like to set a rulebook for myself in times like this, a vague checklist to keep me going. In art school we called them constraints, like, what constraints am I putting on myself in the studio this week - which - inside their small challenges will force a rewiring of the brain to make better or different work.
Like being in the studio and saying, I’ll only work with this set of colors. My grief rules are as follows:
- Walk everywhere you can. You do not have to make any plans, but if there is an opportunity for walking, take it.
- Do not fight the urge to do nothing.
- Wear sunscreen.
- Music.
Is there anything as alchemic for the mood than a walk with headphones? One of my best friends, Suzanne, is always leaving parties to go on walks with headphones. I remember the first time I encountered her doing this I was so struck by this demand for a more tailored experience. It felt so powerful.
Walking with headphones is one of the last joyous, sort of free, experiences, a girl can have. If you start your walk in a sour mood, you’ll notice soon enough, the mind wanders, you think of something else. You look at a bird in a puddle, a cute dog, things seem to be alright. While a walk with headphones may appear to be firmly in the main character energy camp, in actuality, it has the opposite effect. Rather than stew in the dramas of your life narrative, you are thrown into the everyday and everydayness of everyone else. The sidewalk is one of the last truly shared spaces in 2024. Everybody is allowed.
A sidewalk has more in common with open waters than it does private property. The key, is to keep your eyes open- to be the transparent eyeball of Emerson. You must keep your headphone volume at a minimum. You want to be able to hear, for example, the elderly man riding his motorized wheelchair up Sunset playing Selena out of tiny speakers. You want to be a part of it, the stew, the soup, whatever they call it. If you squint your eyes you can see the mountains in the distance are snowcapped - Emerson’s God, nature. The Chthonic swirling, layering of everything. It’s what Ginsberg was grasping at with Jazz and Sex and Soup. And I saw the best minds of my generation frozen with exhaustion from the blood of 40 hours a week. It’s not an easy ask, just walk everywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Flaneur is a Parisian invention for a reason. American cities are not equipped to even suggest you share space with others, Ford struck a deal early on to eradicate public transportation in California specifically, but we can see the effects of this across the country what with the lack of urban trains and buses, even sidewalks in certain places. Most bus stops are devoid of shade and shelter, I am very lucky to be able to live in a walkable neighborhood.
***
Most if not all the postmodern French thinkers believed in this sort of everyday and everydayness. The idea of everything everywhere all at once. This is the existential crisis and also the nihilists burden. This is literally what every French New Wave Film is about. The way the light comes through the curtain, and you’re in your business casual bourgeoise outfit, fascinated with the little street girl because nothing exists without something else, and you have to look at it all, as it is, and its both better than any satire you could write or tragedy or horror to its most extreme.
It is important for me to remember these things about the world because it makes me feel small and also a part of something big. It makes me want to think about art. My dad and big brother were great artists, from whom I learned so much. As was my grandma Patricia, who visits me every chance she can through Weil and Duras and looking at the trash and seeing what it is.
My big brother trained my eye via Big Brother magazine and limited edition skateboard decks. Kid Robot and everything which feeds the early 2000s 14 year old boy that lives inside of me. Vice Magazine and Millers Crossing. Graffiti and the Beastie Boys and big pants.
I think things would be better generally if people stopped and looked around most of the time. It is easy to say but harder to do. The challenge is to rewire your brain to make better or different work.