#have you READ glamorama????

[goddessofthedawn]

honoring the pretension inherent in me by having a commonplace book but the first entry is lyrics from cobra starship's "prostitution is the world's oldest profession (and i, dear madam, am a professional)"

[zoobus]

okay i have to say that as a person who way too deep into the AP circles of hell (not only just watching the movie and reading the book, i mean reading the books connected to it (such as the rules of attraction, glamorama, lunar park), watching the musical, reading the comics, looking into a lot behind of the scenes stuff, etc. this is not me trying to brag, i just been here Way Too Long And Way Too Deep 🫥...), you are one of the few people who actually Get It. even with opinions i don't fully agree on, i can see you put a lot of thought and care into it and understand the source material, which is somehow very rare to find with this particular piece of media. so thank you for actually bothering to do proper media analysis 🫡.

I've been bestowed the highest honor... I couldn't get past the first 10 pages of American Psycho and I'm being praised for my opinions anyway 🫡

[endofthe1980s]

glamorama is a story about doubles. there's the doppelgängers, clubs, film crews, girlfriends

there's also victor's tendency to repeat himself with references, lyrics, and general dialogue

"Hey man, I know, I know," I say, holding my hands up. "It's cool. It's cool." "Then who is that?" the director asks, nodding over at the Christian Bale guy. "I thought he was in the movie," I say. "I thought you guys casted him."

also. you know. how the story is basically a rehash of his europe trip in the rules of attraction,where he's trying to find jamie/jaime. the dates match up as well, with glamorama lasting an entire fall semester

Still looking for that girl, Jaime. Bumped into someone from Camden on the Italy Program and this person told me that Jaime was in New York not Italy.

it's representative of victor's indecision, which is why the story's events are happening at all: because he can't settle with having one thing. not only does he want to be an actor, he models, runs a club, is in a band, whatever

it was always about making a decision about the future to appease his father

...and a girl passing by told me she liked that story I read in a creating writing workshop. I nodded, ignored her, she moved on. I was fingering a condom that was lodge in my pocket. I was making a decision. "I don't take that class," I told Jamie. "No future, no future, no future—for you," Jamie half-sang.

[the1975attheirverybest]

I love charli but the music vid was also not rly my cup of tea either! it’s very ts girl squad but for the gay and online lol I saw a comment saying it was like if you read glamorama by bee but didn’t pick up on the satire which was such a niche reference I had to share. I’m so excited for the album tho

OH MY GOD SO TRUEEE. It’s so interesting to think about Ellis’s take on 90s celeb culture now that things have gotten to a whole new level. Yeah that’s kind of what that mv is giving unfortunately :/ I feel like it was trying to do something but it didn’t quite get there. It’s troubling when you’re like “is this serious or satire?”

Charli’s a great artist though so I know the album is gonna be great. Even if what she does with it can sometimes miss the mark. We are due for some good music for the summer!

[krankittoeleven]

Can I do an offshoot of a tag game? inspired by the TV show tag game: Rules: 10 (non-ancient) books for people to get to know you better, or that you just really like.

I was tagged by @aeide and @brasideios

Boooks! I'm going to aim for a variety here, though a lot of these will probably lean to horror, but believe me, there is variety in horror lol. These are all the first things that came to mind in no particular order, except the first book which is...just...always...there.

This got long so I put it below a cut.

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski - if I ever figure out what it is about haunted or weird houses, liminal spaces, and abandoned places etc. that I enjoy so much I think I will figure out something about myself. I mean, I know it has to do with solitude and emptiness or something, but it has to be more than that. Anyway, HOL is insane in its presentation, and I think should be experienced at least once, but it takes several readings to see everything (I think this will be perfectly clear after reading it once, but I know not everyone can devote that much time to one book). My favorite fun fact that I've heard about HOL is that MZD didn't intend to write a horror story, but instead a romance, and it just happened to take place in what some people consider a spoopy book.

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine - I think if I were to HIGHLY RECOMMEND any book on this list for a broad audience, this would be THE ONE. The premise is that DNA and Mark go on trips around the world to seek out some of the most endangered animals on the planet and to bring to the public eye the conservation efforts etc. surrounding those animals (this was in the 90s). The book is funny, inspirational, heartwarming and heartbreaking, sometimes bleak, sometimes delightful, and always fascinating. It has inspired a lot of conservation efforts since it was published, even now, long after DNA's death, which I think would make him very happy. My favorite story is about their crew trying to buy condoms in China so they could waterproof their mics to record river dolphins. CLASSIC.

John Dies at the End by David Wong - Horror, Humor and Satire all come together to create an incredibly entertaining read. This is one of my overall favorite books, its just weird, stupid and funny. It's best if you don't take it too seriously.

The Terror by Dan Simmons - one of my favorite historical fiction books (based around the disappearance of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, two British Naval ships lost in the artic). It is the slowest of slow burn, slow creep suspense. If you enjoy audiobooks I highly recommend this one in audio, it is a long read at about 800 pages, but reading it is it's own experience. I really like reading about people exploring really treacherous place so this fits the bill.

When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris - I have always loved David Sedaris' stories, he has been a constant presence in my life for many years and I am always amazed at how open he is about his family life (much to the chagrin of his family sometimes lol). This collection in particular holds a special place for me because it helped me get through quitting smoking, which was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had read the book previously and knew that the last story, When You are Engulfed in Flames, was about David's own experience quitting smoking. I listened to the audiobook a lot during that time, usually while crying quietly under a blanket. LOL

Glamorama by Bret Easton Elis - I'm usually pretty loathe to recommend this to anyone, lest they think I am a psychopath, but seriously this is one of the best satires of consumerism ever written if you can just get past the blood and gore. If you don't know who Bret Easton Elis is, he wrote American Psycho. If you don't know what American Psycho is then skip this book (and maybe skip it even if you do) LOL

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami - I can see why this is one of Murakami's lesser know liked works, but I think it is one of the easiest to comprehend as well (IDK maybe Murakami purists like being confused and saying HUH? a lot). There is an exceptional amount of character growth and discovery to this story and it was not anything near what I thought it would be so that probably scored it some extra points. This isn't even my fave Murakami book, but it's what popped into my head.

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers - I feel like I would be doing all of my blog names a disservice if I didn't at least mention TKIY. Have you seen the yellow sign?

Help a Bear is Eating Me by Mykle Hansen - look, everything you need to know about this book is in the title. Also, it's pretty funny.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - much like House of Leaves, I will never get over this story. Technically is a short story, but you can by it on its own so that makes it a book in my eyes lol Although this wasn't intended to be horror, as far as I know, it is one of the most horrifying things I've ever read. Without agency and autonomy we are nothing.

I will tag @theinkandthesea @mini-uzzy @liminalspacecowboah @troublemakingrebel @getfuckedyahoo @akashadarkblade @ainulindaelynn, @erzsebetrosztoczy and whoever else wants to.

[lligkv]

In the midst of writing my last post, I learned Bret Easton Ellis actually has a new novel, The Shards, coming out this month. And mere days after I published the post, as the publicity campaign for The Shards rolled on in literature's very particular corner of the internet, some people on a Discord server I'm on weighed in. The discussion was acid; the general consensus was that Ellis was a shitty writer and that anyone who thought him worthy of redemption has suspect judgment and taste. I might argue with the first part—I think it comes from rating just Ellis's subject matter and public persona and disregarding the capacities he does have for style and craft, or from weighing Less Than Zero, which is definitely juvenilia, more heavily than his later works. But I don't think the latter is unfair, thinking about the public persona and how, on a publicity tour, that's ultimately what's being redeemed... And it did make me flush a bit to think of any of the folks on that server—who are lovely people, fun to talk to, with fine taste of which I often reap the fruits; I have several books they've recommended on order as we speak—reading my defense of Glamorama, or American Psycho. (Which, I do want to be clear, has some gruesome, gratuitously violent chapters like "Tries to Cook and Eat Girl" that I would say go beyond serving the function that book’s violence is meant to serve. My endorsement of it isn’t as a perfect novel.) I’m nervous to think of them knowing of my sense that Ellis might have a moral consciousness to counterbalance his apparent compulsion to be an enfant terrible, or to align himself with the morally bankrupt, even if it's the latter he often chooses to indulge. They'd probably think I'm a clown, or depraved.

But such are the hazards of making your opinions known. You do have to stand by them and accept how suspect they might make you look.

Still, I'll also admit that Lunar Park hasn't exactly helped me put another notch in the “transcendent” column for Ellis. And it doesn't leave me with much optimism for the artistic potential that The Shards, being another of the autofictional novels, might have.

Lunar Park stars a middle-aged writer named Bret Easton Ellis, a figure who shares some details of Ellis's life—having published all the same novels up through Glamorama; come to fame in the '80s as part of a circle of writers that included Jay McInerney; had a difficult relationship with his father, who is now deceased, and with substances, which are still around; and been working in Hollywood and teaching since—and doesn't share others, being married to an actress with a son, Robby. This character, Bret, begins receiving strange emails, ones that contain videos of his father, including in the hours before his death. He's also visited by strange presences—like a student named Clayton (!) with a suspicious air and an unexplained connection to another student, Aimee Light, who's writing a thesis on Bret's work (and having an affair with him), as well as what seems to be his father's malicious ghost—all in the midst of an epidemic of strange disappearances of sons in the wealthy neighborhood in which he lives—disappearances that haunt him not least because he comes to suspect that Robby and his friends are somehow involved in them—and news of a rash of murders he's made to understand are copycats of the deaths Patrick Bateman causes in American Psycho. In fact, they may be the result of Bateman himself somehow coming to life.

As you could probably guess from that paragraph, there are just a few too many plots going on at once, with too-large gaps between them. Interesting elements do emerge, like the revelation that Bret is being haunted because he's actually created tortured entities in the course of his writing—and that these demons haunt Bret because he has antagonized them by his very creation of them. And the moment when Robby finally joins the boys who vanish, leaving only the words DISAPPEAR HERE, a leitmotif in Ellis's novels since Less Than Zero, scrawled on the wall of his bedroom. As well as the way Bret responds, ultimately writing himself into the end of Lunar Park for his vanished son, perhaps, to find—and perhaps, in the process, following both the father he tried to kill and the son he lost into whatever realm demons come from. Or else stuck firmly on earth, calling out to Robby in vain.

But the book is also pretty sloppy, compared to, say, the measured and careful pace at which Glamorama moves. Again, you have to wait a long time for the threads of Bret's father's resurrection, Patrick Bateman's apparent coming to life, and whatever's happening to Robby to come together and for the fact that Bret's being haunted to become clear. This novel doesn't have what American Psycho does, either, excitements and provocations to compensate for an uneven construction. Ellis also adopts a reliance on paragraph breaks—to slow time in the moments the plot takes a twist or to amplify the horror of certain events or realizations—that quickly becomes wearying. And far too much of the novel's action hinges on Bret's being menaced by a toy belonging to his stepdaughter, a Furby clone with a name, "Terby," that's at one point wrought into a terrible acronym ("Y, BRET?") that lands with a thud.

What’s more, while this may be a strange thing to settle on, Ellis's handling of computers and the internet is appallingly clumsy. For one, the compulsion to name brands and products—an Ellis signature that's a reliable and even entertaining marker of yuppie-era shallowness in novels previous—feels much different when the product in question is WordPerfect. I don't know if it's the result of technology evolving at a pace that the lifestyle signifiers of the late 20th century (watches, suits, glasses, restaurants) just didn't, or if this reflects the scrutiny a reader can bring to references that are contemporaneous to them rather than anachronistic—I did live through the early internet in a way I didn't 1980s or '90s New York—but they took me out of the novel practically every time I encountered them. Ellis also wrings a significant chunk of drama out of the fact that for months Bret remains unaware that the mysterious emails he's been receiving have attachments. Maybe you're meant to chalk that up to Bret's obliviousness or his staggering substance use—but I find it extremely hard to believe anyone who's emailing anyone, no matter how much they struggle to do it, wouldn't notice attachments on mysterious and otherwise empty emails long before that.

Again—and I realize I say some variation of this in practically every post, but—I do think Ellis is grappling with substantive matters in all this... The child's struggle with the primal father, and the prospect of the writer transfiguring this father into literature. The way such an attempt to control narratives through writing or to exorcise through writing may birth new demons, as people read the products of your tortured creation and become tortured themselves or swear revenge. The cruelty of sons to their cruel and inadequate fathers, as they seek to individuate; the cycle by which the cruel sons become inadequate fathers in their time; the question of when this cycle ends, if it ever does. I can see these themes. But were they done justice? The universe Ellis creates in this novel is rather cardboard compared to the vividness of the world as depicted in the entirely fictionalized works. And if your interrogation of the hazards of transmuting pain into art, trying to control narratives that can’t ever be perfectly controlled, and aestheticizing violence is also a somewhat incoherent novel with a serial-killer plot—one in which the costs of aestheticized violence are borne not by you so much as by your fictional son, who disappears while you live... if ultimately, the only cost of all this is how bad it makes you feel, to which you attest in language that only occasionally reaches true feeling or beauty... I don't know. It rids these themes of their potency.

*

It’s also disappointing to realize I was wrong about Paul Denton, who is referenced, at least, in Lunar Park. I'd hoped the omission was deliberate.

[brettyimages]

bookish survey! A, C, H, I, O, Q, R, Z

Author You’ve Read The Most Books From - I just answered this one but in addition to my previous answers I also read a lot of John Green's novels and books written by members of Motley Crue, if you can lump them together as one collective

Currently Reading - my current main book is Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis. I've also got Sylvia Plath's Journals, The Scarlet Letter, and That's Your Lot by Limmy on the go as my non-fiction, e-book and short stories for travelling books...

Hidden Gem Book - I read Fangirls by Hannah Rose Ewens last summer and adored it. It's a non-fiction study of fangirl behaviour and covers queuing all day outside gigs, calling your faves daddy in the comments of their insta pics, travelling to the US for a glimpse of Courtney, going on walks around the places Amy Winehouse hung out and so much more and I saw so much of myself and my loved ones in it.

Important Moments of Your Reading Life - I answered this one already too but adding switching Morrissey's Autobiography (so boring) for How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran and having to put it down so I didn't start laughing aloud on the train. I think that was one of the first feminist books I read and it was so much fun.

One Book That You Have Read Multiple Times - this is where I have to shout out to Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson. I devoured the library copy before going to his book signing, I've had him read it to me via audiobook, I've read the paperback on my way to hear him talk about the sequel. It's now battered and full of page markers as I used it as a London guidebook, walking the streets he walked and seeing the places he lived and loved; it's invaluable to me.

Quote From A Book That Inspires You/Gives You Feels - it's lame because it's from a John Green novel but it's true: "what a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person".

Reading Regret - I didn't read much in high school at all, only YA novels about girls who were rock guitarists or goth teenagers or music biographies. I skimmed most of the books I had to read for classes and just fell out of love with reading in general for a few years.

ZZZ-Snatcher (last book that kept you up WAY late) - Dracula: I read it as part of Dracula Daily along with the rest of Tumblr and it kept me going on the long tube journeys out to the hotels I could afford for last minute Suede jaunts. It didn't keep me up necessarily because it was a page-turner but it kept me from falling asleep on the train!

[ulliell]

5, 14, 15, 28, 41, 43 (I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS ONE BUT SHH), 54, 60, 134

5. something in fiction that reads like poetry not sure exactly what this question means but fredrick’s love letter to anne in persuasion by jane austen haunts my soul more than anything

14. a book that made you trip on literary acid glamorama by bret easton ellis is just wild from start to finish

15. a book rec you really enjoyed my mom bought and recommended naiv. super. by erlend loe to me when i was 16 and it changed me as a person and is still my all time fave so yeah

28. a book you wish you could read as a beginner again the winternight trilogy by katherine arden! such a magical series and vasya petrovna owns my heart

41. a book about nature can’t stop thinking about the southern reach trilogy by jeff vandermeer

43. a book that you have read more than three times i know you want me to say the lies of locke lamora by scott lynch so i'm gonna say my ultimate teenage guilty pleasure book instead which is audrey, wait! by robin benway

54. a book with the best opening line “the monster showed up just after midnight.” a monster calls by patrick ness

60. a book about city life apparently i read close to zero books about city life because the only one i can think of is beartown by fredrik backman and that’s more about small town life lol

134. unrecommend any book you like! i have a personal vendetta against a little life by hanya yanagihara i don’t want a single person to read that book

[avanneman]

Yo, Mainstream Media! Bret Easton Ellis has Aitch Ay Dee Had It With You!

It’s true! Mr. Three Names is never, no, never! going to forgive you guys for the way you lied about the Mueller Report! Reason gal Elizabeth Nolan Ryan summarizes Bret's cri de cœur/podcast thusly:

"I want to state that I am not a Republican, I am not a conservative, I am not part of the right wing, I did not vote for Trump, I am not part of the alt-right, I am not interested in politics." ... Ellis said he doesn't "care enough about" Trump to defend him against allegations of Russian collusion, but his beef is with "the crazy dishonest press" and "being lied to" by members of it. "There is no way to get around the fact that the mainstream media misled the country for the last two years. Period," Ellis added. "I'm not saying that as a conservative, or as a liberal. I'm saying it simply as a witness." These outlets "should be humiliated by what they were perpetrating."

Well, as George F. Will was wont to say, “well”. I confess I’m not up on the details of the ravings of talking heads like Rachel Maddow, and that I thought the “speculations” by supposedly more responsible folk like James Clapper that Donald Trump was a “witting agent” of Vladimir Putin were pretty ridiculous, and that Jonathan Chait’s now notorious “plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion”, which he recently tried to explain away in the manner of Rush “Just Putting It Out There” Limbaugh, was so mind-bogglingly boring that I stopped reading it after the first few paragraphs, but (if you’re still with me), I’d like to point you in the direction of a handy-dandy interactive graphic supplied by, yes, the New York Times, with the snappy title “Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With Russians Before the Inauguration”, a great many of which were frequently lied about by Trump and his minions.

I’m still amazed that it was considered “okay” for a retired three-star general (Michael Flynn) to accept a gratuity from Russian sources to sit at a banquet table with Vladimir Putin, even if he didn’t repeatedly yell “Lock her up!” in public with regard to a former secretary of state, and also “okay” for him to work secretly as an agent of the Turkish government, writing, for example, an op-ed supporting Turkish policies without disclosing that arrangement, and also okay for such a man to be appointed as the president’s national security advisor.

I’m also still amazed that it was considered “okay” for the president to fire the head of the FBI, and to arrange for and publish a cover story to disguise the fact that the firing was meant to discourage the FBI’s investigation into Flynn. I’m also still amazed that it was considered “okay” for the president’s son, working in the president’s election campaign, to have a meeting, in the company of two other principal campaign officials, with Russian nationals for the express purpose of obtaining information from Russian intelligence that could be used against Hillary Clinton in the campaign, a meeting about which both he and the president lied in public.

I repeat the old—old and accurate—comment that if President Obama or Hillary Clinton had fired the head of the FBI for any reason, a Republican House of Representatives would have impeached them for obstruction of justice. Since Donald Trump in fact fired Mr. Comey in order to obstruct justice, then he damn well did obstruct justice.

I think impeachment is a terrible idea, and I don’t think that President Trump, on the record before us, should be impeached. But the notion that his nauseating record of corruption and deceit can and should be swept under the rug on the grounds of “Oh, golly, I’m just so sick and tired of hearing about all this stuff!” is simply a matter of what a not very PC mayor of New York1 once called “rape by acquiescence”.

Afterwords I If Mr. Ellis doesn't trust the Times, perhaps he could consider a column written six months ago by David French in the National Review, Republicans Must Reject ‘Russia Hoax’ Conspiracies and Examine the Evidence. Opined former U.S. attorney French:

The more we learn about Trump World’s contacts with Russians or Russian operatives, the more astounding it becomes. Consider this partial summary:

Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, lied to Congress about his contacts with a Russian government official as he tried to negotiate a Trump Tower Moscow deal deep into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged asset of Russian intelligence.

Longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone (and Stone’s sidekick, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi) allegedly tried to communicate with WikiLeaks, a “hostile intelligence service,” to obtain advance information about Julian Assange’s planned document dumps.

Donald Trump’s son, campaign chairman, and son-in-law met with a purported Russian representative with the intention of receiving “official documents” as part of a “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about his own contacts with a professor who “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials” and who claimed to have access to “dirt” on Hillary in the form of “thousands of emails.”

Mr. French thoughtfully provides links for each of these items in case Mr. Ellis still retains some doubts.

Afterwords II I've never liked Mr. Ellis very much. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a review for the Bright Lights Film Journal of the film American Psycho, based on Bret’s novel of the same name. I looked at the novel, intending to quote a chunk of it so that readers could have a taste, but Mr. Ellis’ prose was so vicious and repulsive that I just didn’t have the stomach for it. So I summarized his effort instead:

When Ellis wrote American Psycho back in 1991, he probably had no higher motive than to write the most disgusting, and thus the most profitable, book he could imagine. Unfortunately for Ellis, he overshot the mark. It turned out that filling a book with appalling depictions of misogynistic torture wasn’t the shortest road to fame and riches.

At the time I wrote my review, Ellis had a new book out, described by his publisher as follows: “Glamorama, Ellis’s latest vehicle, ventures deep inside the world of celebrity, a world that jet-sets from coast-to-coast, from champagne flute to vial of cocaine, all the while sacrificing humanity for image.”

Write about what you know, eh, dude? Write about what you know.

Fiorello La Guardia, the “Little Flower”. ↩︎

[endofthe1980s]

history of astrology in ellis novels

less than zero: clay is advised by his father to check out the leo horoscope. "those planetary vibes work on your body in weird ways"

the rules of attraction: lauren talks to franklin about it, which makes her hate him even more. lol

I have come to this conclusion, not by reading his writing, which is science fiction, which is “heavily influenced by astrology,” which is terrible, but by something I don’t understand. I tell him I like his stories, I tell him my sign and we discuss the importance of the stories but …

american psycho: the infamous "Does being a Libra signify anything and if so, can you prove it?" and evelyn sees an astrologer during their vacation

emails. if you like them: "I found this store on Crosby Street that had these stainless sconces with aluminum shades with signs of the Zodiac punched through in little holes and I had to have them and they were One Hundred and Seventy Nine Dollars."

glamorama:

Jamie told me, “You’re the only sign in the horoscope that’s not a living thing.” “What do you mean?” I muttered. “You’re a Libra,” she said. “You’re just a set of scales.” “But I thought I was a Capricorn,” I sighed.

(before the shards i thought this was a diss on patrick, i mean ellis has made jokes about his previous novels before)

imperial bedrooms: kinda where shit gets real.

previously you could assume clay was a leo sun, according to less than zero, but possibly the "funniest" dialogue in the whole story reveals that clay is a leo rising and pisces sun

"You should be more compassionate," she says later, int he darkness of the bedroom. "Why?" I ask. "Why should I be more compassionate?" "You're a Pisces."

makes sense because he's the character most based off of ellis and he shares the same placements

the shards: and oh baby. the big one. finally it's clear that he knows

That was the week I became reminded how astrology affected the populace, when one of Audrey Barbour's friends said Audrey's "rising sign" indicated "danger perhaps" in the ensuing days after the disappearance [...] Other people I knew from that era heavily invested in astrology included my father [...] My father was an atheist and yet enamored by the religion of astrology and it suggests something about him that I thought I'd never seen but now realize, writing this, was always visible: a childlike lostness.

some context:

astrology is often used by the wealthy. there's this quote from JP Morgan... "Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do." .....but it may be misattributed! BUT! it's not wrong

horoscopes are meant to be read using your rising sign/ascendant, so the clay thing in less than zero should have been obvious, but. sigh. you know

[writer-man-blog]

Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch' is Tearing Me Apart

The very delicate memories I have of my own mother are the main reason it’s taken me more than two years to get even halfway-through The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. The other is my class-E addiction to the smell of new books, many of which I abandon for the next odorous thing after four or five briskly read chapters.

I dived into The Goldfinch a little perplexed by how unconcerned it was with splashy sentences. I’d been completely unaware of Donna Tartt’s existence, and one of the first things I learnt about her was that she once dated Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis basically rebirthed me with American Psycho, and seemed to hover just as dozy and dazed as all the milky white miscreants in books as gloriously shallow as The Rules of Attraction and Glamorama. I certainly didn’t expect Tartt to write the way Ellis does – as if each narrative chin-up is meant to culminate in a sudden overdose of form – and I was not surprised by a mutual taste for human darkness. But Tartt’s story of an impressionable young New Yorker who survives a pseudo-terrorist attack on an art gallery, losing his mother and gaining a famous painting, is so unassuming that it’s easy to wonder what all the fuss was.  

It’s as Dickensian as reviewers promised, in length and in ambition. Before the bomb actually goes off young Theo Decker skips school, and we’re invited to explore the ins and outs of his life within a Manhattan apartment building – his ease with the adorable bellhops, his relative lack of naiveté, and most of all the delicate relationship he has with his mother. She’s raised Theo alone since parting ways with his deadbeat dad. We know that she has some kind of low-stakes role to play at an ad agency, I believe, even though her views on creativity – and how vital it’s been to Theo’s upbringing – are anything but. The ominousness of knowing what’s about to befall this woman, and how large and cruel the world could become for this child, inflects her every gesture with a near hymnal finality. The way Tartt writes, Theodore's mom moves like a butterfly, while Theo himself bounds down stairs and holds up elevators with a burning readiness to confront adulthood.

He’s in mourning for much of his time, in ‘transit’, at the Barbours' – family friends who take him in while Social Services devises a plan. Theo makes secret visits to a craftsman’s shop, of which he learns from a body in the blast, and where he is besotted with the idea of a girl injured in the blast, and who departs before he can figure out what she means to him. An informal cub and bear union is formed between Theo and Hobie, the old man revealing some of the magic of restoring antique furniture for a living. Soon enough, Theo is himself shepherded to Las Vegas by a father whose shady figure cuts back into the scene now that there’s an inheritance to exploit.

Tartt is at home just writing about the little things that happen in between each tragic development; so that the effect is you and Theo just sitting around drawing comfort from whoever’s there, before some flawed authoritarian flings the door open and changes everything. It’s heartbreaking to see what a mother’s absence does to a child, when Theo takes up recreational drugs without a thought, and yet heartwarming to watch him do them with his only friend in the world. I can’t help but think of this song by St. Vincent, and the bits she sings about stealing a Chrysler from the garage, and “throwing up in your mom’s azaleas.”

All the while, I’m trembling with fear at the fact that time will take away the privilege of childhood, and all goodwill with it, and then Theo will have nothing but his mother’s favorite painting to process a mountain of pain. There’ll be no second chances for free – no calls from Social Services or his mother’s well-intentioned attorney.

I hear Warner Bros. or somebody have already optioned the film rights. Even if I’m all wrapped up by then, Lord knows if I’ll be able to watch this shameless tearjerker come to life.

[atrophiedcompassion]

Quarantine Q&A

i was tagged by @2pcb in this questionnaire, so here we go

Are you staying home from work/school?

indeed.

If you’re staying home, who’s there with you?

dad and the cat, as before. this week he’s also been home (his job is having people come in shifts so avoid having too many folk in one place at once) and let me tell you that he’s been quite annoying.

Are you a homebody?

yep! but i am getting antsy with having to stay indoors, now that it’s mandatory

What movies have you watched recently? What shows are you watching?

i watched death at a funeral (the 2010 remake) last night and it was so hilarious. been watching murdoch mysteries with dad and it’s quite fun! am trying to catch up with bob’s burgers on the down time of my work schedule (usually in the 17:00 to 18:00 timeslot, but as far as indulging and binging tv on the weekend, i’ve actually done worse than before the Quarantine. i can barely recall to watch the new westworld ep on tv (3 mondays in a row i barely made it) and i haven’t watched one ep on BCS since season 5 started.

An event that you were looking forward to that got cancelled?

summer hols, i wanted to visit rural catalunya this year, and i can imagine that the japan trip in october is also most likely postponed. luckily i hadn’t yet put any money down on either, so that’s that

What music are you listening to?

been putting itunes to shuffle again, rather than just listening to fleetwood mac’s greatest hits or brian eno stuff or new or old tool.

What are you reading?

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis. i usually read on commute. with no commute, for the first two weeks of Quarantine, the book remained untouched. i’ve picked up reading last week in what constitutes my “lunch break”. the style is incredibly annoying and the main char is so self absorbed and dimwitted, it’s very hard to enjoy. i had almost gotten used to the style when i stopped for Quarantine, so now it’s very hard to get back into. ugh

What are you doing for self-care?

i am following my skincare routine to a tee, nothing’s changed or missing. i decided to let my eyebrows grow out and since yesterday, i am dabbing them with castor oil hoping they improve! (i am part of that coming of age in the 90s generation of women who plucked their eyebrows to a small thin line and the hairs refuse to grow ever since...)

sports wise, i am so lucky to have a sporty friend who also teaches yoga, so we’ve been doing zoom sessions with her, both core strength exercises and cardio, as well as some yoga.

sometimes i just dance myself into a sweat, 15-20 mins is enough cardio for me.

friends meets on zoom or whatsapp calls, trying to NOT speak about covid, me trying to temper more panic prone friends and getting bad sleep over it. it’s been okay, overall

[foursprout-blog]

On Avicii, Top Shelf Vodka, And The Summer Love That Never Was

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/on-avicii-top-shelf-vodka-and-the-summer-love-that-never-was/

On Avicii, Top Shelf Vodka, And The Summer Love That Never Was

louis amal / Unsplash

I was sitting at the red concrete table in front of El Michoacano on the corner of Lankershim Blvd. and Sherman Way when my Grindr notification went off. Repetitive ranchero music was blaring from behind the counter, where they were taking longer than usual to make my burrito. I didn’t remember messaging him, but apparently, I did two weeks prior to no response. Two weeks prior, he saw my what’s up message and decided I wasn’t what he was looking for and passed on me for a more attractive profile. But now, he was horny and kept refreshing the app and it was pulling up too many familiar countenances and he decided to look through his messages to see if there was somebody new and appeasing he hadn’t fucked yet and I guess he figured he couldn’t do any worse than me tonight. I wanted to respond to his late nothin much text with disdain and snark, but I had nothing better to do aside from deepthroating a carne asada burrito while rewatching OZ, so I just replied, what are you gettin into? He was taking so long responding to my message that I was walking through my front door when the Grinder alert went off again.

Hopefully you , masctop9.5 finally replied.

I forfeited on satiating my hunger and just sat the burrito in the microwave when I got inside. He only sent me a close-up dick pic with nothing typical to compare it in scale with, like a remote or can of Red Bull. Most likely nine and a half porn star inches (works for me regardless). I douched until the toilet water ran clear and drove my lemon towards Studio City. Approaching his apartment, I was filled with the same excited energy I always have when I’m walking up to a hookup’s house. The nervousness of not really knowing who or what awaited behind the door as you check your phone to make sure it’s the right address.

At least he wasn’t a catfish. He was just as tall and skinny as his profile indicated. His eyes were a deep grey they went past seductive and leaned more into demonic, and outside of them, he wasn’t that good looking of a guy. Endearingly ugly is a term a friend would later use to describe him and it always stuck with me (even though I wouldn’t necessarily consider him ugly-ugly; he just had odd features. Regardless, he was trading with, a legitimate, nine and a half inches worth of currency). When I came in, he must’ve sensed the nervousness because he asked if I wanted to take a shot and I obliged. The apartment reeked of Cool Water cologne, off-brand laundry detergent, and marijuana. Interchangeable euro techno pulsed from the hallway leading to the bedroom. Making small talk as he pulled out a bottle of Ciroc and two shot glasses, I asked if that was a Russian accent spilling out of his mouth. He replied Ukrainian and we threw back the two shots of something that wasn’t Ciroc (I wasn’t going to complain) and he offered up a pull from his bong after he hit it, but I declined because my cottonmouth can get so severe at times, it makes cunninglingus dry, sticky, and useless. Without another word, his dick was out and it was even more freakishly large than I expected (those Chernobyl genetics work both ways).

The sex started out with a bang but got increasingly annoying. Like most guys who are that hung, he could never get fully hard and ended up utilizing the porn trick of stiffening up and applying a vice grip around the base of his dick while sliding it in and out. Still, the sensation was good enough that I came too soon, and as always, the feeling of something inside of me after an orgasm becomes more tortuous than pleasurable, but I wasn’t going to be selfish. He finished off with one of the weirdest set of accented grunts and foreign swear words I’ve ever heard and collapsed on top of me with all his sticky weight, dripping sweat on the back of my head as his hard pants turned into a slight snore. When he came to, he got up and disappeared behind a bathroom door and I could only hear the muffled sound of a faucet running, water splashing and a succession of hard snorts, followed by a loud hawk and a spit. I was unsure of whether or not I should get up and get dressed or just lay there. There was a point when we were doing missionary that he stared at me with those possessed irises and we both cracked a smile and I kind of wanted to see what that would lead to. If he’d wanted me to stay the night, I wouldn’t want to disinvite myself by being dressed by the time he came out of the bathroom. I decided to gauge his reaction and go from there. If he looked quizzical in any type of way, I’d fake like I was waiting for a washcloth even though I was thoroughly dry by then. But when he came out, his expression was blank and he just asked me if I wanted to hear some of the music he made. He pulled up an Ableton session, colored lines stretching out across his MacBook Pro screen as the shitty techno (that was playing every since I arrived) was replaced by an even shittier amateur, douchebro EDM. He listened to the music intensely, eyes closed as he’s vibing. I feigned amazement because I was laying in his bed naked, taking another shot of whatever this was that wasn’t Ciroc and the bong appeared from somewhere and I’m clearing the chamber because his dick barely fit in my mouth regardless. I wanted to ask him to delete the picture I sent him on Grindr (front facing camera raised slightly above head towards bathroom mirror — no face shown, black Andrew Christian jockstrap, back slightly but not noticeably arched) because I was still planning on becoming famous in those days, but decided not to be a nuisance about it. He tells me about Beatport and that he’s bisexual and that Mila Kunis is also Ukrainian and I try to put him onto Gesaffelstein but he doesn’t seem impressed, so he maneuvered into a Kylie Minogue playlist he created full of dance remixes and we had sex again, both of us wet and sticky again as we passed out before midnight struck.

The next morning was a Saturday, but he had to work. He cleaned the plaque off his teeth with the inside of whatever shirt he wore the night before and threw it towards, not inside of, the hamper. He disappeared behind the bathroom door again, this time to the muffled sound of a stream of piss followed by an asshole fluttering fart and a chuckle. This was never meant to last forever, but I was still interested in seeing how far we could take it.

The summer commenced and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” dropped, and Vlad, being the connoisseur of great taste, listened to it religiously. Yeezus dropped and I didn’t care for it initially but forced myself to like it. We seemingly survived on a diet of cold pizza, Dollar Tree burritos, and Arnold Palmer Half & Halfs. Gesaffelstein’s ”Pursuit” video dropped. Vlad marveled at it for a few days and I felt a sense of hipster validation for putting him onto it. I’d lay in his bed reading his dog-eared copy of The Master and Margarita while he watched YouTube tutorials and illegally downloaded the VST’s his favorite producers used. I was forced to listen to various strains of house, trance and trap EDM. He’d scrunch up his face and tell me the music I liked sounded like ghosts committing suicide (KID A!!!). My thumb became calloused because I kept burning it while lighting the big, blue bong full of Girl Scout Cookies, and when that ran out, we’d head up to Van Nuys to donate blood plasma to buy another eighth to last us until payday. “Wake Me Up” would still be leaking out of his headphones as he squeezed the blue foam ball and passively flipped through the copy of Complex magazine I bought with The Weeknd on the cover while I’d be nursing a copy of Glamorama (which I kept in my book bag the entire two years I was in LA and have yet to finish) and feeling lightheaded. Sex consisted of the same routine positions (I’d blow him, he’d rim me, cowgirl, squatting cowgirl until my leg gave out, reverse cowgirl, spoon, doggystyle, in front of bathroom mirror, on the bathroom counter, doggystyle again followed by the money shot).

Elisa Lam’s mysterious death was still haunting the city and he wanted to stay at The Cecil for a night. People on the elevator said there was somebody knocking on their door the previous night, but this is Los Angeles and I can never be sure if people are actually serious or just playing it up. We fucked around ghost and an incessant knocking on the walls that wasn’t coming from our headboard. Somebody on our floor was loudly playing Top 40 radio (Top 10 is more accurate) to drown out all the cacophony but only succeeded in adding to it. “We Can’t Stop” and “Blurred Lines” and “Can’t Hold Us” and “Get Lucky” played in a loop and the knocking kept getting louder, so we decided to just check out and go back to his apartment.

He was an attention-seeking Leo and for his birthday, I bought him a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones. We did molly at a warehouse party and I wanted to hug and kiss him all night but he didn’t want to have any type of physical contact since there were straight men around. Instead, he danced around with a bottle blonde, Slovenian chick with a retroussé nose (bitch looked like an elf) and gave her bumps of the molly that I paid for. When the night was ending, he told her he was going to the bathroom and we snuck out the back. We went back to his place and he fucked me through the mattress, but he wasn’t able to cum.

The relationship gave off the air of what I assume is teenage love even though I was in my early 20s and he had just landed in his 30s. Like most non-cis men, we had to forfeit these type of relationships early on due to societal pressures and fear during our formative years. One night, under the influence of Ace of Spades (which in actuality was a $20 bottle of champagne called Veuve Clicquot Brut that he’d pour in the gold bottle. The aforementioned “Ciroc” was New Amsterdam. Appearance is everything, I guess) and Super Rush, while performing formulaic missionary and staring into those dubious greys again, I told him I loved him even though I didn’t really mean it. He hesitated, then told me the same thing back with an ambiguous smirk. The same tone as telling your boyfriend you’ll be together forever before walking across the graduation stage and into your first taste of the freedom that college brings. We never repeated those three words again.

I caught him wearing a gold wedding band I’d never seen previously and he just shrugged and told me he bought it because it made him more marketable to gay guys. He began inconspicuously checking his phone during the night, so I opened up Grindr for the first time during the summer and saw that he was still active. The next morning, he acted aloof towards me. I knew he was fucking somebody else, and although I couldn’t get mad because we weren’t a couple-couple, I became extremely jealous. I spent nights wondering if whoever he was fucking would knock me out of my spot. The come thru texts were coming less frequently. He just told me he became real busy lately.

Nothing Was The Same leaked just as the summer was coming to a halt. I got fired from my job and moved from North Hollywood to Valley Village, maybe thinking that being closer could mend whatever had broken, but mostly because rent was cheaper. I hadn’t watched porn or masturbated all summer and forgot my password, so I had to “Forgot My Password” it and create a new one. It took a week before he came to my new place. We tried to fuck on the air mattress, but it made too much noise, so we just did it standing up. It was the first time our routine had altered.

A change in location meant a change in Grindr and Scruff profiles. I replaced him with a barrage of random dick coming in and out of my life. He didn’t text much and stopped calling completely, but I already knew I was months away from going back home, so it didn’t matter much anyway. Sometimes men just go cold like that. I’ve been ignored in social situations immediately after having sex with a guy—it’s whatever. Our last meeting happened the following spring, the day before I left Los Angeles to return home as another sad statistic. It consisted of us reminiscing about the previous summer. Our summer. The barrage of music that would always be associated with that time period (All those mindless effects, pitch-shifting, buildups and drops now having significant meaning to me). The cheap GMOs we digested and shat out. The sphincter-stretching, sometimes painful, but mostly great sex. There was only the veneer of keeping in touch. There was never any explanation or real reconciliation about our distance. There was no need. We already knew. It was fun for what it was.

When Avicii died, my social media feeds were inundated with embeds of “Wake Me Up.” I hadn’t heard that song since that summer when it annoyed the living piss out of me. I hadn’t thought of masctop9.5 much since then either. Curiosity took hold and I went to Google to see if I could track him down. After a few unsuccessfully tries of remembering (followed by remembering how to spell) his extensive last name, I finally found those haunting greys. The Ciroc and Ace of Spades aged him and he was now a rough mid-30s. Vladyslav never became the big time push play and fist pump DJ that he wanted to be. His stint in Los Angeles didn’t seem to pan out much better than mine either, as he’d moved back east. The prophecy became true. Like a lot of bisexual men, he used his sexuality to be openly intimate with men while knowing he’d always end up settling down with a wife and having kids to satisfy his religious family. He’d get into these mini-relationships but leave quickly to minimize the hurt he was causing to the men he strung along. His timeline was flooded with pictures of him cradling newborns and hugging the bride and smiling a coffee-stained smile as he lurked over everybody in family photos. Any life before that was erased. I wondered if his wife knew that he probably fucked more men than she had. I wondered if the kids knew that he was probably switching out the breast milk for Similac. I wondered if he would be thinking about our summer together for the rest of his life every time that shitty song comes on.

RIP Avicii.

[foursprouthappiness-blog]

On Avicii, Top Shelf Vodka, And The Summer Love That Never Was

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/on-avicii-top-shelf-vodka-and-the-summer-love-that-never-was/

On Avicii, Top Shelf Vodka, And The Summer Love That Never Was

louis amal / Unsplash

I was sitting at the red concrete table in front of El Michoacano on the corner of Lankershim Blvd. and Sherman Way when my Grindr notification went off. Repetitive ranchero music was blaring from behind the counter, where they were taking longer than usual to make my burrito. I didn’t remember messaging him, but apparently, I did two weeks prior to no response. Two weeks prior, he saw my what’s up message and decided I wasn’t what he was looking for and passed on me for a more attractive profile. But now, he was horny and kept refreshing the app and it was pulling up too many familiar countenances and he decided to look through his messages to see if there was somebody new and appeasing he hadn’t fucked yet and I guess he figured he couldn’t do any worse than me tonight. I wanted to respond to his late nothin much text with disdain and snark, but I had nothing better to do aside from deepthroating a carne asada burrito while rewatching OZ, so I just replied, what are you gettin into? He was taking so long responding to my message that I was walking through my front door when the Grinder alert went off again.

Hopefully you , masctop9.5 finally replied.

I forfeited on satiating my hunger and just sat the burrito in the microwave when I got inside. He only sent me a close-up dick pic with nothing typical to compare it in scale with, like a remote or can of Red Bull. Most likely nine and a half porn star inches (works for me regardless). I douched until the toilet water ran clear and drove my lemon towards Studio City. Approaching his apartment, I was filled with the same excited energy I always have when I’m walking up to a hookup’s house. The nervousness of not really knowing who or what awaited behind the door as you check your phone to make sure it’s the right address.

At least he wasn’t a catfish. He was just as tall and skinny as his profile indicated. His eyes were a deep grey they went past seductive and leaned more into demonic, and outside of them, he wasn’t that good looking of a guy. Endearingly ugly is a term a friend would later use to describe him and it always stuck with me (even though I wouldn’t necessarily consider him ugly-ugly; he just had odd features. Regardless, he was trading with, a legitimate, nine and a half inches worth of currency). When I came in, he must’ve sensed the nervousness because he asked if I wanted to take a shot and I obliged. The apartment reeked of Cool Water cologne, off-brand laundry detergent, and marijuana. Interchangeable euro techno pulsed from the hallway leading to the bedroom. Making small talk as he pulled out a bottle of Ciroc and two shot glasses, I asked if that was a Russian accent spilling out of his mouth. He replied Ukrainian and we threw back the two shots of something that wasn’t Ciroc (I wasn’t going to complain) and he offered up a pull from his bong after he hit it, but I declined because my cottonmouth can get so severe at times, it makes cunninglingus dry, sticky, and useless. Without another word, his dick was out and it was even more freakishly large than I expected (those Chernobyl genetics work both ways).

The sex started out with a bang but got increasingly annoying. Like most guys who are that hung, he could never get fully hard and ended up utilizing the porn trick of stiffening up and applying a vice grip around the base of his dick while sliding it in and out. Still, the sensation was good enough that I came too soon, and as always, the feeling of something inside of me after an orgasm becomes more tortuous than pleasurable, but I wasn’t going to be selfish. He finished off with one of the weirdest set of accented grunts and foreign swear words I’ve ever heard and collapsed on top of me with all his sticky weight, dripping sweat on the back of my head as his hard pants turned into a slight snore. When he came to, he got up and disappeared behind a bathroom door and I could only hear the muffled sound of a faucet running, water splashing and a succession of hard snorts, followed by a loud hawk and a spit. I was unsure of whether or not I should get up and get dressed or just lay there. There was a point when we were doing missionary that he stared at me with those possessed irises and we both cracked a smile and I kind of wanted to see what that would lead to. If he’d wanted me to stay the night, I wouldn’t want to disinvite myself by being dressed by the time he came out of the bathroom. I decided to gauge his reaction and go from there. If he looked quizzical in any type of way, I’d fake like I was waiting for a washcloth even though I was thoroughly dry by then. But when he came out, his expression was blank and he just asked me if I wanted to hear some of the music he made. He pulled up an Ableton session, colored lines stretching out across his MacBook Pro screen as the shitty techno (that was playing every since I arrived) was replaced by an even shittier amateur, douchebro EDM. He listened to the music intensely, eyes closed as he’s vibing. I feigned amazement because I was laying in his bed naked, taking another shot of whatever this was that wasn’t Ciroc and the bong appeared from somewhere and I’m clearing the chamber because his dick barely fit in my mouth regardless. I wanted to ask him to delete the picture I sent him on Grindr (front facing camera raised slightly above head towards bathroom mirror — no face shown, black Andrew Christian jockstrap, back slightly but not noticeably arched) because I was still planning on becoming famous in those days, but decided not to be a nuisance about it. He tells me about Beatport and that he’s bisexual and that Mila Kunis is also Ukrainian and I try to put him onto Gesaffelstein but he doesn’t seem impressed, so he maneuvered into a Kylie Minogue playlist he created full of dance remixes and we had sex again, both of us wet and sticky again as we passed out before midnight struck.

The next morning was a Saturday, but he had to work. He cleaned the plaque off his teeth with the inside of whatever shirt he wore the night before and threw it towards, not inside of, the hamper. He disappeared behind the bathroom door again, this time to the muffled sound of a stream of piss followed by an asshole fluttering fart and a chuckle. This was never meant to last forever, but I was still interested in seeing how far we could take it.

The summer commenced and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” dropped, and Vlad, being the connoisseur of great taste, listened to it religiously. Yeezus dropped and I didn’t care for it initially but forced myself to like it. We seemingly survived on a diet of cold pizza, Dollar Tree burritos, and Arnold Palmer Half & Halfs. Gesaffelstein’s ”Pursuit” video dropped. Vlad marveled at it for a few days and I felt a sense of hipster validation for putting him onto it. I’d lay in his bed reading his dog-eared copy of The Master and Margarita while he watched YouTube tutorials and illegally downloaded the VST’s his favorite producers used. I was forced to listen to various strains of house, trance and trap EDM. He’d scrunch up his face and tell me the music I liked sounded like ghosts committing suicide (KID A!!!). My thumb became calloused because I kept burning it while lighting the big, blue bong full of Girl Scout Cookies, and when that ran out, we’d head up to Van Nuys to donate blood plasma to buy another eighth to last us until payday. “Wake Me Up” would still be leaking out of his headphones as he squeezed the blue foam ball and passively flipped through the copy of Complex magazine I bought with The Weeknd on the cover while I’d be nursing a copy of Glamorama (which I kept in my book bag the entire two years I was in LA and have yet to finish) and feeling lightheaded. Sex consisted of the same routine positions (I’d blow him, he’d rim me, cowgirl, squatting cowgirl until my leg gave out, reverse cowgirl, spoon, doggystyle, in front of bathroom mirror, on the bathroom counter, doggystyle again followed by the money shot).

Elisa Lam’s mysterious death was still haunting the city and he wanted to stay at The Cecil for a night. People on the elevator said there was somebody knocking on their door the previous night, but this is Los Angeles and I can never be sure if people are actually serious or just playing it up. We fucked around ghost and an incessant knocking on the walls that wasn’t coming from our headboard. Somebody on our floor was loudly playing Top 40 radio (Top 10 is more accurate) to drown out all the cacophony but only succeeded in adding to it. “We Can’t Stop” and “Blurred Lines” and “Can’t Hold Us” and “Get Lucky” played in a loop and the knocking kept getting louder, so we decided to just check out and go back to his apartment.

He was an attention-seeking Leo and for his birthday, I bought him a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones. We did molly at a warehouse party and I wanted to hug and kiss him all night but he didn’t want to have any type of physical contact since there were straight men around. Instead, he danced around with a bottle blonde, Slovenian chick with a retroussé nose (bitch looked like an elf) and gave her bumps of the molly that I paid for. When the night was ending, he told her he was going to the bathroom and we snuck out the back. We went back to his place and he fucked me through the mattress, but he wasn’t able to cum.

The relationship gave off the air of what I assume is teenage love even though I was in my early 20s and he had just landed in his 30s. Like most non-cis men, we had to forfeit these type of relationships early on due to societal pressures and fear during our formative years. One night, under the influence of Ace of Spades (which in actuality was a $20 bottle of champagne called Veuve Clicquot Brut that he’d pour in the gold bottle. The aforementioned “Ciroc” was New Amsterdam. Appearance is everything, I guess) and Super Rush, while performing formulaic missionary and staring into those dubious greys again, I told him I loved him even though I didn’t really mean it. He hesitated, then told me the same thing back with an ambiguous smirk. The same tone as telling your boyfriend you’ll be together forever before walking across the graduation stage and into your first taste of the freedom that college brings. We never repeated those three words again.

I caught him wearing a gold wedding band I’d never seen previously and he just shrugged and told me he bought it because it made him more marketable to gay guys. He began inconspicuously checking his phone during the night, so I opened up Grindr for the first time during the summer and saw that he was still active. The next morning, he acted aloof towards me. I knew he was fucking somebody else, and although I couldn’t get mad because we weren’t a couple-couple, I became extremely jealous. I spent nights wondering if whoever he was fucking would knock me out of my spot. The come thru texts were coming less frequently. He just told me he became real busy lately.

Nothing Was The Same leaked just as the summer was coming to a halt. I got fired from my job and moved from North Hollywood to Valley Village, maybe thinking that being closer could mend whatever had broken, but mostly because rent was cheaper. I hadn’t watched porn or masturbated all summer and forgot my password, so I had to “Forgot My Password” it and create a new one. It took a week before he came to my new place. We tried to fuck on the air mattress, but it made too much noise, so we just did it standing up. It was the first time our routine had altered.

A change in location meant a change in Grindr and Scruff profiles. I replaced him with a barrage of random dick coming in and out of my life. He didn’t text much and stopped calling completely, but I already knew I was months away from going back home, so it didn’t matter much anyway. Sometimes men just go cold like that. I’ve been ignored in social situations immediately after having sex with a guy—it’s whatever. Our last meeting happened the following spring, the day before I left Los Angeles to return home as another sad statistic. It consisted of us reminiscing about the previous summer. Our summer. The barrage of music that would always be associated with that time period (All those mindless effects, pitch-shifting, buildups and drops now having significant meaning to me). The cheap GMOs we digested and shat out. The sphincter-stretching, sometimes painful, but mostly great sex. There was only the veneer of keeping in touch. There was never any explanation or real reconciliation about our distance. There was no need. We already knew. It was fun for what it was.

When Avicii died, my social media feeds were inundated with embeds of “Wake Me Up.” I hadn’t heard that song since that summer when it annoyed the living piss out of me. I hadn’t thought of masctop9.5 much since then either. Curiosity took hold and I went to Google to see if I could track him down. After a few unsuccessfully tries of remembering (followed by remembering how to spell) his extensive last name, I finally found those haunting greys. The Ciroc and Ace of Spades aged him and he was now a rough mid-30s. Vladyslav never became the big time push play and fist pump DJ that he wanted to be. His stint in Los Angeles didn’t seem to pan out much better than mine either, as he’d moved back east. The prophecy became true. Like a lot of bisexual men, he used his sexuality to be openly intimate with men while knowing he’d always end up settling down with a wife and having kids to satisfy his religious family. He’d get into these mini-relationships but leave quickly to minimize the hurt he was causing to the men he strung along. His timeline was flooded with pictures of him cradling newborns and hugging the bride and smiling a coffee-stained smile as he lurked over everybody in family photos. Any life before that was erased. I wondered if his wife knew that he probably fucked more men than she had. I wondered if the kids knew that he was probably switching out the breast milk for Similac. I wondered if he would be thinking about our summer together for the rest of his life every time that shitty song comes on.

RIP Avicii.

[thousandmovieproject]

One of the major themes in Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction is the risk of caring about somebody and the way that our loyalty to a toxic person (usually a relative or childhood friend, somebody with whom the bonds are too deep to negotiate) can destroy us. I remember somebody on reddit saying “you don’t have to set yourself on fire to warm the people around you” and that’s exactly what Ellis’s characters do. Especially the women.

All of his narrators are tormented by how beholden they are to somebody who doesn’t deserve their affection; and increasingly, as Ellis gets older, we see, more poignantly, the inverse: our narrator is the recipient of a love he doesn’t deserve.

December 2016 saw Ellis’s directorial debut in a feature called The Deleted, released in serialized form on a streaming service called Filmsquare. I’m noticing as I watch it that there’s a copy of Less Than Zero, Ellis’s literary debut, on somebody’s nightstand, and that it’s Ellis’s voice off-camera in an interrogation scene (a little nod to De Palma). I’m always excited to spot these things. Easter eggs thrown in for a viewer who’s familiar with his work. Gifts for a fan.

I’ve told the story of how I discovered Ellis’s work so many times in conversation that I’d rather not get into it right now except to point out that I was fourteen and I wanted to be a writer and I’d never read a sentence so long as the one that opens American Psycho. Or Rules of Attraction. Or Glamorama. And so, being eager and young and impressionable, his work cast a spell that it might not have cast if I’d discovered it ten or five or maybe two years later.

My affection for Ellis’s work has so much to do with my high school years that I don’t know whether to trust that affection, like whether I can share it with people, or is it too personal, too circumstantial. The story of how I grew up, and how my sensibilities took shape, is, in part, the story of how I interpreted Ellis’s stories. My idea of the authorial entity Bret Easton Ellis (which probably bears little resemblance to the actual man) honestly feels like an imaginary friend from those years. It isn’t that this author figure can do no wrong in my eyes. It’s more like I’m just always in his corner when it comes to the assessment of his work, pleased to see that he’s keeping busy, interested in what he makes and rooting for him to succeed.

Bret Easton Ellis’s directorial debut shows promise and it’s enjoyable but, again, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anybody because while the pacing is just as swift and smart as it is in his novels, and the nudity’s great, I think the camera (which otherwise glides with smooth and constant motion through almost every scene) gets too stagnant when he films dialogue, flat shots of not-great actors trading lines in the same dour and agitated tones, and I think that the whole movie might actually be undone by the very awful acting. But is that the director’s fault? There’s an argument to be made that a great director can fashion a great performance out of a stone, that they can take the Hitchcock approach and treat the cast like cattle and tell the story through the camera and the editing alone; but I think it’s more reasonable to say that, however great the director, a film is only as good as its weakest link.

Or is that me being an apologist because I’m such a fan of Ellis?

I’ve read each of his six novels more than once. I’ve read the most recent one, Imperial Bedrooms, four times. Ellis is obsessed with the image of youth and beauty, and he films it in The Deleted with earnest appreciation (longing?), but I think his best work comes about when he drifts away from youth and addresses, instead, the concerns of ageing. Glamorama, published in ’99, is his Big Difficult Novel and I like it a lot, think that it’s maybe his peak effort as a Writer’s Writer, but I prefer his two later books, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms, wherein his narrators grow, along with Ellis, into their forties and fifties. There’s heartbreak in these two books that I find really powerful. The endings are moving.

I recommended Lunar Park to a friend named Lea and she told me it was one of the best novels she’d ever read and so I recommended it to another friend named Liz and she got halfway through before telling me she’ll never take my recommendation on anything again.

My affection for Ellis’s work and persona poses three issues, as I see it

I don’t think I appreciate his work as it really is. When I don’t enjoy something he’s done, like The Deleted, I go through it a second time, telling myself that I’m just trying to give Ellis the benefit of the doubt, look for something I might enjoy, when really I’m trying to find a way to argue myself into believing it’s objectively worthwhile. I’m looking for a validation of my loyalty to this artist.

I’ll check out anything he releases. If Ellis releases a $90 coffee table book with nothing but his Twitter feed embossed on glossy pages, I’ll buy it. I’ll hate myself while doing it, but I’ll do it, and I’ll read the thing closely.

The readily apparent issues of extreme violence, which is often sexual — behavior that I obviously don’t endorse but do think is artfully rendered in his work. Liking his work requires stating openly that you can see beauty in violence.

Are these problems, from a critic’s perspective?

I met Bret Easton Ellis at a cocktail thing in South Beach a couple years ago and since people were for some reason leaving him to himself on the balcony I went and talked to him about his podcast, told him I’d read all his novels several times over, tried to showcase my admiration without being weird. Probably failed. Anyway. I was resisting the urge to tell him how great it all is, how much it’s influenced me, and that it’s all genius. All of it genius genius genius.

When, in reality, if you give me a drink and sit me down and ask me about it I’ll probably tell you that, yes I love them, but Rules of Attraction is a bit of a mess, and Glamorama crawls up its own ass at times, and I’ll get pretty scathing about The Deleted.

I got drunk at the open bar and bought another copy of Imperial Bedrooms so that I could have something for him to sign. He autographed it and we got a picture together and I left.

He’s really friendly.

I sometimes pay money to enjoy, and seriously consider, the work of bad people. (Not saying Ellis is one of those people, but just go with me for a minute.) I then get anxious, though, at the backlash that might come of giving serious consideration to the work of somebody who’s considered a bad person.

Is it a moral failure of the critic that she should focus on the work itself and ignore the crimes of the artist? Is it possible to really appreciate a work of art if you have strong feelings of hate or anger toward the artist?

How about strong feelings of affection, nostalgia, warmth?

When I was 21 I went to a Leonard Cohen concert, got there super early, hung out at the bar by myself, looking around, and then sat in the concert hall by myself, looking around, and eventually I realized that I was the youngest person in sight. Also probably the most excited. Most of the people around me looked like they could take it or leave it. Texting during the show, talking.

This happens, I’m told. You get older, accumulate responsibilities, there’s so much going on in your mind and life at any given moment that it’s just hard to be as transported by art as you used to be.

Whenever Ellis releases something, I get excited. Count down the days til I can buy it. I’m 26, and it’s something I’d like to hold onto.

An avid moviegoer who likes to talk seriously about movies is compelled toward the medium, most likely, out of a love for it, a love that predates and underscores their critical faculties. In my more forgiving moments I embrace the fact that all criticism is a manifestation of love for the medium and thus (inherent to anything love-based) it’s flawed. It can make you strangely angry when a movie disappoints and weirdly exalted when it succeeds. You can end up pulling punches or coming down way too hard.

Is a critic stripped of her legitimacy, then, when biases show up? Should a writer recuse herself from heavy discourse about a certain artist if her fondness for that person runs too deep to be reconciled with a purely critical approach?

I’ll tell you flat out that you probably won’t like The Deleted, because I’m coming to terms with its faults and learning to assess it as a movie as opposed to Bret Ellis’s Directorial Debut, but I’d have a harder time telling you whether to read Imperial Bedrooms or Lunar Park. It’s one of those situations where I can’t really give you a critical verdict so much as tell you how I feel about it.

I have a hard time talking critically about Ellis, and about Quentin Tarantino and Henry Miller and Martin Scorsese, but it’s a healthy challenge, it’s constructive, prompts me to confront things about myself and my biases and why I like the things that I like. They’re artists who became such influences at such formative ages, looking at them critically is like rating your friend’s appearance.

What’s skill got to do with good company?

On Bret Easton Ellis & Liking Things One of the major themes in Bret Easton Ellis's fiction is the risk of caring about somebody and the way that our loyalty to a toxic person (usually a relative or childhood friend, somebody with whom the bonds are too deep to negotiate) can destroy us.

[agentskyhouse]

Strand Clerk: *rings up Imperial Bedrooms* have you read any of the rest of his

Me: *stares at the neophyte* Hundreds of times. *considers mentioning the fear, flies, the exact level of pressure needed to remove an eye from a socket, ominous words in repetition but becomes nearly distracted as Oasis starts playing in the background. Restrains from squinting*

Clerk: Oh wow I've read Less Than Zero and then American Psycho but I needed to keep taking breaks cause it felt like it was ruining my life and

Me: They're all interconnected. You should do them in semi-order though that's not actually important at all. You can track everyone in them through out.. have you read...

Clerk: ...

Me: *squints, glares, squints again*

Clerk: ...?

Me: *sighs* ... Glamorama?

Clerk: No but my friend said I have to so

Me: *he's ready now* Yes. You do. *leaves, muttering quietly back and forth to BB*