04.02 | loneliness, warhol, & nyc

Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?
– Andy Warhol

✉️ letter #32

One of the best parts of living here instead of China now has been the amount of excellent book stores I get to wander through. I've already gorged myself on The Strand, several Barnes & Nobles, that cute new mini-bookstore in Chinatown dedicated specifically to Asian-Americans called Yu & Me, and (most recently) McNally Jackson, where this book caught my eye:

Part memoir of post-breakup wanderings by an expat transplant, part New York City art history reflection, it's felt very... I don't know, exactly this moment for me. And it's one of two learning experiences since coming to New York that has made me really rethink my previous general dismissiveness of Andy Warhol.

Much like the author, who admitted that she found Warhol's work "vacuous and empty," I think I'd seen so much of the pop movement on people's college dorm walls that I also became kind of bored by their ubiquity. Craving this need to be different, I guess I never dug into how different Warhol himself was for his time.

The first learning experience was in February, walking through the Brooklyn Museum's surprising exhibit on Andy Warhol's spirituality. It was an aspect that I honestly didn't know he had. A Byzantine Catholic, he spent an enormous (but much less visible, it seems) chunk of his life reconciling his faith and his ritual practice with his life as a very unapologetically gay man.

And then there was this book, whose description of Warhol's famous tape recording habit hit very close to home for me.

It's about wanting and not wanting: about needing people to pour themselves out to you and then needing them to stop, to restore the boundaries of the self, to maintain separation and control. It's about having a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego; being swamped or flooded, ingesting or being infected by the mess and drama of someone else's life, as if their words were literally agents of transmission.

This is the push and pull of intimacy, a process Warhol found much more manageable once he realised the mediating capacities of machines, their ability to fill up empty emotional space.

In regards to the premise of the book, I don't know if I'm lonely right now.

Because of the nature of work-from-home in a place where I've chosen not to have roommates, I am alone a lot. Often, if I haven't made the effort to schedule a social outing, I will be completely alone for days, the only communication I have through work slacks and a text here and there.

Sometimes I notice that when I'm back in front of a person, face to face, I feel that stuttering of speech, that tense little barrier as you try to match the steps of the conversational dance, the frustration of not being able to delete or edit before sending... and thinking about that inability to connect as smoothly as I want to connect often causes my heart to twinge.

And yet I also know that even the happiest of social interactions, of which I've had many, drain my battery. In fact, I'm probably if anything overly possessive of my time alone, hoarding it like it's a precious resource and mildly aggrieved if I end up giving up more of it than I was prepared for. I always prefer text, where I can engage on my own terms, only perform sociability the very moment I actually feel somewhat sociable.

Well, like Olivia Laing, I am a mid-30s something now inhabiting aloneness on a daily basis, and sometimes (less often than I'd like, honestly) some of that manifests itself in finishing a video about moving to the city that I already had all the pieces for over a month ago.

AT LEAST IT'S OUT NOW:

🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel

• Sea Hero Quest is a little mobile phone game in which you play a boater who needs to memorize a map and then, when the map disappears, steer your vessel to a destination based just on recall. It's also a neuroscience study that's now teaching scientists how we navigate our worlds. How cool is that?
• I recently saw this on TikTok: Someone has put together a Resistbot for supporting HR5444 & S2907, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies, which aims to address the way U.S. missionaries tried to terminate everything about the culture of indigenous peoples here - and hopefully lead to at least some of the conversation & actions taken over similar things done in Canada, which has been confronting its own horrible past. You can read more about the bill, which was introduced in September last year by Elizabeth Warren, here.
  
  I'm trying to resist the urge for whataboutism, but a part of me is definitely going to be looking at who is vocally against this bill but still readily & loudly ragging on China over its human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
• Amazon workers in Staten Island have voted to unionize, the first group ever to have successfully done so in the company's history. The victory won't be legally certified until parties are given the chance to file objections with the NLRB, but this is a big (and welcome) blow to the crap Amazon has been pulling on its employees for over a decade now.
• Werk! This feature looking into how male cheerleaders are becoming more comfortable dressing up how they want (sequins, full face make up etc) for the NFL field is kinda adorable.
• Elizabeth Maruma Mrema is a Tanzanian lawyer and diplomat that's also the executive secretary of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. Yesterday, she was awarded the Kew International Medal. This is a very interesting interview with her that touches pretty deeply on how biodiversity and climate change are linked.

🎵 song of my week

In the theme of people I'd been generally dismissive of but then turned out to be kinda low key great, I've got to admit I've been pretty into Harry Styles' solo pop career.

He has a distinctive enough voice that helps to differentiate him immediately from fellow Britpop people like Shawn Mendes and Ed Sheeran... and he's been playing around a lot more. The new single As It Was could as well have been an indie song from the late-2000s and the music video is like Coldplay's Yellow if they all were much more adventurous dressers.

Okay, I'll admit I also dig Harry Styles because I just generally love a man who is willing to genderbend his clothing choices. <3 How do I get more of this in my life?

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

Moon Knight is finally out! Yay. I love a lot of the choices they made for the first episode and, ifkyk that once I finished it I immediately then went and found the Youtube commentary to relive every moment with the kind of nerds who dissect every damn detail of every damn scene. Watch it on Disney+ before watching this, obviously:

Did you enjoy it?

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