talking pictures

I was trying to hang my shelves back up in my new apartment and gave up and started writing this. One of my old roommates who had done construction and painting odd jobs tried to teach me how to hang things up, but drywall crumbles very easily. It’s harder than it looks. I’m very attached to the idea of self-sufficiency though. When I told my sister I was hanging shelves, she was shocked I (kind of) knew how to use a drill. You learn interesting skills, she said, being single.

You do learn a lot of interesting skills being single. At a party, a girl I met told me about how her boyfriend had broken up with her right before they both moved to New York. She had been ghosted repeatedly by a man off a dating app who had become her white whale. She was obsessed with him. She had seen him on the train that day and done a little smile and shrug which she hoped looked cool. She showed me the smile and shrug and I said it looked cool, and she said I was obviously going to say that. She showed me the man’s social media to explain her fixation but he looked just like everyone else to me. Sometimes it’s just about the vibe.

I have a story I like to tell when I meet people, which is that I’m trying to get my parents’ cat to come live with me. He was a rescue and the runt of his litter and he has a chip on his shoulder. My mother has gotten progressively more allergic to him over the years and she can’t really touch him anymore. Since he, like me, was raised by my parents, he has kind of an anxious attachment style. He needs a lot of validation to feel loved. Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I’m say this, but some people are charmed by it and some people are put off by it, and that’s how I can tell who my people are. For the record, I’m not sure it’s even true that I have an anxious attachment style. Maybe anxious avoidant: holding on, running away.

I think a lot about how people like to present themselves, maybe because my job depends so heavily on making small talk, something I hate and am bad at. I don’t hate meeting new people or going to parties or anything like that, I just hate being agreeable. There’s a kind of respectability to small talk. It’s like picking conversation off a menu. It makes socialization into work. In Hanging Out, a manifesto for unstructured social time, Sheila Liming writes about the social aspects of work that “hanging out is networking and networking is, as the term itself suggests via its inclusion of the original word, work.”

This can be the best aspect of a job in many ways. I’ve already written about the value of having work friends, and Liming also finds space for solidarity, resistance, and subtle forms of individualization in hanging out on the job. Like me, she honed her work/play skills in a professionalized job that depends heavily upon networking and upon understanding specific social codes. Knowing how to navigate such spaces can be a minefield. Liming frames her discussion of work around her experience of being sexually harassed at an academic conference. An older, more powerful man hits on her. When she doesn’t reciprocate, he accuses her of misunderstanding his intentions. Then he ostracizes her. Uninvited from dinner, she has to get creative. She starts hanging out more seriously.

Hanging out, in its purest form, is less anxiety-inducing than networking. There’s nothing to get wrong. But a lot of hanging out now feels like networking of some kind, at least in New York. The lines are blurry. Many other people have already written about how dating kind of feels like networking, the professionalized aspects, the sense that you’re auditioning, the cutthroat speed at which potential partners can lose interest. It’s often described as a new phenomenon, but I think it’s actually a really old phenomenon, the same kind of courtship criteria described in 19th century novels, just without the courtship.

My sense that I’m insufficient at hanging out has a lot to do with my sense that I’m not very agreeable. You have to put up with a lot, be willing to sweep things under the rug. There’s a space between participation to a group and deference to all its rules. Or more succinctly, as Julie Gavras puts it: how can you tell group solidarity from sheep?

We are suffering, as Leti Vila-Sanjuán put it in her TinyLetter, from a failure of collective imagination. Reflecting on the newfound popularity of Ozempic as a route to being skinny, Leticia writes: “Me parece que todavía tenemos una falta de imaginación colectiva, incapaces a veces de contemplar nuevas formas de vernos y de admirarnos.” Undergoing severe forms of body modification to adhere to conventional beauty standards seems like one of the most intractable and rigorous forms of socialization gone wrong. It’s easy to imagine body dysmorphia as an isolated and internal process, detached from the gaze of other people. Eating disorders, you often hear, are about control not beauty. But we live in a society, and in a controlling society at that. If you were the last person on earth, would you really care about your ab crack?

The Point ran an essay about the failures of cancel culture, focusing on the example of philosopher Agnes Callard who was ostensibly canceled for throwing out her children’s Halloween candy (my parents used to do this too). Callard is not particularly well known and it’s not clear to me exactly what her cancellation entailed. The Point essay does not mention that she scabbed during a student strike at her university, crossing a picket line to teach (by her own admission). This seems like a more cancelable offense to me.

Instead, the essay focuses on the idea of mobbing vs collective thinking and how to tell the difference between the two. Drawing on the language of science fiction, of mind viruses and infectious thinking, the piece suggests that collective thinking succeeds in retaining individuality where mobbing fails. “It is easy to imagine why the figure of the zombie resonated so strongly with twentieth-century Western audiences, who increasingly learned to fear the destructive potential of “the masses,” whether in the form of fascist crowds or conformist consumers.” The writers are careful to defend forms of collective action that they deem worthwhile. But I think they are wrong both about the origins of the zombie trope (often linked in the European imagination to the specter of working class uprisings or those of colonized people) and about the problem. I don’t think we’re suffering ultimately from a failure of individuality, but from a failure of collectivism. How can you individuate yourself when it’s everyone for themselves? How can you articulate a coherent ideology about how to behave in the world when you’re trying to survive?

In February, I went to a retrospective of the films of Yvonne Rainer. In a Q&A, she described her films as very difficult to watch and demanding of attention. They are in some ways: they don’t have a traditional narrative structure. They blend different forms of storytelling and mediums, play with voiceover and intertitles and experimental kinds of performance. But they’re also funny and sharp and incisive and very good. The unsynced sound can be played to comic effect. In one of my favorites that I saw, Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), which is also available online here, Kristina sits in bed with her on again off again lover. He’s telling her about his life working on a tanker. In a silent sequence, he talks and talks and talks, Kristina smiles and laughs and listens and nods. Love is a beautiful thing.

There aren’t a lot of reviews of Kristina Talking Pictures so when I looked it up what came up was Letterboxd, which I never look at. The self-involved dialogue reminded me of Girls, wrote one viewer. “I dreamt i was having sex with marlon brando and he asked me why don’t you brush your teeth,” said another.

In one of the best scenes in the film, Rainer satirizes the ideological inconsistencies of liberal artists and intellectuals, whose ostensible concern for the world is rooted in self-aggrandizement. One of the characters describes such an artist, obsessed with moral purity, obsessed with tits and ass. “Do you believe in Chairman Mao and refuse to curb your dog?” asks the narrator in a voiceover. “Do you take your papers and bottles to the recycling center and disparage your colleagues behind their backs?”