Why's it gotta be this way
The Christmas Pig Special: The Nest (2020), Marilyn: A Biography, Abercrombie & Fitch and encounters with postmodernity at the department store
Merry Christmas! This is somewhat just an excuse to share the most horrifying thing I’ve seen this year, this eternally locked in suffering Christmas “honking latex pig” that I saw when shopping for my puppy. I understand that he’s supposed to be wearing a festive scarf of some kind but all I can see is bondage gear. When will the outrage over the Balenciaga bear come for the makers of this horrible, scarred pig?
Sad
The Nest (2020) is a haunted house scary movie, except there’s nothing supernatural, no slasher, no psycho, the only spectre at play here is debt. I was trying to think of the last time I saw a movie that dealt with debt so directly, with striving to seem like you have more money than you do and failing at the performance, and I couldn’t think of any. I feel like it’s one of those things that is so common and so humiliating, few people are willing to address it, to admit they have a personal understanding of it. Carrie Coon straddles two realities, that of knowing there is no money and pretending there is money for the sake of her desperate husband, Jude Law. She moves warily through the precarity of her situation, as if she is holding it all together with her smooth, buttery french twist. Jude Law, who I personally think might be the greatest living actor (shout out to Dom Hemingway, a film no one has seen) is devastating in almost every scene, often able to convey an entire life history in two words and a horrified look. He is cringey and anguished all at once. The Nest is shot like a horror movie, there is something coming for this family, and you keep bracing for the jump scare. It’s an anxiety ridden film but it interfaces with its subjects humanely. CW there is some graphic and metaphorical stuff that happens to a horse in this film.
Famous
Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer was the first celeb biography I ever read and I read it in elementary school, which was probably not appropriate but happened. My friend Stephanie and I began regularly frequenting a new vintage poster shop that opened in our small town and developed an obsession with the many images there of Monroe, who we began to collect posters of. When I was 9/10 my bedroom was plastered in images of her, which I think freaked out my mom lol. I would discuss her at length with our housecleaner, who was also obsessed with Marilyn. Her beauty, plus her tragic life and death made her even more compelling. One year for Christmas my Uncle Malcolm gave me a second hand copy of 1973’s Marilyn: A Biography, written most certainly without elementary school girls in mind. It is a large coffee table book that is mostly images accompanied by a long, sexually charged essay by Mailer about Monroe’s life, death and cultural legacy.
Of all the pictures of Monroe, the ones I returned to look at most frequently were from the above photo shoot, taken only days before her death at age 36, on a beach in Santa Monica. There’s something about them, I still can’t quite say what it is except there seems to be a division evident in them, an exhaustion, but also a reality? I chose the above photo from this shoot because she doesn’t look “like Marilyn” here. She looks small, pretty, fragile, like she’s chilly, like she’s someone smiling their millionth smile. It could be a picture someone might show you of their mom or grandma in their long ago youth. I think she wants us to see her here, but we can never see her. Eventually the binding got too frayed on my copy of Marilyn: A Biography and I had to throw it away, the pictures were falling out.
I have watched many of Marilyn Monroe’s movies and many of the movies and documentaries about her. I have not read Blonde or watched the 2022 film version even though Nick Cave did the soundtrack. I just don’t feel like I need to ingest any more about this woman’s suffering, I believe it was extensive and I also believe we will never really know anything about her. My favorite Monroe film is Some Like It Hot because she is really funny and the best movie about her I think is My Week with Marilyn which at least gives her a little bit of joy.
Shopping Story: Abercrombie & Fitch
In 2021 and 2022, I found myself more profoundly alone than I had ever been. Something had happened to me that I could never have imagined. I’d been in serious dire straights before, yes, but this was more than that, it was a maelstrom that pulled up the blackest shit from the bottom of my life, from what felt like beyond my life, from what seemed like the crust of the earth, and hooked me up to an IV drip of it. I was alone in a new country where I knew no one and nothing beyond the thin smear of our common language. I was in a place whose sky was pale and beautiful over cold distant hills, but those hills remained alien to me, impossible as it was to make it beyond my block before I became too frightened and unwound and needed to retreat to bed. It was a time when I tweeted things like this:
I hadn’t thought about Abercrombie & Fitch since probably high school and had no good associations with it—low rise jeans deliberately sized too small, huge black and white images of hard abs. Maybe because I’d read somewhere at some point they’d undergone a huge rebrand, who knows, but I found myself on their website one night, looking at sweatpants. I longed for sweatshirts and sweatpants, I could not get enough of them. I lived in them. I wore them through the dregs of summer, when weather finally forced me out. I could not imagine putting anything on my body that did not feel fluffy soft, huge and gentle. I climbed back inside them as soon as the temperature dropped.
I did not go to the women’s section of the A&F website but to the men’s. To this day it’s the only part I’ve shopped from. From the men’s section I purchased XXL sweatpants, sweatshirts and cardigans and coats. Boxes and boxes of it in 1950’s private school colors. I was going back into time. I was building a house for myself from fabric. I was building a man to live inside, a man who wasn’t here, a ghost, I was his bride. He was a professor at the private school. He was Ted Hughes and I was Sylvia Plath but we were nice to each other, faithful, and nobody died. He didn’t mind that I wore his clothes when he wasn’t around. He was 6’5. He would never let anyone fuck with me. He was a gentle giant. He was a lumberjack. He was Adam Driver from Paterson. He had hands that spread the width of frying pans and he wore hoodies under jackets in autumn. In our life it was always autumn, always chilly. He was lantern jawed and sentimental like Rob Delaney. I could stand under him like a pergola. I could wear him like a shroud of protection, hood up, hands inside sleeves, coat wide and heavy on the shoulders. I built him from that store because real men are unsafe and when I felt like vapor he contained me.
On Trend
My friend Sara and I went to Edinburgh recently and decided to slouch around Harvey Nichols (a fancy department store) and look at and covet and evaluate everything. It was very fun! She is also a shopping enthusiast, so we really enjoyed ourselves. We spent most of our time casting judgement on the third floor, women’s fashion. The aesthetic was such an insane hodgepodge of the last forty years of fashion, specifically, it seemed, the ugliest selection of those eras, that I didn’t just feel old, but sort of like I was watching society meltdown. I’ll sum up the vibe as “hooker Princess Diana goes to Warped Tour ‘97.” A great deal of it looked trampy, cheap, recycled, like high end versions of throw away fast fashion you’d find in a bad second hand clothing shop. Jarring colors, bright pinks, pale purples, lime. Thinly woven mini cardigans and bib collars and polka dots and gingham and huge brand names spreading across the chests of sweaters.
Almost nothing seemed new to me, just regurgitated. I don’t necessarily care about ugliness in fashion as long as it’s doing something new. It either has to be doing something new, in which case it can look like anything and I’ll find it interesting, or it has to put all trendiness aside and be created solely in the service of beauty. There was very little of either going on at Harvey’s. Except one brand, which Sara and I declared the “winner” of the third floor, Stine Goya. Stine Goya is a Danish designer who seems to be informed primarily by her own vision. Interesting textures, unusual shapes, unique patterns, unusual color combos, often with metallics mixed in. By far and away the best stuff in the store.
Embrace my motto for now until the end of the year: Just give up!
Hearting this from inside a hoodie the size of a planet. No one can see me. Nothing can touch me. I am free.