WARNING: WANKY THINGS TO AVOID: HAZARDOUS MATERIALS AFOOT.
If I were a Physician or a Surgeon, I would issue this Warning:
For your livelihood, I recommend one practices severe avoidance at every available time in which your psyche is not otherwise arrested, of running and stumbling unawares into these detrimentally terrible malignant tumors which lay waste and fester upon the skin of major cities, particularly New York City, the Capital of the World. Thank God for taxi cabs and limousines – I suspect us truly well adjusted souls don’t see the worst of what goes on in this town behind closed doors (although I do get profoundly nasty glimpses).
1. Fashionistas.
One thing I’m tiring of as Fashion Week draws closer is the bevvy of fashionistas I see preening around like overbred roosters. There are three types: Type One is the painfully thin “look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me!” one, with the very long shaggy hair and gray tone clothing, offset with either white or black “accents.” I’ll give you an accent – “je vous ridiculise!” Number Two Type fashionista is the over-evolved perfectionist classicist. Note that any of these can be either male or female. 
Type Two is the kind often seen snapped by The Sartorialist, and really they’re perfectly harmless. I recently wrote about this exact phenomenon of dandyfied over-cool, for Pages Online and was succinctly validated yesterday by seeing Scott Schuman on Bowery & 5th taking a potential picture of a man who was too preened to be – even by peacockian standards – pretty. If I hadn’t looked thrice, I would have assumed him to be a man made of plasticine, or somewhat constipated, or, seized up with the sheer bondage of having knitted oneself into a ridiculous outfit all in the name of some ethereal factor that will constantly both elude and taunt you. Coolitude. (Hint. It doesn’t exist in your clothing, it’s in you). The Type Two is basically the Anna Wintour wannabe, and we all know her ilk, but Type Three is perhaps the most prevalent virus and the most aggravating to the nervous system – a studiously undone collage of recently popular culture. This fashionista is influenced by other fashionista’s blogs, by 80s movies, by their fellow modelistas (see “Modelistas” below), by series like Gossip Girl, and by the elusive hipness of rock & roll, motorcycles, cigarettes and Erin Wasson. This fashionista is so wanky that I think he or she undoubtedly surpasses all the others in terms of wanky annoyance factor. They are most likely to die by the force of their wanking-off to the perpetual stream of incessant distractions (like so many baby rattles) that come in the form of Facebook notifications, Invites, BBM messages, pointless movies, obscure rich-kid photography, appearances at “the-next-Peter Beard” gallery openings and so on. Yech.
It’s okay, I hear you: “Please stop!” you beg, “The proliferation of denim cut-offs are beginning to hurt my eyes!” Me too my child, me too.
2. Tourists.
Living in New York I am obviously arrested by many things irritating, all herein mentioned today. It’s open to debate whether these are perhaps the benchmarks of the city itself, the very makings of it – and yet may be the most snitchy and annoying elements, at least to people who aren’t the a, b, c, or d types of people that I’m slaughtering. My point here is that Tourists, whether holding a map of the city – (it’s a grid my friend! It’s numbered and lettered! Sesame Street couldn’t have been easier to navigate!!!!), wearing a backpack with trinkets hanging off it (sadly this was a grown man with the trinkety backpack), or, meaninglessly documenting every single angle of a totally inconsequential bridge many miles far down the river – all make for some very strange folk.
Why, in the age of information, the age when what we seek is no longer food or shelter but information and to my deepest understanding knowledge, why do Tourists insist that they need 25 pictures of the view back to Manhattan from Staten Island? There is nothing very interesting, really, in the larger scheme of things, about a conglomeration of shiny buildings all mushed in together like rather tall people gathered in a stationary row-boat. Albeit, Manhattan is a very interesting row-boat, where every sell, I mean cell, in the body of each individual in this metaphorical rowing vessel, could potentially contain the seeds to your next grand adventure, trillion million dollars, or memorable Affair (to Remember)….. No….. What the strange breed of wanky children called Tourists see is only the facade, the sheen of symbolism that has subliminally been implanted from all the many movies and countless television shows, books, conversations and collective dreams we’ve all had about NYC – all of that is what they see. They see the symbols: Money, Fashion, Fame, – all reflected in the light that hits those giant steel structures by the water edge. Sadly for her, Lady Liberty is privy to all this but she looks on unflinched.
Those who get her message without buffering it by photographs and cheese don’t need to wank off over what she might symbolize – New York, idolatry. Her genius is in her presence** and to get that, no Tourist need apply. They move too fast to just be here. Wank off and expediently die.
3. Whole Foods.
What is it about Whole Foods that makes me now want to put my foot into someone’s ass, backed by a good deal of velocity? I have recently rediscovered the joys of a little place called Trader Joes, a grocery store that grew (there is still only one Trader Joes here in NY and apparently the day it opened the lines went around the corner of 14th street) from grass roots beginnings. I like to shop without it feeling like I’m turning into a) a fashionista, or b) a tourist in a land that screams inauthenticity.
"We sell a bunch of junk", says Whole Foods boss John Mackey
First things first. Wholefoods target audience is clearly affluent professionals in their early to late 30s who have a yen for being the best and a disdain for doing that for themselves. Wholefoods is like a spoonfed version of daycare (but open until 11pm)… You go in, you play with the colorful toys and new products, and leave feeling nice and wholesome inside. It is called WHOLE foods, for a reason, and they do write subliminal messages on your double-bagged brown paper bags (why two???? Why???? Do you not care for the evils of consumption, Wholefoods?) – things like “I’ve got my standards and I’m having them for dinner.” ….. No… No Wholefoods, you are breeding a small army of self-righteous narcissists who eat greasy pizza, smoke American Spirits and drink diet coke at lunch time, before meeting their personal trainer (a glorifed version of baby jungle gym), and end the day smugly buying coconut water and parmigiano reggiano at Wholefoods with the other wan schmucks. Buzz words like organic are receding from the coolctionary (cool-dictionary) faster than you can say kombucha, and are now being replaced by the obsession with what is “Local.” Freetrade is boring now, so is macrobiotic, so is organic. When everything is certified organic, even three different brands of frozen peas are branded like organic-on-steroids, where does the line begin again? When does organic become normal, and we retreat from becoming a society of over-spent yuppies living an overpriced life of the first hunter-gatherers, but with organic beer on the side? ? ? Wholefoods has a wholefood beer store. Enough said.
4. Models.
(Take some thin women, put them in these digs, (keep that creepy guy in the background) and voila! Instant Models! Their brain-chemistry wouldn't be much different either.)
I once was a model, so I have authority to slam what is becoming to my eyes one of the most dangerous and wanky professions that ever became created on this earth’s face. The faces of models are masks. Their bodies are suits and our faces are or were masks, and our clothing became no more than cardboard cut outs that had to fit onto a 2D barbie, stuck flat to the fridge front with magnets. Modeling, by its very job description, requires a hefty degree of narcissism and selfishness, two of the most detrimental things on the planet I think. Models don’t ask you how you’re doing or what is really up, they just ask you what’s up, and that is a rhetorical question if you haven’t already realized yourself via the embarrassing directness of honesty. I’ve answered that question honestly (or attempted to) very many times – and what’s up is not “stuff” or “the sky??” – it’s nothing. Which is the very bane and hinge of all models lives. Nothing is up (Which is code for happening. What’s happening? Apparently)…
What's Happening? What's Up? Hi! Hi! Bye!
Apparently Nothing is happening, which is the bane of their lives, and yet the fact that nothing is happening consequentially gives models the chance to do whatever the fuck they want. This often includes a) dressing like a fashionista (see 1.) b) ingesting an unmonitored quantity of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes (they are all so ashy…), and salad (see 3. ) – so much so that all common sense and natural niceness goes out the loft-window. Normal human relationships are long gone by now – it’s all about “hey baby” and “that’s hot” and mirrors and cut off denim shorts and taking photos of oneself for ones blog, or, just facebook (the subsitute blog… or dare I say it, the poorman’s blog….) I’m happy to have escaped with what I’m hoping is a relatively unscathed psyche, but relative to what? To madness? To meanness? Models are so wanky that I can spot one, even a not-so-pretty or a not-so-tall one, from half a block away. The studs on the shoulder pads of your leather jacket gave it away. The demi-heel on the ankleboot on your heavy stomp-swaying feet tell me clearly too. And the way you keep walking like that without making a shred of eye-contact or acknowledgement to your fellow citizens whilst obviously begging for attention (also see fashionista #1, same deal) – is a dead ringer. There is a shrill telephonic noise above the sirens, telling me to tell you to wank off, really satisfactorily, until you can’t take any of your own fabulousness anymore, at which stage your innards will deflate and your flimsy wafer-thin facade disintegrate away… Such is the nature of your mask-suit. Such is the nature of the narcissus.
5. Writers
Herein I dive – ready to deconstruct the very being that I am, the very profession that I nurture and adore. There are certain writerly people that one only knows about in hindsight, in reflection, in imagination or in words. They live and write in uninfiltrated worlds, kept silent and still and pure – they live in the 4 AM’s of New York, when there are no distractions, when there are no sirens, when there are no other places to be. They write in rooms filled with books and once they leave that room they are like regular people, albeit interesting people, on the street, in the Duane Reade, buying printer cartridges and inkball pens. However, there is another kind of “writer” who is as much a part of the New York scenery as the rats and Tourists are. In fact, they may just be a hybrid of the two, in some fucked-up romanticised way, which deep down I think they already realize. The digitized NY cafe writer. Ah dear, it makes the bile rise to even think about it. Where to begin (or end..)
Writing is a difficult craft to master. It is an even more difficult craft to practice in New York, and much less anywhere outside of some form of walled room secure from external stimulation. Real writers do not sit at small wooden cafe tables with overpriced coffee and laptops. They might sit at small wooden cafe tables with overpriced coffee and ratty old beaten up journals full of observations and story ideas, (or envelopes with love letters to write) but they don’t sit there stop-starting screenplays or writing half-chapters to half-books. I know, because I’ve tried, and that writing is not writing. If it was read aloud it would not even be considered talking, or perhaps even human communication. It is garbage, or as you’d call it here, Trash! NY cafe writers are indeed some weird cross breed of rats and Tourists, sitting there feigning to write someting decent (and I do only intend here to point out the people who actually try to write in cafes, not the ones who legitimately don’t have internet at their new apartments yet, or like to check emails in the morning over (over-priced) coffee)…
Essentially, these writers are touring a psychosomatic sense memory they have of watching some film, or reading some “hip” writer, and feeling the cool vibe waft off the screen or the pages onto them, thus infecting these subpermeable souls to believe that they too can be cool by sitting in a cafe and being a writer. NYC is full of this bullshit and it’s shot to flames, if I have anything to do with it. Writing is not about image, it’s about becoming a vessel, becoming an instrument through which the worlds messages that surround you can become filtered through your particular melange of brain sponge (interesting depending on what kind of a life you lead) – and letting it out. Like the NYC water in fact, which everybody filters. Whatever that filter is made out of, that’s what turns the crude water (words) into something drinkable. That’s what you are. It’s not glamorous. You’re a water filter! – trying to write while you’re sitting in the sewer doesn’t help a thing. Writers can be the most wankiest thing of all, fawning in their ivory towers, and yet sometimes I think, I get a niggly feeling, that perhaps it’s the ones who disdain the ivory and sit in the sewer masochistically, who are the most Wanky of all. Nowadays, I don’t see the “sewers” of writerly habitats as the benches where the homeless guys hang, but the cafes that sprout up with their vegan icecreameries like wildfire. Why don’t you sip your italianate coffee and panini, write one more scene about a coffee shop couple, wank off, sprinkle some cinnamon on it, and then die. And you can take your dirty laptop with you!
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED PRESCRIPTION MEDICINE:
As a remedy, take the phenomenally beautiful Crystal Renn’s wisdom that intelligence is beautiful. [I know she's still a model, but damn. She's centered] “Focus on who you are a a person. That’s more important than thinking, oh do my thighs touch? Am I fat? It’s more important to think about who you are and what you believe in” as well as Sara Ziff’s documentary Picture Me. Genius, liberation and celebratory individuality are so hot right now.
- “Fashion is therefore the maddest, most unheard-of tyranny that has ever issued from man’s perversity; it demands from Nature an absolute obedience; it dictates to real need a self-disownment in favour of the artificial; it compels man’s natural sense of beauty to worship at the shrine of what is hateful…let us look far hence to glorious Grecian Art, and gather from its inner understanding the outlines for the art-work of the future.”
- -Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future.
Beauty Incarnate
** Also, regarding getting lost in New York City as a Tourist, here the brilliant Leslie Feist will demonstrate what you must sing when you’re lost in New York. Amazingly, there are actually people who look remarkably like that fuzzy monster clan, and they’re the nicest and most interesting people ever! Also, penguins totally live behind doors here.
Last but not least, if you haven’t already clicked over to this link previously when I mentioned Brilliance – this is what I see as the antithesis of most of the points I’ve made today: Another Feist video – I Feel It All. This is what I get (to feel!) when I’m being me, not a model, not a regimentally-trained whole-foodian, not a fashionista. If those firework bins were parts of the streetscape that I wander through, parts of the world, the airports, the landscapes of my mental reality (maybe I do have mania?) then that is the best representation of my reality I have ever seen! When I’m in the zone, that’s what this feels like! The first time I saw this video earlier I thought, hey! That’s me! She even dances like me! When did I do that? Oh yeah, Many Many Times! It’s great to be alive. This awesome gal was born of the same essence as I, and I do so adore her for lighting the way.
THIS IS MY WORLD.
20 Comments
Yes, except you have exploding barrels of a different kind…
EXPLODING BARRELS OF A GUN!! THAT JUST MASSACRED TWO-THIRDS OF THE NEW YORK CITY POPULATION!!!
I am quite scared of you at the moment…
Definitely mania.
Going to think this through. Am I part of the problem if I happen to like grey with accents of white and black? Or that I’m quite excited to see those oversize studs courtesy of Givenchy?
I think you shot me.
FYI just as I began to write this, the kids in the garden across the way in the adjacent building lit up a ton of sparkler fireworks on the ground!!! It was happening all over again! Sparky!! Weird! (See! It’s the world that has mania, not I!!!)
In fact my dear, this has all been building for quite some time, mainly just from the circles I tend to dip my toes into… I know who I am, and it’s different from the usual signifiers of cool. That bothered me when I tried to fit in, and felt like I was treading on eggshells in the world, interspersed with pure moments of blastian fireworks of joy whenever I’d tune into my own radio station.
I write to be happy, I don’t write to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. If fashion makes you feel as excited as Feist is in I Feel It All, then you should be diving in!! I want to see more people live with the spirit of a child. One comment I loved on Youtube about that video was that she “moved like she was a little kid” or “with the excitement of a little kid” — gosh, this is what the world needs more of!!!! I’m bored of the “serious-cool” of Fashion and Models and Wholefoods and Writers! I want to run around in a field conducting fireworks to a song like this!!!!!
If people could just lighten up (wank off & die – in order to be reborn), we would not have anorexia nor oppression in the mainstream media, we would not have children traveling in bad industries doing drugs & older men (because the young ones take the old ones too) – we would be liberated from a slave trade that is hinged on nothing.
The turn-over of it all… the “it-it-it-it” “now-now-now-now” factor……….. the “must-have-that-product” factor. I don’t know……….. I learnt more from laying on the grass in the middle of nowhere in France, listening to a song called ‘Largo “New World Symphony”‘ by Dvorak, than I had in a long time. The thing is, there was nothing to learn, nothing to get to, nothing to find or change or fix or add-to. Nothing to detract from.
Everything was perfect as I watched the beetles and the flies and the sparrows fly around the blue sky, doing their thing, the sun and the sky and the ground under my back. And hell, I’m sure (I know) people try to replicate these moments in fashion shoots, but they will never get close to the actual realization of something like this. That we add so much unnecessary STUFF to the world, and it is accelerating, too. I can feel it, more and more and more and now and now and arghhhhhh!!!
There’s something to be said for methodically letting go of anything you don’t need: You travel further into the essence of life, the less baggage you carry. You’ve gotta strip the crap away. Which is what I endeavor to do when I set out with the Wank Off & Die! prescription. It’s a prescription for life and living openly, fully, in the essence! Fashion is what needs it most! Everything is so openly sexualized, but I think even the term “wank off and die” would provoke discomfort for them. They don’t want to die. Their identity depends on being visible NOW. But it’s important to let it all go every once in a while. Even if this is not what you want to hear, it’s an important warning.
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself,” said Anna Quindlen.
Fashionista’s, Models, Wholefoodians and Writers (Tourists are excused, for now) in particular, take note………….
I agree. Kind of.
And my initial comment, was light-hearted, I hope that was understood.
I’m really struggling with all of this. It makes me so uncomfortable, in it’s disgusting accuracy and at the same time blatant ignorance. To single out one thing here is to omit another. You are right, AND you are wrong. I want to hug you and then slap you. I want to agree with your pessimism but then inspire optimism.
The only thing that is certain, is that you have addressed everything from one vantage point, that is generally negative (with wit and humour included) and it is ABSOLUTELY subjective. For obvious intention I understand.
Since I almost entirely agree with you on all counts… I will simply add my two cents with a short anecdote.
I was in midtown one day (don’t ask me how or why) and an immaculately clean thirty something couple in pastels and whites, with glaringly white sneakers, approached me cautiously (a dead giveaway) as I was waiting to cross the street. Now mostly… I am responsive and helpful when asked for directions by a New Yorker, even while my usually stern expression might suggest otherwise. But tourists inspire nothing but rage in me…
“Do you, by any chance, know where The Gap is?” they asked me innocently, to which I replied, “I think there’s one back where you came from.”
Did they actually come to NYC to shop at The Gap?!
The Sartorialist posted an image of a homeless man on his blog today. Yes, the photo is beautiful- the colors, the composition, the emotion. But, does it have anything to do with fashion? I don’t know. I can pysically feel my reaction- uncomfortable- to this post and all of its comments- but I cannot quite express why I feel this way.
Sophie, your post is funny and provocative- I have been annoyed by many of the same things in this city- but I agree with Scott’s second comment -I think It makes me uncomfortable for the same reasons. It is hard to be in a state of flux -oscilating between the real and the ideal. But I think we (thoughtful, creative, people, particularly in New York) all live there most of the time.
So, today I have felt uncomfortable twice. I think there is some kind of connection between both moments, though, I find my mind unable to clarify it.
This piece reminds me of my favorite Keruac quote – “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Hi mir,
I think you have the seeds of an answer to your own queries and discomfort: “I think It makes me uncomfortable for the same reasons. It is hard to be in a state of flux -oscilating between the real and the ideal. But I think we (thoughtful, creative, people, particularly in New York) all live there most of the time.”
The flux is something to move with though, rather than resist. The resisting is what’s hard. I know I resisted it for a long time: I became too thin, too tired, too obsessed with image: in other words, profoundly dissatisfied. Move with it, and you find growth, and life, the powerful quiet and still force that presses up through the flower.
I loved Scott’s picture of the blue dude chilling on the street waiting for a home to appear. Perhaps he is already home ? Now that’s a question…
(I’ve also found that whatever makes you most uncomfortable in the exterior world…… whether it’s violence or fear or anger, is something that snags inside you – that is, something to look at, to clear out of your soul. Something you are afraid of in yourself, afraid of becoming, or not becoming. But what is there to become?) (Alive!!)
ps. Thank you for the Kerouac quote, one of the all time gems! Another manifestation of beauty incarnate.
I’ve been reading your words for some time now and sometimes feel as if your observations and musings are the mirror to my own. Thank you for putting onto paper (er…into the world’s sphere of consciousness) many of the things I supposed but never really said. I left New York at the close of October last year, abuzz with possibility, hoping to abandon all that is unreal and devoid in the city, humming goodbye to all that. I skipped down to another country on an adventure in journaling and people-meeting, in solitary walks through unknown places and in observation of life’s oddities. I wished to live in a place where I could step out my door each day and walk in a direction I had never been. I answered many questions and created even more. And soon I will return to the city at last, happy that there are still people who inspire me, happy that there are more questions than answers anyway. PS Have you ever heard of this band?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg7ReGV5GcE
How does Paper Castle work? Do you accept submissions?
oh. my. god. Emily – this is amazing!!!!! I WAS AT THAT SHOW!!!!!!!! My boyfriend’s band was their supporting act and the Edward Sharpe guys (and girl) are friends of mine and my boyfriends……. and I wrote this post the following day when I was filled with the energy and spirit of their musical vibe of genius.
That is the most incredible thing, in terms of putting something out, as you said, into the world’s sphere of consciousness, and having it whip right back 180 degrees within 24 hours. I’m blown away! So wacky…
As for you feeling like my words are mirrors to your own – yes! This is how I endeavor to write. I am a tap for water, a filter, just absorbing what’s around me, and it’s not unusual to me that you feel the exact same things. This is what being creatively human is about, I think – to share the experience of being alive, and have that experience transform, over and over again, replicated infinity-fold into the circular future. It all comes back, and this is absolute proof, to my own consciousness, that that phenomenon is indeed possible! More than that; very, very real!
Wowzers! As for adventures to cities unknown and full of sparks, you know I read recently in a Science magazine that living abroad fuels creativity. (I think we already knew that, but it’s more reason to leap into the unknown, into all different kinds of living “abroad”…. ) I’m glad you’ll be visiting NYC once again though. It needs questioning people more than ever, I feel. It needs those status quo shakers. That’s what we are all endeavoring to do, really, isn’t it. Just gotta leap into it, wholeheartedly.
Paper Castle of course accepts submissions! We’re tentatively growing with the full life-force of how a tree begins to sprout. Strongly but slowly. Any and all fertilizers of the imagination are wholeheartedly welcome on the tree! We’ll be growing and changing and adapting to this new technological (I’m hoping still tree-like) environment as steadily as we can.
Thanks for reaching out and writing and reading! Still flabberghasted you posted the only 80-viewed link to the show in Williamsburg. I was literally stage right, downstairs in the crowd, until right after that very song, which is when I left. Unfathomably bizarre. Unbelievably believable… How on earth did you know?
You are so right! I’ve been ranting at my girlfriend about this stuff for MONTHS (including the preeminence of Feist) and now she’s just getting it because you are her hero. Thank you for vindicating me. Another thing is the tourists WHO FUCKING LIVE HERE, who come for the same reasons as the other tourists – only are much, much more hardcore, and of whom I am one. Sadly, this kind of ranting against this scene in NY will soon be as redundant as calling advertising or television stupid; not even worth the effort, because it’s so self-evident.
John, Feist is superbly preeminent, yes! she is as the dictionary says, “surpassing all others; very distinguished in some way.” Wow, thank you for validating what sometimes feels like too much pushing of the envelope. I’m just glad someone opened it and read it and got the message with such truth, with all the vivid colours! Thanks mate. Also, tell your girlfriend thank you for reading my blog. I love people like you guys. Rock on. Perpetual hard-core tourists? Tour everywhere! I think I can count myself as one of them too. You have a friend.
i feel it all! i feel it all! the wings are white! the wings are white!
thank you sophie… i needed this ability to feel… you keep me going, still. you keep going.
About the writers who sit in starbucks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12JTDp6xm18
Wow. I suppose I knew in the same way it isn’t surprising to you that your ideas can be mirrored back to you by another. Many of my friends were at that show, and one of them, Frooz, forwarded me that video. The show made her think of me because of that creatively human connection you spoke of, and I guess reading your words I felt you would connect to it in the same way. It is a bizarre and yet familiar thing.
And that FEIST video! That video is walking down Bedford Avenue on an October night when it’s just starting to get cold and less people roam the streets, and you just sort of realize life is really tremendous and everything starts to light up around you in the night. The first song that made me feel this way was Astral Weeks, which I discovered one spring as life started to slowly crawl back out the city’s nooks and colored in the once-gray streets. I wrote something about it at the time. It was an instruction I felt compelled to write, a sort of disclaimer for anyone who was experiencing this feeling of coming alive when walking the streets of New York that THEN, at that moment, as they became so attuned to the world’s strangely beautiful frequency, must they listen to Astral Weeks.
I’m glad I wrote you. Life can be so funny and imperfectly perfect. You’ll know me when I return to the city because I’ll be the one skipping around, banging on trash bins and leaping before the storefronts, exuberant.
Don’t stop writing, as long as you stay the way you are, with a steady head on your shoulders, don’t stop writing.
I am recovering from my eating disorder and reading this aids me in staying levelled and centered – just the same way that watching interviews of Crystal Renn helps me. I am rebrainwashing myself and getting rid of years worth of media nonsense from my mind. I am sure there are others like me that use your blog for similar purposes so I think I’ll say thank you on behalf of all of us.
Keep writing.
Sophie, have you read the diaries of Anais Nin? Her insights into the places she lives and the people around her, along with her energy, clarity, and appreciation of humanity, might indicate she’s one of your literary ancestors.
You should also be given a license to punch off the eyebrows of the above-listed people. Literally punch (not metaphorically which you’ve just done in entertaining fashion). It would make the city a better, although considerably more eyebrowless, place.
We’re all doomed btw.
No I haven’t read too much of Anais Nin, I think I was put off after seeing Henry and June, where Anais takes off with Henry’s wife June…. and I love Henry!!! I don’t think he really cared too much anyway… What books of Nin’s would you recommend I read?
Also, we’re all doomed? In what sense? It’s true that yes, “we’re all gonna die!!” Maybe not by my pen, but perhaps 2012 might help me with some eyebrow-singeing handiwork!!
Thanks so much for the compliments. I am overwhelmed-ly honored.
THAT is fucking brilliant.
Thanks Sophie, you are a joy to read.
Cami from Melbourne
I FUCKING LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
GENIUS !!!!!!!!
“Why don’t you sip your italianate coffee and panini, write one more scene about a coffee shop couple, wank off, sprinkle some cinnamon on it, and then die. And you can take your dirty laptop with you!”
Very much so.
Sophie you’re awesome.
Its like you define those sub-thoughts or feelings towards people/places/life happenings even before they can be filtered, defined into words so particular and back out again. Yeah it is a little insulting to the subjects but so are the subjects egos or annoyances even more so just as you defined! You inspire me alot ! Going to go back to reading the artists way to get back into my writing, as you told me to all this time ago, finally. .. I need to come back over before i lose my adventurous spirit too fast, (which i dont actually think could ever happen) -but for different reasons than before, as relying on that way of life there solely to me is no real way to live anymore. Would love to talk about life and all its particulars with you, anywhere in the world, its been a long long time ! xxx