The Past Comes Up Clean
Every archive is a kind of excavation. You dig through old posts and find whoever you were three years prior, still insisting on things with the confidence of someone who hasn’t yet been proven wrong.
One piece I wrote around that time was about Giza Lagarce—the newest face in the cycle of American internet-party girls I’d been watching since Cory Kennedy started it. The machinery never changes: identify someone beautiful and twenty, let the ambient fame arrive ahead of any actual work, wait for the album with someone like Pharrell, then the quiet disposal. Lagarce had the face of someone you’d construct from scratch if you were designing beauty on purpose, and I was convinced I loved her in the way you love someone you’re worried about. The worry was probably warranted.
There was another piece from that period about friendship being the real love of your life. I wrote it from somewhere inside the smoke of personal collapse, which is the only honest vantage point for that subject. The observation holds: when everything comes apart at once—and it always comes apart at once—it’s rarely a lover who picks up the phone. It’s the person who answers at 2 a.m. and doesn’t make it a whole thing.
Tam Vibberstoft was someone I wrote about then too—a twenty-two-year-old Danish artist studying in the Netherlands, member of a band called Nelson Can, devotee of red wine and midnight pancakes, self-declared Miss Panic. She made photographs and abstract short films that felt fully formed in the way young artists occasionally are before they’ve learned to second-guess themselves. I was completely, uselessly in love with her for the duration of writing that piece.
The one I can’t be embarrassed about is the Lost in Translation write-up. I’ve watched Sofia Coppola’s film more times than anything else I own—ran it back-to-back on a train once just because the journey was long enough. It had doubled my love for Tokyo before I’d ever been there, which is a strange thing for a film to do. Johansson and Murray deserved everything they won for it. It’s what I’ll watch on any long-haul flight to Japan—and not, despite what the rest of this archive might suggest, pornography. Though I’ve heard conflicting things about Japanese law on that matter, and I should probably clarify before landing.