Volume IX: Always Be the Most Shocking and Scandalous in the Room

And if you can’t be the most scandalous, make sure you’re the most absurd

In no way are we qualified to give advice. We’re still lost in early careers, spend too much money on frivolous things, get shit haircuts, and give ourselves hangovers that keep us in bed until we’re brave enough to make buttered noodles at 5PM. However, behind the invincibility shield and facade of authority we call our Substack, we thought we were maybe ready to answer some of your hard hitting questions. That was until we got our first thought provoking inquiry from Sophia: 

How do you feel confident / emulate confidence while not tying it to your looks / how you are presenting visually? 

Well fuck. Are we confident? Can we still emulate an air of self-assurance if we’re not in full beat? We talked. We want our intelligence and creativity to give us this confidence, and we’re just now figuring it out. 

Only advice: No, don’t get the bangs.

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Andri

Being twenty-six feels like a purgatory, a suspended place of knowing and not knowing. Old enough to have a fully-developed frontal lobe and your own health insurance, but still young enough to feel unmoored, adrift in the vast in-between. No longer a child, but still not settled. Marriage feels theoretical, having children seems distant, and knowing a clear path is nonexistent. And maybe that feeling, of being slightly off-axis, doesn’t go away. 

Lately, I keep returning to a term I made up, something referred to auditing your life (not sure if this is trademarked but I will be working on that). The concept is simple: take stock. Lay everything out on a metaphorical bed - your relationships, your routines, your small joys. Ask yourself: what still fits? What brings light? What no longer serves? Like a closet clean-out, but for your psyche. 

As I have begun my own audit, one word seems to keep floating to the surface: creativity. 

Creativity feels lost in my world. Most of my days are spent behind a screen, hunched over emails and toggling between tabs. My shopping carts are filled with clothes that Amazon-sponsored influencers are telling me to buy. The closest I seem to come to self-expression is deciding what to wear to drink overpriced orange wine with friends. Somewhere between growing up and becoming functional, my creativity stalled.

Throughout my 26th year, I’ve made multiple attempts to connect myself to my creativity, this Substack being one. One concerted effort to tether myself to my brain's right hemisphere, came from my friend JJ. At the start of the summer, she texted me about this book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Well known in the art community, this book is a spiritual, step-by-step guide on how to open your mind up to creativity and opportunity. It invites you to write every morning, without judgement, and take yourself on “artist dates,” solo outings that open up your perception. At first it felt like a stretch, a challenge that would last a week, similar to previous 75-hard attempts. Now, it has become a sort of lifeline. I look forward to the morning pages, the stillness in them, the cohesion. I enjoy the challenge of being present in my thoughts and for one hour a week, I feel like I am on a date with my own mind. 

Alls to say, I obviously don’t have the answers, to anything really. I don’t know what I want to do with my life (recent corporate lay-off or not - life update lol!). My taste is basic but masked by novelty. I binge Bravo shows but quote Joan Didion. I listen to Taylor Swift’s Fearless on repeat while dreaming of being someone who reads Infinite Jest on the L-train. 

But maybe that’s the point. Creativity isn’t a brand or a destination, it’s a practice, It’s like working a muscle you forgot you had. It doesn’t have to be grand, it just has to be honest. Go to a museum by yourself, take a job at a jewelry store because it feels like play, wear what makes you feel like you, not like content. 

Audit your life. Not because it will give you all the answers, but because it might at least give you back your questions. 

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Sissy

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “the writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels”. I came upon the quote while in my happy place, Reddit, and it got me thinking. Of course, it is true. To be groundbreaking, an idea/action/policy/novel will be met with resistance, misunderstanding by some, if not most, based upon the status quo. I’ve seen this novelty in action, but I am afraid because I’ve never been an active participant.

You could say I am easily influenced, it doesn't matter by who. I’ll reverse image search the girl sitting outside at happy hour’s shoes and click buy without a second thought. I’ve gotten as close as possible to Henri Rousseaus in the Philadelphia Museum of Art to take pictures of his brush strokes to try and mimic them. Bought the book based on the aesthetic cover.  My playlists consist of the 1975, Boy Genius, Taylor Swift…. The list goes on. And I am, for the most part, unashamed of these things. They bring me joy and comfortability, maybe even inspiration from time to time. Pure novelty and originality have never really been important to me, but maybe they’re starting to be now… Unforced and un-curated self-creativity has been missing from my life for too long.

I took time to reflect and some of my favorite people, pieces of art, etc. are both disturbing and repelling. Sitting on the comfortable couch in the beach house basement almost 2 years ago, Matt turned on “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”. I’d heard of Twin Peaks, I’d heard of David Lynch, but that night I got pulled into his world of red room mystery, hazy beauty, gnashing teeth, the pure bizarre and mind-bending. I loved it- and I love it. It launched an appreciation for the show, for Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, which each evoke disturbing emotion related to whatever it be fear, sex, confusion. For the first time, I really thought about the human psyche and the duality inside each of us. Lynch embodies the absurd and novel. I feel the same way reading Eve Babitz pieces. Like many other well-educated young women, I loved (still love) Joan Didion. I wanted to be her, to write with minimalism and precision, intimately observational, effortlessly cool, instantly iconic, and obviously wildly successful. Through Joan and her Californian, pseudo beatnik, rock and roll dinner party scene, I discovered her foil, Eve Babitz. While Joan wrote with the exactness of a cardiothoracic surgeon (her dedication is talked about almost as fictionally unattainable), Eve wrote with the anger, glamour, depravity, and scandal that drew me in immediately. She embraced her circumstances, embodied her environment. When I first read LA Woman or Sex and Rage, even before I knew anything about Eve, you just know the stories are autobiographical nature. All of her characters are described in detail so intimately embarrassing, she couldn’t have made it up. Using characters like Sophie and Jacaranda to completely expose her own hedonism. The nature of Eve is the scandal, and her honesty is the novelty. 

I recognize I will never be Lynchian or a fearless crusader of sex, drugs, and rock and roll like Babitz. But I’m challenging myself to take lessons from them. They emulate self-confidence through radical honesty, absurdness, and novelty. They’ve swung and missed, many times. Lynch at first watch made sense to few (still does) and Babitz was shit on many times due to lack of character depth (except her proxy of course), endless streams of consciousness, and self indulgent writing. But man, they did it for the love of the game (creativity). And that’s what I am working towards: exploring my creativity and originality without abandon. Writing dumb things that will live in my notes app or computer desktops, but instead of being embarrassed, I am proud. Proud because I am taking a step towards doing something for myself; for creativity, for scandal, a step closer to both disturbing and repelling for the greater good of my mind and Andri’s, who I’m grateful to have with me on the journey.

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Cultural Digest

Reading:

• Andri: Atonement by Ian McEwan 

• Sissy: Swamplandia by Karen Russell

Watching:

• Andri: Real Housewives of Miami 

• Sissy: Gilded Age

Listening to: 

• Andri: Trippin’ by Futurebirds  

• Sissy: Favorite Daughter by Lorde

Most fake thing we’ve done to prove our novelty :

• Andri: Reading Play It As It Lays drinking Sancerre at the Shake Shack in the JetBlue Terminal at Boston Logan 

• Sissy: The Velvet Underground poster above my bed in college OR buying an ugly Dior top off Vestiaire