Can the art world change? The art world has not “always” been any certain way, so there is no point in being defeatist about changing things. The whole idea that there has been a unified and enduring centralized “art world” is like when people say that capitalism is the only viable economic system. Just because it’s the way things are presently doesn’t mean it’s always been this way, or that it’s the way things have to be. Furthermore, what power or meaning is there in art if we can’t even critique our own community effectively?

If anything, I need to post this before all of the ideas in it become completely obsolete and yesterday’s news. So…

Recently I was scrolling on instagram (on my iPad, during my allotted consumption time) and came across a reel by an artist that I follow.

She was answering a kind of vague, philosophically-adjacent question; something like “as an artist, how do you measure or perceive collective consciousness”. She narrated her thoughts on collective consciousness and taste over a video of her stretching some canvasses in her studio, going on to talk about how perceiving culture to her feels like a “sensation, like synesthesia about time” in reference to something like pattern recognition in popular culture. In the comments are people celebrating her insightfulness, how well-spoken she is, how videos like this make them think twice about deleting instagram!! Am I the only one who gets frustrated listening to these monotone, stream-of- consciousness collections of word salad over and over again?

Offering the illuminating realization that history is like a cycle, which is itself like a sine wave (in that it goes up and down) she concluded that there are things in history that connect to now. “I think as artists we definitely see connections in many places that non artists don’t see them!” excited commentators affirm. Every thought and half-thought was punctuated by a different meme overlay; for example, that one of all the different spidermans pointing at each other. If my tone didn’t make it obvious already, I found it all to be a little silly.

This reel is not an anomaly on fine arts social media by any stretch, and I am not really trying to hate on this particular artist. I am used to artists trying to monetize the less lucrative parts of their practice (the process and research, as opposed to the product) and trying to posture as philosophers as their generation. We all have to do it do a degree, and those of us who think we aren’t are probably just doing it with less self awareness.

Somehow though, my reaction to the aforementioned reel and my subsequent conversation about it with a friend made me realize that my desensitization to this behavior had made it difficult for me to notice exactly how it has been impacting my personal relationship with art.

I’ve had a terrible creative block for years now, and I can identify a few factors easily: a lack of confidence in myself, a confusion about what matters to me, a lack of structured time, a distracting amount of pressure on me to lay groundwork for a financially sustainable career in anything. Add on a feeling that art isn’t worth making in the context of the destructive, unrestrained bloodlust of late stage capitalism and white imperialism and perhaps I can somewhat justify my lack of productivity. But even if the world order (unsurprisingly) has betrayed us, in these moments of doubt I look to other artists for inspiration if not solidarity. I keep searching for shows that will inspire me to make art, or other artists who will serve as a successful model of what currently feels impossible.

Where are the artists who prove that there is a way to thoughtfully engage with our current condition as artists, by making art that is good for more than decorating rich people’s homes? By making me feel that art is important?

Why Make Art?

It is very difficult to make artwork if you feel like it doesn’t matter. Practically and socially, it has felt very confusing to make artwork lately. I keep knocking down reasons to make art. Make art just for myself? Self-serving and out of touch. Make art for social change? Confusing art with activism is one of my pet peeves. Not that art cannot be political, or a force for change, but that fine arts media in particular has an indirect quality about it – opening a conversation or subverting a common narrative is simply different from feeding your neighbor or speaking to your city council. This is not to say that media and conversation don’t matter, but that they aren’t interchangeable with practical action. And of course: Make art for money? Haha…if only.

Instead, the concept of making art for art’s sake feels a lot sturdier. This concept is actually pretty loaded though, since it can mean basically anything. Pursuing art as a craft to refine, to create more eloquently and skillfully, to speak to the contemporary culture of fine arts and push it forward: this creative goal feels more enduring, intellectual, and self-actualizing. Work that is truly contemporary not only reacts to the zeitgeist but understands it enough to evolve it. In a sense, that kind of progress necessitates the implication of the political, the aesthetic, and the personal.

Some may disagree, but to me, this kind of approach to artmaking requires interacting with the broader art community. To reject or navigate the contemporary art scene means being familiar with it and finding your place within it. Especially these days, there is no way to access a platform without making friends and professional connections. And it’s hard to really impact culture exclusively with DIY basement shows - in some ways, being an artist is like being a politician. Societally oriented praxis ultimates requires co-conspirators.

For many years, finding an art community was a goal in of itself for me. It was this romanticized concept of late night studio hangs and chainsmoking while talking dialectics and debating which painting mediums were best for what. My first experience really getting to experience this was the summer of 2018, when I met many of my current best friends on an art residency in New York City. It wasn’t a perfect program, and we weren’t all fundamentally compatible people, but for that month we achieved a level of synchronicity and camaraderie with each other that set a standard for creative cohorts as genuine community in my mind. I still keep in close touch with a handful of these people, and I cannot imagine life without having met them.

So, when all else fails: when I lose my faith in myself, and in my craft, and the overall project of my life as an artist and person in 2026, perhaps I have community to fall back on and make artmaking seem a little bigger than myself.

Yet lately the art world feels like it functions by claiming meaning rather than demonstrating it. Perhaps this isn’t new, and I was just born in 1998. But many of my peers and I have discussed our confusion around navigating a world where statements and explanations seem increasingly important compared to the actual work being discussed. The justification for the work, it seems, is more important than how well it actually pulls its mission off.

Institutions Are Our Friends?

Recently, there was a scathing review of the Whitney Biennial by Hakim Bishara - The Whitney Biennial is for the Faint Hearted. I’ll include an excerpt here:

Say you just landed from Mars and walked straight into the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Would you be able to tell from the show that the country is teetering on the precipice of fascism? That two American citizens have been shot dead in broad daylight by masked federal agents? That hard-working immigrants are being rounded up in Home Depot and Walmart stores and sent to concentration camps? That the current government unabashedly kidnaps and assassinates foreign leaders and lays claim to their countries’ oil?

How about the fact that artists have been silenced and denied opportunities for their political views, including at the Whitney itself, where a program was put on hold and its leader sacked over a cohort’s sympathy for Palestinians?

Would any of that come to mind at the storied exhibition this year? Not so much.

And yet, you’re likely to walk out of the show feeling that something’s rotten in the United States. Fear and inhibition are humming like drones beneath the surface. Otherwise, why so somber and moody? Why so meek and joyless?

Barring a few exceptions — Ali Eyal’s Ferris wheel of horrors from his war-torn childhood in Baghdad; Kainoa Gruspe’s doorstops, made from found material in US military bases and golf courses in Hawaii — I got the sense that the Whitney Biennial is hiding from the world today instead of reflecting on it.

This review unsurprisingly generated a load of controversy. On my own feed I saw a professor of mine (whom I deeply respect) applauding a response from one of the artists, ticked off by the implication that POC artists should be pigeonholed into making art about their own pain and never their own healing. Yes, I do think this is true. But also context matters, and in the context of the Whitney Museum, it is all too clear that the institution is politically selective about which “minority feelings” it will provide a platform for.

Is it really radical to talk about our healing within an institution that has not only censored work about Palestinian mourning but also indefinitely suspended programs for artists over its associate director’s support of Palestine? At an institution where board members have ties to the Trump administration, weapons manufacturers, and Zionist nonprofits? I did not read Bishara’s critique as an attempt to condemn minority artists to the niche of trauma art, but rather as a critique of the Whitney Museum as an institution for wanting to play both sides by cherrypicking which forms of POC outrage and mourning are safe and hip to showcase in its space.

A show from 2025 at Eli Klein Gallery titled “Ceci n’est pas une guerre –This Is Not a War” provided, in my opinion, a more successful example of disentangling a minority population from a flattened identity of perpetual victimhood. An excerpt from the press release reads as follows:

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the exhibition seeks to challenge the long-standing tendency to confine Vietnamese contemporary art within narrow narratives of war, trauma, and survival. Audiences are invited to move beyond inherited narratives and experience the breadth, complexity, and vitality of Vietnamese contemporary art today: unbound, unpredictable, and charged with energy.

The exhibition prompts a reconsideration of how Vietnamese visual culture is presented within a global context. While artists have engaged deeply with the past fifty years of history after the War, their works have often been interpreted through the lens of the aftermath. Within the context of Vietnam's massive economic reforms, the artists critically explore themes of identity, censorship, and queerness.

The presentation of the show, and the show itself, does not shy away from an acknowledgement of the tokenizing niche many Vietnamese artists are forced into, nor the traumatic origins of this identity. Through this acknowledgement, the show focuses on the possibilities for not only healing but active (rather than passive) global engagement, contemporary politics, and evolving Vietnamese identities. This press release, combined with the gallery’s general specialization in “contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic art”, provides conceptual scaffolding to answer the dual questions of “why present this show now” and “why present this show here”. Whereas this gallery has a clear track record of investment in the Asian community, I’m not convinced that the Whitney has any skin in the game when it comes to representing artists of color in the USA.

I also find the press release of the Biennial to be lacking a conceptual anchor, another manifestation of a wishy-washy approach to political discourse that focuses more on aesthetics than politics. The official description of the show centers it around the loose concept of surveying contemporary art and questioning the existence of an “American” identity. It offers vague concepts like the “moods” of an intergenerational and international artist cohort and explorations of “precarious ecologies and shared mythologies”, terms which these days have unfortunately become something of boilerplate text for any vaguely identity-based contemporary art.

I think of the tweet (that I tried very hard to find to no avail) that reads something like: You make work that creates alternate possibilities for being and existence under capitalist and post-imperialist structures? Can you name one alternative possibility that your work creates? Even one? While my graduate thesis revolved around these literal topics, it’s admittedly well past the time to find a better way to talk about them. One that doesn’t rely solely on load-bearing terminology to invoke a concept. We need to start speaking more specifically and more plainly about our work, not only for the sake of accessibility, but also accountability. I just want us to describe what our work actually does instead of inventing a loftier purpose to appeal to collectors and gallerists. If we all join forces, together we can fight intellectual elitism and bullshit-centric discourse culture.

Sure, Art is Politics. But What Do You Think Politics Is?

The hall pass for artists to speak in confusing and alienating terms as a means of generating their intellectual mystique and cult of personality is just as frustrating now as it was in the 90s. People have long critiqued the hypocrisy and elitism of the art world, but I would argue that the escalating concentration of wealth in an increasingly shrinking class of people is making the problem even worse. Perhaps things have not been the same ever since Warhol made work about consumerism and mechanical reproduction while kind of messily making love to it. Nowadays, the understanding that aesthetics function as politics seems ubiquitous, but people don’t seem to understand what exactly “politics” refers to. A one-dimensional grasp of both concepts has led many artists to act as if aesthetics = politics, then politics = aesthetics.

What this looks like is appropriating existing terms, concepts, and realities and treating them as aesthetic. Why does this have problematic implications? There is the standard argument about a poverty of language, and how misusing terms ends up divesting them of meaning, and so we end up with less expressivity than we had before by trying to widen the umbrella of a single term. Sometimes this is on purpose - like with the term “queer”, but there has of course been similar discourse in the LGBTQ+ community about the looseness of the idea of queerness making it vulnerable to appropriation by those with no real stake in our community and no real subversion of cisheteronormativity, thus rendering the term queer relatively impotent.

While the use or potential misuse of queerness is still in relatively ambiguous territory (at least in my opinion) there are of course examples that are much more clear cut. Such as, the mischaracterization of butchness.

As the artist says in a video about this print: Cop sympathizers can identify as masc, sure, but you’re not butch if you’re cool with the police. The reason for that is in the history of butches being harassed, beaten, and assaulted by police! Queer identities are not just about who you sleep with - they are also political identities. Therefore, your community is also related to your shared history and sense of values.

Possibly worse than misappropriating butch is the incorrect understanding of what a “stud” is. A stud has always referred to a masc black lesbian, but I have seen some white people throwing it out there to refer to any masc with A cups and a gold chain. It simply must stop. We cannot go on like this!!!

I argue that words like stud, butch, and queer are already political terms, but there are, of course, words specifically coined in the context of geopolitics. One such term is soft power. Referring generally to a nation’s might outside of the traditional category of “hard power” - that is, its military and economic means of coercion - soft power typically refers to a nation’s cultural and political influence.

Terminology and Appropriation in the Arts

Recently, a friend of mine noticed that a gallery called D Contemporary had posted an open call for its show called Soft Power. In its description of this show, it defined soft power as “the quiet force of stories, memories, and experiences that resonate beyond the individual. It is how personal narratives become shared histories, and how creativity transforms curiosity, need, and imagination into enduring cultural impact.” This description is kind of an odd amalgamation of the geopolitical term and a description of what sounds like the natural formation of culture. So why is it harmful, if not generally weird, to rebrand an existing term into something that sounds so nice?

I’m going to argue that soft power is a very important concept, as awareness of what it is and how it functions is essential to comprehending the ways in which the current world order manifests. The concept that capitalism is the system of freedom and prosperity, or that certain actors are terrorists while others are freedom fighters, or that certain nations are our friends and allies while others are dangerous or antagonistic - the creation of these public attitudes is necessary to manufacture popular consent for foreign and domestic policy, which is necessary in order to borrow and/or subjugate the power of the masses. So, whether you are a member of the 99% or the 1%, you should know that control of the narrative is key to stabilizing otherwise fundamentally unsustainable structures.

While trying to find the text from this open call online, I came across a different article by an artist who chose to make up their own definition for soft power:

”What is soft power? Soft power is level and a playing field, a map upon which we may expand as our edges lose their sharpness. Porousness grows and we become absorbent. It is a place for fairness, for clear views clearly expressed, for mutualistic relations that benefit all parties or, at least, show consideration for all parties. It is the site for truce. What is the difference between falling down and laying down? Falls happen when gravity chooses its partner to dance with. I prefer to lay. Now I lay me down to see.”

”Soft power. It has always given me strength, fortified me, even if I didn’t realize it was there. Flowers. Balloons. Colors. Corduroy. Carpet. Candles. I remember so much talk about being hard. Hard line. Hard body. Straight edge. Edge lord. How edges bound, edges guarantee, edges own. Then what about mutable edges? My edges are soft. My wants are softer.”

I understand the appeal of language and wanting to reshape it to suit your specific aesthetic needs. The term sounds nice, it’s perfect for describing a different type of “power” - I understand why people want to redefine it. But the important thing about political language is that manufacturing support or even just consent for a political concept is often rooted in choosing aesthetically appealing language. Lebensraum, for example, literally meaning “living space” was the Nazi justification for their brand of settler expansion. Manifest Destiny is a great thing to call the genocide of a people and the theft of their land. The liberal Zionist outrage over calling what is happening in Gaza “ethnic cleansing” rather than a genocide is yet another example.

We cannot pretend that it doesn’t matter what you call things. If it didn’t matter, then we wouldn’t need a term like soft power in the first place. My friend did actually end up emailing D Contemporary about their use of the term; ultimately it’s her story to tell, but I will share that their response included the justification that they were using it under “poetic license” in order to “support artistic practices". As artists, we simply cannot accept that our creative practices must be buoyed by the careless misuse and arbitrary, self-serving redefinition of existing terminology. Even more tragically, in mistreating words like this we then lose our ability to understand and join the political discussions happening around us.

Here’s Where I Start Talking Shit

Oftentimes, this kind of appropriation is more dangerous because it is done under the guise of some kind of progressive or positive act. The Whitney is just one example of an institution that benefits from borrowing the voices of socially progressive, minority artists as a way of making itself seem more contemporary and progressive. Of course, in return it does offer prestige and professional connections, and this relationship is recreated in smaller venues all over the city. For instance, a former professor of mine (White man) recently decided that he was going to get into the “niche” of curating Asian art. Apparently he thinks he’s quite good at it, and looks forward to building some sort of name for himself in the practice. Of course, whatever “Asian” means to him is anyone’s guess, but judging by the inaugural exhibition of his that sparked this idea, Asia consists exclusively of Japan, China, and Korea. The show was neither inclusive enough to include a broader Asian community (such as mixed-race Asians or South Asians, who are commonly left out from AAPI representation) nor specific enough to make any meaningful connection among the work aside from its Asianness. (Allegedly, the theme of the “body” wove the work together, but I feel like it was a pretty far reach.)

I do appreciate that this show was, of course, an opportunity for AAPI artists (or, just EA artists in this case) which offered tangible benefits for artists under immense pressure to put together a competitive CV for visa applications. That being said, why do we have to accept representation under any circumstances? Individualism in the artist community has turned the concept of identity-based representation into something not political, but professional.

Ultimately, a survey of “contemporary Asian art” or “the moods offered by an intergenerational and international” group of artists all sound vague enough to imply progressivism solely through representation, while ignoring the caveat that the context for and nature of the representation is arguably the most important factor in determining its social impact. I understand the possible response that marginalized artists should not have to make political art just because their identities are politicized. While I hope we can acknowledge that art and aesthetics are always political, for they always either affirm or contend with societal norms, I agree that we shouldn’t be forced to pimp out our labels in order to find a space for ourselves and our work. That is precisely the issue though: Curating a show of minority artists but making it neither about subverting oppressive norms or allowing the work to exist outside of the narrow context of “cultural representation” just reinforces the tokenization of said artists and negatively impacts the viewing of their work. This approach contrasts with spaces like Latitude Gallery in Tribeca that simultaneously prioritize AAPI representation while presenting its artists, first and foremost, as artists. The most important difference, though, is probably that spaces like Latitude are run by and for AAPI community, rather than by and for…a white audience?

Does it not matter if a show about “contemporary Asian art” says anything interesting or meaningful about Asian artists? Or is it enough to just benefit the specific artists who were included with an additional line in their CV? Ultimately, there will be plenty of Asian artists who don’t care about this man or this show, and plenty of other members of the AAPI community who do. Either way, the fact remains that invoking community or identity in order to pad a show’s manifesto does not simply make it so. Once again: just because aesthetics are political does not mean that just any work of visual art is a thoughtful political statement.

Could this be another consequence of the lack of standards for intellectual rigor and ethical integrity we have in the arts? The cult of personality that allows artists to be vague, ineffable, and self-congratulatory all while claiming some meaningful societal role as “cultural workers”? If artists are still succeeding at our role in holding a mirror up to society, is society just really this vapid, disdainful, and performative? I think that the increasingly exaggerated concentration of capital among the most privileged in NYC is a big part of this problem, honestly. With unstable economic conditions and a government that hates the poor, the arts, the LGBTQ+, the POC, the women, and the environment, most people’s individual circumstances are more fragile than ever. More people are competing for fewer opportunities in the arts, to the point that even volunteer gigs and DIY shows can be as difficult to get as paid work or more prestigious opportunities. Furthermore, plenty of these spaces that claim to be artist-run or for emerging artists have relied on the relative desperation and inexperience of their target audience to scam them.

A personal anecdote: A while back, I applied to an open call with A Space in Bushwick, a gallery that claims to be both artist run and supportive of emerging artists. Their open call was free of charge (a good sign) and listed a bunch of benefits of participating in their exhibition specifically as being free of charge. Upon being accepted to the exhibition a month later, they asked me for a $350 participatory fee, listing a bunch of “perks” that were completely useless (like a certificate of participation) or standard fare for an exhibiting artist (a press release and social media coverage).

Even more hilariously, these benefits were the very same ones listed in the application as being free of charge! I obviously withdrew my participation, but what does it mean for artists when so many of these “emerging arts spaces” are either charging 25-40 dollars for an open call (even for online exhibitions!), tacking on extra fees for additional “perks” like the chance for an interview, or hundreds of dollars in bogus “participation” fees?

I can list a dozen institutions that do this off the top of my head, but you’ll have to message me separately to keep naming names. Ultimately, while spaces like these exemplify the pay-to-play nature of many arts institutions all over the world, the true irony is that having these predatory galleries on your CV can actually be detrimental to your career. If someone familiar with the gallery’s practice knows that you paid a few hundred dollars to be in a show, it’s not an amazing look. It’s a lose-lose, even for those privileged enough to participate in these games without taking serious financial losses.

In Which I Talk About Rich Artists

We can’t ignore how capitalism and our nation’s political values have been affecting the humanities. The relative inaccessibility of artmaking and the comparative dominance of rich people making art has enforced certain trends: a plethora of work that is formally interesting but devoid of risk, and that is immediately recognizable as incredibly cost intensive (or should I assume your aluminum stretchers are a tradeoff for this month’s groceries?) Much like the culinary philosophy of provincial France, many works of art are of exceptionally high quality because their expensive components are combined with refined technical skill. There is something missing in just this calculus, though it certainly has its advantages: If you have the money to buy pure pigment for incredibly vibrant colors and large, expensive linen canvases, your work is going to look better and have a higher base value from the start. This doesn’t mean that these artists don’t have an immense amount of talent, just they are making work that only rich people could make.

Basically, it means our community is full of people we might like a lot as individuals, but can’t relate to on the most fundamental aspects of our conditions as artists and as people.

What does it mean when most of the people making art are rich? Well, it’s not like rich people shouldn’t make art. But if only rich people can afford to make art, that means that only rich people get to proactively engage with culture. If only rich people get to influence and create culture, then that means everyone else can only engage with the arts in the more passive role of consumer. I don’t want an art community that functions to perpetuate a working class that only listens, consumes, and generates value for the upper class, who then gets to make art and poetry. Didn’t we spurn ChatGPT for the very same reason?

I Can’t Work In These Conditions

I have not felt like making artwork lately. Part of the reason is that artists simply cannot stop acting up. I am not perfect, but someone really needs to start holding us accountable – and it is not the rich, conservative board members of museums, or the theory-obsessed elitists with no actual investment in the fine arts or the art community. If the society that we make art for and about is going to become a part of the conversation, we need to start making our conversations more accessible, and stop playing along with the standards and systems that pressure us into creating our own commodified cult of personality. As it stands, I am really struggling to glean any meaning from participating in this project of being an “artist”!

I keep comparing the fine arts to literature, poetry, film, comics, music – are these all not more expressive, more eloquent, more radical? How can painting still connect to people and offer them something valuable, something uncomfortable, or something of solace? The solution to me is not, like many art professors suggest, to simply go multidisciplinary. I have interest in mixed media, but not as a bandaid for relevance. After all, it’s not only painting that suffers from these cultural ills. Every year, someone tries to claim that painting is dead, but interesting people keep making interesting paintings. I guess I’m trying to figure out if I can be one of them.

Ultimately, I love visual art - my room is full of it, my life revolves around collecting pieces of things that inspire me and fill me with emotion. If all the crap I have accumulated in my room (that makes moving such a pain in the ass) is any testament to the power and significance of art, it’s hard to argue that art doesn’t matter. But I am still trying to figure out what the significance of a key difference is: art that pads the every day, investigating and celebrating all the aspects of existence, and the art that disrupts the everyday, revolutionizes thought, and challenges power structures. Is it enough to just make the former? Is art still really capable of the latter, or is it all toothless and commodified –– or else, stuck in an echo chamber of other artists and elitists?

I think that art is capable of transforming daily life, and it’s just that the heavy commodification of every aspect of our life makes everything seem a lot more toothless. Visual media is perhaps the easiest and most obvious thing, but it’s crept into everything about our daily lives. Literally, our lifestyles have been commodified, as average people, for influencer content. While there used to be a bit more of a divide between the private and the public, the corporate and the personal, the elitist and the subversive, these days it feels like those lines have blurred all over the place. Which is why, ironically, I feel like sometimes I can make better art if I ignore the art community.

I always strongly felt - and also learned from others - that being grounded in community and history was the only way to make relevant work. Basically, being contemporary was about paying attention to your surroundings. Now I’m thinking maybe I took that a little too literally - not all surroundings are worth paying attention to, especially in our NYC-arts style echo-chamber. And, if the artist I mention at the very beginning of this essay is right - time is like a sine wave, and also is cyclical (!!!) Sometimes being contemporary comes from having a broader view of history to contextualize the current moment. That is, looking macro rather than micro.

I think, for that reason, I have been trying to tune out a lot of the art community lately in order to make better work. It feels illogical to stop paying attention, and in many ways I can’t disengage from the arts world in NYC: venues, institutions, curators, publications, other artists (including my friends) are all part of it, and typically solely accessible by going through the motions of openings, closings, press releases, reviews, critiques, talks, etc.

I don’t think that art has become less valuable, and I do think our community will always been a degree of insufferable. Perhaps it’s a test to my strength of character whether I can weather the intersection of late stage capitalism and the creative arts and still produce a body of work that I believe in. But I can’t do it until I get myself to actually make the work, so I’m trying to be less scared of irrelevance or ineptitude and just do what I love doing.

Since I never know how to end these…
ultimately this is still just my blog, so here are some fun updates:

Lately my garden has been exploding! In a good way; it’s growing really fast. I hope to see some flowers soon. My obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana) and philadelphia fleabane are already blooming and my yarrow and lanceleaf coreopsis have buds forming! I also recently planted a winterberry tree, but I realized that they are dioecious so I will need to find it a gendered counterpart if I want it have fruit for the birds.

I’ve also been rewatching Mawaru Penguindrum as a part of my recent Kunihiko Ikuhara kick (the director of Revolutionary Girl Utena, for those unaware). When I was much younger, I remember trying to watch the show and not really getting it. It’s so awesome getting older and rewatching things that you weren’t that into and finding that you can really, really enjoy them now. It’s been a great experience which is helped by the fact that the animation, voice acting, and soundtrack are all awesome as well. Next on my list is my annual Evangelion rewatch, and then rewatching all the Madoka Magica movies with some friends to prepare for the new movie coming out this summer!! It’s yuri summer guys.

I hope that you all are able to stay hydrated and relatively solid in this heat. I’m determined not to let the summer sun keep me indoors this year. This winter was particularly brutal, and I need to catch up on my outside time. Stay safe out there though, there are some bugs going around (Jay and I both got sick these last two weeks :1) Especially as mosquito season approaches, we have to be on guard against bugs. Okay, bye bye now.

A soundtrack for you to read alongside if you wish? How do we feel about this?

HELLO substack warriors! I am trying to use my substack more, because I recently took instagram off my phone and redownloaded it onto my iPad (huge change, everyone erupts into applause). why substack? I think it’s a better way of sharing what I’m doing and what I care about than instagram. why choose my iPad to be the cursed vessel of this application? because I don’t carry it around with me, so I won’t lose hours at a time to aimless social media usage, but it’s also easier to use than the (similarly cursed) desktop version of instagram.

What I’ve been up to lately How I’ve been feeling lately

Lately I feel like my life has lacked any defined timeline - not just because I graduated and finished a lifetime of schooling - but because the timeline that I thought I would transition into simply didn’t happen. And, with the way of the world these days, the unfortunate reality is that it probably won’t happen. While maintaining my focus on what there is to be done, I am trying to make peace with a future in a very different world from the one I imagine - a great privilege all the same, compared to the possibility of no future at all.
My father recently said that I’m finally realizing my own destiny (or “density” as he calls it). He said that because I have been working on getting into law school. Like many others, I am trying to figure out the best way to make a difference and keep a stable paycheck. Am I realizing my density? I’m not really sure. I have reasons for what I do but really I’m just making it all up as I go.

Instagram: Faustian bargain connecting me with the world at the cost of my own unraveling??

So why send IG to iPad gulag? Why now to make this change?? Is this even a significant change at all? It is to me, actually. Because I have just been getting really confused by social media. I don’t just mean tired, because I think we’ve all been there for a while. I’ve been confused by social media because I feel like I need it but I also hate it - relatable?? It is definitely a factor in how ungrounded I feel. My density is slipping away. We are all in this together. We are all on instagram together!

Do I really need it? No, maybe yes? I have actually gotten most of my opportunities thus far through instagram, although upon reflection I suppose the fact that the evil surveillance nexus is also practically useful is not that surprising. How else would they keep us on there? Cosmetic validation and memes alone?! Look, I have found opportunities from job postings to community organizing and volunteering through instagram, I have made friends and even professional connections through instagram, and I even find out about most of my friends’ events or recent work through instagram. And news, given the biases of mainstream news outlets (and the growing monopoly which controls them) these days, is something I even go to instagram for (not exclusively, but there tends to be a lot more focus on community/local happenings on IG); I have this fear that without instagram my access to a range of perspectives and stories is limited. My access to friends in need or mutual aid initiatives is limited.

Why do I feel like I need access to all these things in the first place? I’m going to focus on professional networking and arts opportunities first. For those who are new here (to my life), I have been caught at the beautiful intersection of the job search, a nascent art career, and the prospect of law school. That means that I’m trying to lay the groundwork for three different life paths at once, in case any of them work out. This is a consequence of my lack of success finding a stable job since graduating from my MFA in 2024…into a terrible economy and a decimated national arts budget (so….a big surprise, I know……). It takes a lot of capital and/or flexibility to support an art career in this day and age; the alternative is a very slow, gradual progression of one’s career. That’s okay! But it certainly won’t make you much money, or at least enough income in the short term to provide you with general stability. So that you can, you know, continue to develop your art. So far things have looked a little like this:

No money to support self or art career → Job search → Get shitty job → still not enough money to support art career or self, and no time to do anything → Quit shitty job → no money, but time to make art and search for better jobs → either catch a lucky break, or back to square one!

I’m not really here to complain about that, since I have infinite subsequent newsletters in which I can complain about my life. I’m mostly providing context for this feeling of need that has crept into the way I use technology, and the ways that I’m trying to figure out alternative infrastructures in my life. I’ve been looking for lifelines through instagram, and I’ve even seen evidence that I could actually find one there.
Which begs the question: What is the net practicality of a thing which offers me services in exchange for my time, attention, and personal information? Which then uses this information to better surveil and target people, and to fund the same billionaires who are enabling this fascist acceleration?

“Politics” and emotional burnout

In order to think about this, I am going to expand the conversation to include the “political” communications which instagram facilitates. There are a few attitudes about this that I would like to explain as a way of opening the conversation. With the extreme polarity that social media platforms encourage, I typically encounter two main oppositional points of view. I’m going to try to paraphrase them here:

Perspective A is that we should just take care of ourselves, because our activity on social media won’t solve crises or contribute positive change, and is even kind of cringe and aggro, plus it spreads negativity and impacts our own mental health, so we should all just focus on being our best selves and spreading positivity (and fun! our fun fun vacation pictures! Woohoo!)
Perspective B is that we should all abandon any focus on our own welfare, get over feeling like shit all the time because our feelings don’t matter in a crisis - or even, we should feel like shit because that is the logical response, and we should rather dedicate every resource we have to throwing our bodies upon the wheels of society.

These perspectives both claim similar solutions to collective problems, although in opposite directions: perspective A believes that self care is the best and most effective thing we can do while perspective B completely sublimates the self into tangible action, and recommends its own one-size-fits-all approaches.

For the record, I think that just because it is a privilege to take care of our wellbeing does not mean we should stop trying to be sound in body and mind. I also think that taking care of oneself is different from trying to maintain the “unbothered good vibes” persona that wealth and ignorance enables. There are many things in life which deserve to be treated with gravity, even if those are things we have no direct, personal control over. Perspective A and B both ask people to control their thoughts and feelings: either to be that positive presence people crave, or to be the best leftist we can be. I believe that at the core of Perspective A is a selfishness that pretends to be radical, or at least respectable. At the core of Perspective B is a deep fatigue and anger with that selfishness that, when taken out of context, can be paralyzing and even self destructive. Ignoring our flaws and fears will not make them go away. I saw someone say that hope is a useless white person emotion. Well, maybe? I don’t really care to weigh in on that, but I guess I figure that we are getting a little too abstract with our psychological critiques. Rather than trying to transform everyone into strong, mature, resilient, flexible collectivists, we might need to figure out what even weak and scared people can do. I mean, organizing groups are already full of tools and we still get stuff done (despite it all). I guess I’m somehow implying that the purity politics of the left keep us from successfully organizing, which is all too often used to ask leftists to lower our standards. I don’t mean we should lower our standards. I just mean that while we ask for the most, we should we working with what we have. At least, for those of us who have the liberty to still be figuring out how to engage with all this disaster, tragedy, injustice – should we not figure out how to have our emotions and still, somehow, be the person that we need to be?

But maybe I am just taking instagram discourse too seriously? After all, the amount of people I run into out in the world who espouse such extremes are far more limited compared to social media. For example, I see a staggering amount of antisemitism in instagram comments these days. Attitudes that are genuinely disquieting and seem to be somehow intertwined with Gen Z internet culture? It’s really weird and kind of funny hearing so many people talk about the word goy all of the sudden. What, so you can have a word for us but we can’t have a word for you? Anyways, perhaps another reason to seek balance with my instagram usage.
(I’m going to have to write another substack at some point on the weirdness of jewish identity in NYC, in part being that for some people, their entire experience with jews has been with the …somewhat disagreeable and typically racist hasids of Brooklyn. within diaspora, there sure are all different types. no one is surprised to hear this, and yet somehow it doesn’t always click for people that minority groups are not monoliths!)

Unfortunately I think that people who are not prepared and do not have the training to engage in political activism, which is most americans, are simply going to get burnt out and stop trying. I saw someone write something once to the effect of, white americans are so used to being the center of everything that they think they’ll solve these decades or centuries of problems just because they are now involved/invested. And when solutions are not actually easy or immediate, they get burnt out and turned off, feeling ineffective, and walk away from the cause saying they tried their hardest and still couldn’t fix it. Which begs the question: are people only interested in these problems because they think they can solve them? Or perhaps more specifically: are people only interested in these communities because they think they can help them? I’ll let you think on the implications of those motivations.

One opinion I have is that if doing one thing feels pointless, maybe focus on doing the things that don’t feel pointless? Sometimes it can ground those “pointless” tasks in something that feels more tangibly productive, and other times you can just invest your time and energy more wisely.
If every possible action you could take to help others feels pointless…then perhaps you should just do something anyways, and also, maybe look into SSRIs. There’s no shame in admitting we are all going through something right now.
Getting involved can be tiring, but if we focus on where our skills and interests can shine the most rather than shifting focus every moment to what feels most urgent, we can end up enjoying that tiring work and even cultivating a long term community. This isn’t to say we should ignore emergencies; rather, we could use discretion and put effort into cultivating our own identity as a community member, rather than aspiring to be a chameleon without any experience or training to back it up.

Where this conversation leads, I think, is that the moral fixation on “doing something” is not enough to make Americans productive members of a collective. Especially for those who have no real concept of intersectionality. I think people need the tools to be able to think for themselves about how they fit into their actual communities, and that is unfortunately something that many americans, white or not, did not grow up with. Who are we to our neighbors? The problem compounds with many of us NYC transplants who moved from suburban communities (which are socially alienating to various degrees) to parts of New York City where people are physically close together, and where communities have survived on close social ties and grassroots work in the face of an actively racist, antagonistic government. Many of us are comparatively out of our depth. What do now?

So, what do?

I think that being our best self does isn’t simply being our most upbeat and carefree self. Maybe something along the lines of being in integrity with yourself, having a support system and a social community, and, of course, realizing your personal goals? That seems pretty best case scenario to me. So what do we do about “being our best self” in a world that seems more and more hostile to our futures? I guess there isn’t a way to be our best selves in the society we currently live in. How could we be our best selves under the expanding maw of capitalism and a crashing economy that continues to pillage and oppress other countries to feed itself, while our friends and neighbors disappear around us? Telling people that disengaging will make things go away is a trick. But maybe we can still be a good version of ourselves. Some people will say it does not matter if you are good, it matters if you are doing good. Well…semantics! To me they are the same: being good is an action, not a quality. Mostly because who cares about the essential moral character of your soul if you’re a great person to have in the world. I’m not the one who chooses where to send you when you die, but I do have to live with you. Either way, I am not going to offer you a way to be good!!! Because the whole point of this is that I am trying really hard to figure it out for myself right now.

I think I have been using instagram as a way to feel that I was staying informed and invested. The emotional response I had to getting information through that app was one of investment - I felt anxious, stressed, angry, guilty, bad and weird - so, at least I felt less insulated from the horrors than if I chose to stick my head in the sand. I could tell myself I was at least not sticking my head in the sand. But while I am still trying to make sense of my own life and choices, I am also looking for ways to build alternative infrastructure, and to not rely on instagram for everything, including feeling involved in my community.
I am still going to use instagram to access important communication networks, but it has been relegated to my iPad for proper containment. I don’t want to just ignore the things that are important, or aimlessly drown in a constant stream of information that is either meant to or functions to overwhelm me. If anything, Instagram is simply not a secure platform to be organizing on! So, I am going to try to organize my time and my communications more intentionally, and this substack is a part of that.

I sometimes hear about the transformative changes others have made by cutting out “smart” tech, and while I am impressed, I also find that most of these people have few circumstances in common with me that would allow me to model my success after theirs. So I am slowly finding my own methods to making things work. And eventually I would love a flip phone because they’re so cunty.

You know how when you clean your room you often need to make it messier first, because you’re resolving all of the stopgap solutions for putting away your shit that are incompatible with an actually sensible and sustainable system? Like how right now I have half of my clothes in cardboard boxes around my room and still somehow keep running out of closet space? Spring cleaning is going to be a pain in the ass this year.

I think that’s my issue with cleaning up the infrastructure of communication in my own life. I have way too many newsletters and email chains spread over various emails, I follow way too many accounts to even figure out how to check them in a methodical way. My digital footprint is a messy amalgamation which has accumulated over 10+ years of me throwing everything into random bins, and to now sort out all the different elements of my life and things I have to keep up with is going to take a while.

As a small start, I’m going to try to be better about keeping in touch in my own ways and not by just feeding more of my personal information to the meta corporation. I guess posting things publicly on the internet is still just posting things publicly on the internet, but at least I get to choose how and where, and this is what I’d like to do for the next bit.

Another one from the same album…I’ll list the songs at the end!

What I’ve really been up to lately

Well, I have some work up in a group show at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood! Pulling that off was super fun, and now I am stumped on what to make next. I realized I probably need to go out and see some stuff to get inspired again, do some research, you know. I’ve been neglecting a lot of my creative input because I’ve been so focused on various outputs lately. My density has been increasing so rapidly, maybe I need to lighten up a bit? In that vein, I got to play DND last weekend and it was so awesome. DND is actually kind of fatiguing and takes a lot of practice to get good at (to be a good player, a good teammate, and get the most fun out of it) and so the fun to work ratio can be a bit surprising to people when they first play. But even though my back hurt and I was basically foaming at the mouth after about 5 hours of sitting at the game board, I’m still super excited for our next session. It is my first time doing a campaign in person instead of online, and honestly it is so much more fun to get to interact in person and share food, look at each other, avoid screentime, you know.

I’ve also been going to the YMCA every week and it rocks. I have such a tough time building habits no matter how much I like the thing, so having someone else to schedule with is a godsend – I’m close to being able to squat my own body weight again! Watch out or I might squat you!
I have been going with my good friend and it keeps me motivated and makes the sessions way more fun. As the weather warms back up I’m looking forward to doing more runs in the park too. We saw such beautiful scenery the other week at Prospect!! Many geese were out walking on the semi-frozen pond…ducks too….it was a beautiful menagerie.

It is really nice to have a routine and to be taking better care of myself, and it is so messed up that it took quitting my super shitty job to be able to do any of that. I was on the phone with my friend Chloé earlier, talking about what it means for people who are categorized as small and femme to be physically strong. Honestly, while it is frustrating that we live in this kind of world at all, I do find it really empowering to maintain my fitness. In addition to taking care of ourselves, more and more I think we are going to be able to need to lean on each other, and sometimes that means physically.
Earlier I said that I was struggling with my density, but running is one of those things that makes me feel perfectly grounded. I hope that everyone gets the chance to find an intersection of things that make them happy and healthy and that helps them connect with our beautiful lady Earth. It is hard to think that our days of enjoying her like we do now are likely limited…it truly pains me to think our time in our own beautiful home is in danger because of corporate greed…but still we press on, and as we do, I am grateful for every memory I have and every new memory I make.

I have so much stuff I am behind on and now I have to catch up on moving out of my studio, patching and painting everything, and selling all my old junk. Plus I have to study for the LSAT and take it in April. Ahhhhhhhhhh! There is no time for existential and practical crises, but here I am - that’s how substack fits into my life, I guess.

And now….

ANIMAL CORNER!!!

The animals are interacting….I am also animals. It is so cool being a human on a planet full of other creatures who all have different ways of relating to you because we are all different but also we still live together. And some of them bite me.

I also my opening at Tempest this past week, which was very cool, and I am super grateful to my friends who stopped by to check it out. I had a really fun time that night but I also realized that I am a super lightweight now because I haven’t been going to bars because I have been broke and ALSO too much alcohol not good for me (brand new thought)

Here’s a picture of me about to go to my opening. I think I was lowkey fitted but you can’t really see in the picture so just trust me on that. I got no full length mirror!

Art corner!!!

Val was really super happy to be looking at this painting. Glad that Jay got a picture to commemorate the occasion now literally NO ONE can call you uncultured because look at how much you like art also wow such great posture! No one would literally ever think you are a homunculus. I love that my art can facilitate these kinds of encounters.

I am still sad that this piece did not make it into the show at the last minute, but I am really excited to show it sometime in the future. It’s the bottom half of a diptych and it’s kind of a small and messy piece but I really enjoyed painting it so that was awesome.

In news of art consumed this week…I saw my professor Nat Meade’s show up at Hesse Flatow this week! It was so sick (really really beautiful) and he is such a huge inspiration for me that I can’t even post his work or it’ll make me look so bad in comparison. But please go check it out, it’s really great. My friend Crater has some work up at Satellite Gallery as well. They are such a talented ceramicist with such inventive, playful, and narratively rich work and any chance to see their pieces in person is not to be missed!! And, my friend Xiangjie Rebecca Wu has a stunning solo show up at Latitude Gallery. She is such a skillful and thoughtful painter and the atmospheres she creates are really impressive. Her work has a cinematic quality that makes you feel like you’re experiencing a memory, like all the times I’ve wished I could take a mental snapshot of a moment just how it is. iPhone photos fail where Rebecca’s work finds great success in carving out moments of time.
Go check out everyone’s shows!!

Impromptu film corner?

I also saw the movie Project Hail Mary, which mostly felt like a cross between Guardians of the Galaxy and a much better sci-fi movie. I enjoyed seeing Ryan Gosling go to space and make friends with a rock, but I do feel I missed out on the depth of the book. There were a lot of moments where I leaned over to ask Jay, “did this happen in the book??” Because it felt like such a silly or pointless scene, and unfortunately, yeah, most of those moments were film originals.
I do think it was a very fun movie which I enjoyed! And possibly an excellent companion to the source material, though maybe not a substitute for it. Looking at it favorably, I would say it focused on the strengths of a movie in playing up the more narrative and action oriented aspects of the story. But my faith in the medium of film to be art makes me think that if the producers been targeting a different audience, or aiming for something to really bring out the source material, it could have been a really sick sci-fi film. I guess I have to go watch and also read The Martian now.

TW: Ryan Gosling

So, comparatively, an example of a movie that I thought was an amazing adaptation of a book: The animated movie for Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back. The manga tells parallel stories about artistic development and interpersonal development which implicate and sometimes aggravate one another. It is a truly exceptional story written and drawn by the very talented Fujimoto-sensei, something that means a lot to me as an artist, and I think the animated adaptation was just as strong as the manga. Especially in hearing conversations with the director Kiyotaka Oshiyama, it was clear how much the team wanted to use the medium to bring out the essence of the story and the original artwork - there was one scene where the main character is running along a path, and Studio Durian went through these great pains to animate this shift in perspective that really brought the scene to life. Like they really animated the shit out of that comic, rather than just recreating panels shot-for-shot with some movement. It felt like a really thoughtful adaptation. Damn, I want to go watch it again now.

Apparently the movie is getting a live-action remake, which is unsurprising given the success of the anime adaptation, but I feel it’s unnecessary. I guess we will never escape the looming specter of live-action remakes for already-good media. Oh my god, remember the live action Avatar the Last Airbender movie from 2010? I almost forgot how awful that movie was. Look at this one review I dug up:

“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

—Roger Ebert, Sun Times

I’m sorry, it’s just so funny. Rest in pieces, The Last Airbender. Middle school me was so disappointed by you.

In keeping with my hopes to break from Instagram’s clutches, I am also going to add some opportunities for mutual aid/learning/etc. in my substack as a way to directly connect you guys with the stuff I care about, that maybe you guys care about too.

Mutual Aid Opportunities!

As many of you may know, a devastating flood recently hit Hawai’i and the people need help. If you’ve ever been on vacation or consider Hawai’i one of your favorite places (like myself) then think about pitching in somehow!
Especially with the gutting of FEMA, and the general lack of interest the fed gov has in providing disaster relief in areas where POC and poorer Americans live, (not to mention its disinterest in the wellbeing of territories it has forcibly colonized like Puerto Rico and Hawai’i) it is something we regular people will have to help with.

This spreadsheet has a list of families, businesses, and individuals affected by the storm in need of help!

the Hawaiian Council is also matching all donations right now!

Even a little bit helps. Donate $5 and pretend you’re paying a latte forward! It might not feel that good or that helpful, but don’t forget that it still makes a difference. Maybe we are just conditioned to expect too much for too little? I think as we continue to get used to supporting each other, we will see the ways in which we are making a difference even when they are small.

Also - with ICE in our airports, stay safe while traveling out there and make sure you know your rights.

Well, that kind of ends what I wanted to talk about in this post. What should I leave you with….hm….well, if anyone actually read this far, I am really impressed and also we should hang out soon.

Oh, let me give you the track list:

1. Glass Flowers by Elysian Spring, album Glass Flowers, released 1969

2. Blue Sands by Elysian Spring, album Glass Flowers, still released 1969

3. Action Line by Dorothy Ashby, album Afro-Harping, released 1968 (a recommendation originating from Kobi - shoutout Kobi)

I have realized that I’ve been putting a lot of my passions off while I’ve been trying to take care of business, so I’m aiming to get back to reading and writing more this year. I am proud of myself for making progress in some areas, so I’m going to be ambitious and try to keep making progress in others too…! Maybe I’ll review a show? Finally finish Braiding Sweetgrass? Make a comic? Join another book club? If you have any recommendations for me, please let me know. Otherwise, as always, I invite you to flame me in the comments.

-Aliza!!!

If we want to find the dream, we have to find where it is buried under semantics. Our dream can be our “fantasy”; it can be our “goal”; it can be our “desire”. Do dreams have consequences? Do they matter more or less than reality? The dream can be an escape, the dream can be a distraction - the daydream in class, chin resting hard in your palm. The dream can be an exploration: once, I had a dream where I was convinced I had figured out a real methodology for how to fly. Practical. Semi-lucid, I thought if I remembered how to do it once I woke up, I could fly in the real world too.

The dream, much like the novel, or the movie, or the painting, provides us with a way to access other worlds. It gives us a “what-if”, the kind of thing that is impossible to experience in linear time. The dream can make reality feel fragile; it can give us a way out. The “save” function in video games is a fantasy, just like how Choose Your Own Adventure games will let you experience multiple what-ifs, over again and as often as you’d like. The what-if can be mundane: what if I got up when my alarm rang, got ready for work, and bolted out the front door on time? But then again, what if I was a time-traveling knight destined to save the world and meet a princess and a robot sidekick?

If a dream is an alternate reality, then something like playing make-believe is a kind of lucid dream. I’ll pretend to be the fireman, and you be the cat stuck in a tree, if you want. Or we can pretend to be pastry chefs, or bears escaped from the zoo. Make-believe is a kind of practice for something we may or may not actually do, but it’s fun to give ourselves the chance.

Dreams as: Make Believe

In Role-Playing Games, much like an actor in a play, you take on the identity of a character which you “play” in the game. Some games define their protagonists more rigidly: your name, story, personality, and appearance are all given to you, and it is your job to play the role. In other games, you can customize multiple aspects of your character in order to maximize self-expression. Still, similar to how the point of roleplaying in 3-dimensional life is to experience something different from the norm, people often use RPGs as a chance to explore a different identity and existence altogether rather than to replicate themselves perfectly.

above (top), Pokemon Red; above (bottom), Old School Runescape

Sometimes, we can share these worlds with other people. Many popular RPGs are played online, offering connectivity to massive servers full of other real people playing their own invented characters. These games are called MMORPGs - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. In these games, you can chat with other people, make friends, collaborate on quests, trade items, etc. Some people even date, and these relationships may or may not spill over into the “real” world. How much you want to merge the worlds of your dream and your reality is a matter of personal choice.

(above) a frame from the last day of the MMORPG Trickster Online, which was shut down in 2013. Source: youtube video “Trickster Online (USA Version) Last Day - Part 2” uploaded by Eight Bit Rabbit

(above) screenshot from the online multiplayer game Club Penguin, where players could chat and play minigames against 2D backgrounds.

Players would often interact with these backgrounds, pretending to be clubbing or as seen here, attempting to “tip” the iceberg by soliciting other players to all move to one side of the screen

During the last party/event of the game, before Club Penguin was shut down/discontinued, it became possible to actually tip the iceberg and reveal an underground dancefloor.

Dreams as: The Fake

MMORPGs create a space for collective dreaming and play in the virtual realm. We think of dreams as a fabrication – like in the Matrix, the intricate virtual landscape constitutes its own reality. With the addition of sensory immersion, what difference is there really between our dream and our reality? The Matrix asserts that value doesn’t come from sensory experience, or even collective experience (the vast majority of humanity is caught in this dream together). The claim must be that reality (as truth) even if it must be experienced alone, offers something concrete that the Matrix ultimately cannot compete with. Many other movies ask the same question: when a different reality promises something better, easier, more fantastic, more entertaining, more delicious, what obligation do we have to the world we came from? What is the difference between dream and reality? What use is living in a dream somewhere if others are living in a (potentially nightmarish) reality elsewhere?

Dreaming is most often seen as a disengagement from reality. You must be dreaming. You’ve got to wake up. To be awake in this sense isn’t just about a literal state of consciousness, but about paying attention to the world you inhabit. When Neo plugs back into the Matrix for a second time in order to destroy it, he is not dreaming in the same way he was at the start of the movie – he’s already seen what the Matrix is, and he is no longer navigating it as a passive spectator. The dream is defined by its function as a means of escape (or, obfuscation).

(above) still from The Matrix (1999 film)

The digital realms of the internet and video games can be like waking dreams, in that they provide alternate realities for the willing. For better or for worse, the digital space is different from our physical reality. Legacy Russell’s book Glitch Feminism points out the ways in which the digital space can allow the marginalized body to reinvent itself, shedding the identifiers that limit political privilege and safety in the physical world, allowing an individual to slip through cyberspace with a renewed agency. At the same time, the anonymity and immateriality of the digital space can remove the consequences and accountability of physical space that force us to have “skin in the game” - to take life seriously and treat it preciously. Acknowledging the differences between digital and physical realities, while accepting that they don’t undermine the value of a space for exploration and fantasy, is an important part of maintaining a healthy mental balance throughout this dimension-hopping.

Dreams as: Portal

If the dream can be something like an alternate reality, then could the dream also be a physical space? Other worlds as physical or pseudo-physical realms for escape is a common trope in media, including folklore and fables. The ornate wooden wardrobe of the Narnia series provides a very real portal between worlds, like the hidden door in Coraline or the chalk door in Pan’s Labyrinth. In all three of these stories, behind the door is a mixture of fantasy and danger that makes it clear that a dream can just as easily turn into a nightmare. These dreamworlds offer a reprieve from the difficult or mundane realities that these child protagonists are hoping to escape, but they soon must face that they are not the masters of the dream they have stumbled into.

Like Hansel and Gretel stumbling upon the Witch’s cottage, they must outwit and/or defeat the villain in control of the fantasy space in order to reach their happy ending. It is relatively uncommon for characters to remain in the alternate world, although sometimes (like in Narnia or Harry Potter) our protagonist finds that they finally have a space to belong, and settle into their new home. Most of the time, though, our characters return to their original home having changed, grown, and learned new ways to understand and navigate the world they came from.

Dreams as: Portal as: Catharsis

In this way, dreams and dreamworlds provide an opportunity for learning, growth, and catharsis to allow characters to overcome traumas, insecurities, and other roadblocks in everyday life. In Satoshi Kon’s animated film Paprika, characters explore the potential to use lucid dreaming to understand the subconscious and therefore heal the conscious, waking mind. The dreamscape doubles as a refuge for the disillusioned and disgruntled, as they seek to use dreams as a tool of manipulation and control. Eventually, the dreamscape merges with the physical world in an attempt to rewrite reality itself.

(above) A still from Paprika. The movie is known for its stunning, complex visuals and distinctive soundtrack, among other trademark qualities from director Satoshi Kon

The TV series Over the Garden Wall takes space in a thickly forested dreamworld tinged with a nefarious, creeping shadow. Our protagonists, two brothers, must navigate absurd, fantastic, and downright frightening scenarios which both test and strengthen their bond. Their encounters in the forest world provide alternate landscapes from their daily lives, providing new insights into their character and allowing chances to break the cycle of habitual behaviors. In their journey to survive and escape home, the brothers untangle mysteries of the forest and its inhabitants, as well as some of the complications in their relationship with each other, and within themselves.

(above): a scene from Over the Garden Wall

Some stories are less inspiring, with dreams providing more of a post-mortem view into the subconscious than a space to grow and heal. The japanese indie RPG Yume Nikki, or Dream Diary barely gives the player any information about its main character, Madotsuki. She is a shut-in who spends most of her time dreaming, despite the fact that her dreamscape is a surreal, nightmarish multiverse.

With no dialogue and little to no explanation of anything in-game, the player is left to draw their own conclusions about our player character’s mind from the imagery in her dreams. Despite being basically devoid of actual violence or conflict - the main character is never harmed in any way - the game Yume Nikki contains a wealth of disturbing imagery and dynamics which makes clear allusions to violence, sexual trauma, and feelings of alienation and social anxiety. There is no satisfying resolution or catharsis for Madotsuki, however, and the game’s only “ending” is considerably morbid. Hint: it neither ends with her happily rejoining society, nor with her remaining in the dreamworld.

Perhaps, as nonsensical and frightening as the worlds in Yume Nikki are, they are only reflecting back to us how nonsensical and frightening our real world can be, and already is. The surrealism of dreams can, at times, help us see with more clarity by making our common sense useless and forcing us to pay attention. Dreams grant us a lens to more closely examine things which would otherwise be too ugly, or too mundane. Or, perhaps, the fantasy space of the dreamscape can give a voice to the voiceless. In Yume Nikki, dreams may not provide a chance for healing, but they do allow us a way into the heart and mind of someone who has otherwise closed herself off from the world.

(above): stills from the game Yume Nikki

Ultimately, what dreams have to offer us is similar to what art offers us: another perspective. By giving us a space to explore “what-ifs”, we can learn from realities different from our own. We learn about heartbreak before we experience it ourselves, or we learn how to overcome it from someone who has already lived through it. We learn what scares us, what inspires us, and we imagine possibilities. Dreams can remind us of things we thought we had forgotten, and even predict things which haven’t happened yet. Dreams can provide us with a new angle to understand something that already happened. The important thing is that we preserve our ability to imagine, and understand that both dreams and nightmares expand our world.

Dreams as: Politics

Dreams can be revolutionary. In an excerpt from Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russel writes that, “Unable to see its edges, we are forced to live within it as a world in and of itself. This is why, in order to reimagine the body, one must reimagine space. Revolutionary change manifests through a reconsideration of the spatial, in negotiation of spatial limitations and identifications of how to overturn, dissolve, break through these boundaries.” Where physical and political barriers exist, dreams restore permeability. Fantasy is a tool of subversion, literally challenging our reality.

If I were to propose an Ethics of Dreaming based on what I’ve written here already, it would be in attempt to answer the questions, “what do we owe our reality?” and, “what constitutes a reality?” In response to the second question, I would say that multiple realities can exist, and they are not necessarily more or less real or more or less important than each other, but have different parameters and play by different rules and could perhaps be more or less consequential, given the added gravity of the 3rd dimension. It just so happens that the vast majority of human beings have far more at stake in our present physical reality than in any other one. All of our dreams, ultimately, originate here in our reality; in that sense, we owe our reality as sincere an effort at goodness as possible, because it is our home, and the source and inspiration of all of our dreams and fantasies.

The Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul wrote:

To dream is a freedom to be preserved, and much like other freedoms, the right to dream in our day and age is a political issue. Some dream at the expense of others: the ability to separate oneself from reality is often a marker of a kind of privilege, such as for those billionaires who snap up scenic land on occupied Hawai’i for their private use, or those who believe they can flee to hi-tech colonies on Mars after thoroughly ravaging the Earth. The individual who relies on exceptionalism and good fortune to cushion their fate with the sacrifices of mankind has chosen not dreaming, but violence. The best dreams, we learn from many stories, are those we can share with others, not those which exist at the expense of others.

Dreams as: Romance

I had a dream once where I fell deeply in love with someone that I had barely ever spoken to in real life. When I woke up, I thought it was the funniest thing ever; I was not, in fact, in love with them, but it was still a very beautiful dream. Sometimes, I’ll have a dream that I am arguing with someone I am very close with, and when I wake up I am so upset that it takes half a day for me to get over a fight that didn’t even happen. Dream logic is kind of funny, and it can sometimes eclipse all of our sense and rationality with how confidently it asserts itself. While I enjoy the adventure, I’m glad there is a reality to return to. It’s not lost on me that everything in my dreams is something taken from living my life out here.

As fun as it would be if a portal to somewhere else opened up, there is something romantic about belonging to something and being of something; where we are from never leaves us, even though we may leave it behind. The inherent magic, then, of simply being born on and experiencing this Earth might inspire us to take some care in engaging with it seriously and lovingly.

- Lyrics from Al Green’s Dream

A portion of this essay is going to be published in the Dreams issue of the With Friends Like These zine, which is a lovely project being organized by three current Pratt MFAs. Now freed from the limits of physical publication, I was going to edit these thoughts and beef them up a little, but it turns out I am too lazy to do that, so any offshoot conversations and further explorations of this topic will have to occur as commentary. Which you are welcome and encouraged to participate in!

Today I’ll be in the studio trying to fix up this work in progress (below), which was inspired by thoughts about dreaming and layered realities/personas. If you have any advice feel free to drop it, lol.

Peace and love as always my friends, and happy new year of both the Gregorian and Lunar varieties.

I graduated from my Master’s program just last Wednesday—I have a MFA degree now! And of course, the first thing I have to share with you all is not a meaningful reflection on my program, but on the High School Musical franchise. I will give you a brief life update, though, to preface my lighthearted thinkpiece about various pieces of musical comedy.

What has Aliza been up to? I started writing this entry in March, and the last few months have been such a chaotic melange that I’m only now getting to posting this. But of course, regardless of what I have in mind to do or not, the persistent thrum of daily life continues. Everyone seems to want to visit New York between March-June, so I’ve been racking up more nights on the couch than an estranged husband on the cusp of divorce. I’ve been meaning to make more time to paint, more time to read, more time to write, but sticking to an intellectually strict regimen has proven a little unrealistic. What can I say — I finally graduated from a two year program, so the party boy in me is coming out a little bit. Well…I don’t mean partying in the conventional sense; mostly I’ve just been playing video games and rewatching my favorite anime and movies. Oh, I’m getting ready to leave on a roadtrip! And many more exciting developments. But, at the time I first drafted this, I was pathetically sick after one too many nights at the club. This is what I had written:

I’m home sick today after staying out at the club past 6am on Saturday night (Sunday morning?). Technically I got home from the whole thing closer to 2pm, but who’s counting. The price of my degeneracy is both physical and academic encumberment, and the loose feeling that my consistent cycle of clubbing→illness falls under some kind of crime and punishment (somehow Justin never gets sick from it?) Yet, I refuse to learn. I refuse to learn from this!!! Is it a crime that I simply want to dance? I’m feeling an awful lot like Billy Elliot right now.

If you’re not familiar with Billy Elliot, it’s a musical from 2000 (later adapted into a Broadway musical in 2005) about a boy from a coal mining town who just wants to dance. Billy lost his mother as a child, and lives with his older brother and widowed father, both coal miners. The twist is that Billy loves ballet, which his father thinks is kind of sissy and gay, and is vehemently against Billy pursuing. The story is also set during the 1984-85 coal miner’s strike, which started in Northeastern England’s Yorkshire county. This setting is important because it gives our cast a sense of urgency: the union is clashing with the oppressive Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher, and harsh conditions for coal workers mean less experimental dance to go around for young Billy. We do get an absolute banger from this crisis though, the scathing diss track of Merry Christmas Margaret Thatcher, which I think sets a precedent we should all follow: union busters get what? Union busters get diss tracks.

Actually, if you’ve seen Zoolander (great movie), Derek Zoolander’s backstory is pretty much a one:one copy of Billy Elliot, except that instead of being a ballet dancer, he pursues being a male model. Derek’s family is also from New Jersey, which notably has no history of coal mining. Given that Zoolander was released in 2001 and Billy Elliot was released in 2000, I have to assume that the brief nod to Billy Elliot was added in at a later stage. In doing some fact checking for this blog post, I also ran across this production note in Zoolander’s Wikipedia article, which I have to share:

Before Billy Elliot or Zoolander, however, was the classic film Grease (1978), an absolute juggernaut in the field of musical romantic comedy. Frankly, there is no High School Musical without Grease. If you haven’t seen Grease, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m honestly feeling a little out of community with you right now and I might need some time to process these feelings. I will watch Grease with you, so let’s fix this. The tl;dr is that a prep girl and a greaser lad fall for each other, and both the external pressure of their social circles and their own sense of identity conflict with the easy chemistry they feel with one another. Finding common ground, they gradually change for one another, shake off the yoke of social expectations, and ride off happily into the sunset together. In an indication of the time that Grease was produced, it contrasts Billy Elliot, Zoolander, or High School Musical, in that the great subversion of masculinity that John Travolta’s character engages in is becoming a jock (rather than a model, dancer, or singer). I won’t go further on this, because I’m tired and sickly, but consider this quote from Grease’s Wikipedia page: “In 2020, Grease was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Need I say more? Well, maybe in 20 years High School Musical will enter the Library of Congress too.

For those not already familiar, High School Musical is a three movie Disney franchise which featured annual releases from 2006-20008. All three movies star Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens as star-crossed high school lovers in a kind of hybridized remake of Grease, with other tropes borrowed from classics like Romeo and Juliet and Billy Elliot.

Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens play Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, respectively, who meet over summer vacation and lean into an immediate attraction in the song Start of Something New (this is a musical series, remember?) Both think the end of summer vacation will see the end of their romance, but Gabriella ends up enrolling in Troy’s high school, and they are suddenly reunited! This is a direct callback to Grease, where Danny and Sandy have pretty much the same beginning to their relationship. Of course, despite their mutual excitement at seeing each other again, Troy and Gabriella now have to navigate budding romance within the framework of existing, complex social dynamics. We quickly see that Troy is the captain of the school’s basketball team, the star jock and quintessential popular boy of East High. Gabriella, being shown around by the principal, is gifted an absolute masterpiece of a line “I don’t want to be the school’s freaky genius girl again” which clues us into her archetype. When I tell you I laughed out loud. This movie series is the best, seriously.

The next song, “Get’cha Head in the Game” (pictured above), is Troy’s angsty song of the first High School Musical. He gets exactly one of these per movie, and in my opinion, they are always total bangers. I’m going to resist doing a play by play of every movie, because it would be extremely tedious for you all to read, and I have retained some semblance of empathy in my body despite losing most of everything else to outbound phlegm. If you haven’t seen the movies, you might be a little lost, but maybe this will motivate you to go check em out. If you’re into musical rom-coms, that is.

Something I want to acknowledge is that the funny thing about Troy and Gabriella’s immediate immersion into the musical theater world is that somehow, despite never really singing, dancing, or acting before, they are both instant prodigies at it. (This is further enforced when, in High School Musical 3, two scouts from Juilliard come to watch him perform. Wooooow...) This kind of undiscovered genius trope appears in Billy Elliot as well, where within a year of secret ballet classes Billy is determined to be Royal Ballet School material. For reference, most people train in ballet from childhood and train for close to a decade to reach a professional level. LOL

The tragedy, in the case of both movies, is not just that the main characters feel torn between what is expected of them and a new passion they have found, but that they are so damn good at what they want to do. (God forbid you have a passion that you suck at) It makes for a more fun story, though, and definitely helps expedite the plot that Troy and Gabriella are so explicitly caught between worlds, both of which want them. It helps streamline things also that Troy and Gabriella really could do both (or either) but it’s mostly the social expectations and their own senses of self that constrain them.

Ok, so now that I’ve set the stage, I’ll get into what I really think about these movies. I’m gonna break it down movie by movie, and then get into an overall view of the franchise, so obviously I’ll begin with the first High School Musical.

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL (The first one)

The charm of High School Musical is that it deals with issues that are actually quite salient to high schoolers, and synthesizes that drama with the artistic flair and satisfying narrative arc of a typical musical rom-com. Troy and Gabriella are an instantly iconic pair; they have great romantic chemistry, they encourage each other to try new things (healthy!), they’re both aces in their respective fields, and, most importantly, they sing great duets. For a rom-com, the strength of the main couple as a duo usually makes or breaks how enjoyable the movie is to watch, so there’s a plus for the franchise.

Narrative wise: most of the first High School Musical deals with the struggles of fitting in, expectations from your friends and family, chasing your dreams, embracing differences, and building community. It’s all very feel-good Disney value type stuff, but isn’t what we love about classic series like High School Musical or Naruto the kind of idealism and fantasy they offer? What’s life without a little aspiration?

The cast of characters is so archetypical that watching High School Musical in the year of 2024 makes all of the cliches kind of campy and enjoyable. Ryan and Sharpay, for example, have some great interactions as the over-the-top drama kid duo. Also, it’s Disney, so the production value is crazy, and honestly everything from the music to the choreography and the movie sets are incredibly well done. I would love to do a double feature of High School Musical followed by Emma Seligman’s Bottoms (2023). For anyone who’s seen both, Bottoms is clearly more of a direct nod to Superbad (2007) but there’s kind of a shared trope slurry among all of the films I’ve mentioned in this post thus far. (Sidenote, tvtropes.org is such an awesome website that I had forgotten about until now. Go ahead and look up your favorite series on there!)

It’s crazy how much other stuff I have to do right now, especially since I’m actively blowing off three applications I’m working on to be writing this right now. I yam what I yam.
…
Now for some brutal honesty: It pains me to say a single negative thing about HSM, but the truth must come out: some of the dialogue is downright awful, like, the interactions between these characters are often bereft of the content or diction which actual breathing humans (let alone high schoolers) would ever use in daily conversation. Sharpay is an exception to this, because her whole niche is being kind of insane and dramatic, as is the drama teacher Ms. Darbus. Anyone who has ever participated in high school musical theater knows that high school drama teachers are completely insane. (Is there some kind of hiring policy around this? And why do they all dress like that?) The quintessentially Disney-esque costume choices (the more shirts the better), camera work, and color editing don’t necessarily help the “character” quality that so many of the main cast take on. You can definitely tell it’s a Disney movie.

Also, there are obviously moments where this is enjoyable, but the one-dimensional tropes that some characters fall into can be a little bit grating at times. Kelsi, for example, who dresses like she runs a Doctor Who fan tumblr, kind of gets nerd-bullied by Sharpay until Troy and Gabriella step in to realize her artistic vision. Ryan, the incredibly gay-coded brother of Sharpay, is implied to be partially illiterate. Chad, the childhood best friend of Troy, is such a basketball-pilled literal chad that he carries a basketball around with him in every single scene (I haven’t fact checked this, but it feels true). The lack of depth in the characters and their dialogue is also accompanied by a kind of jumpy timeline (which, to be fair, typically accompanies musicals. Why plot when you can song?) As such, my main criticism for High School Musical is that it can feel surface-level in a way that makes it seem like the script was written as a dictation of a second-hand retelling of the story in a game of telephone.

Overall, however, I want to be clear that the universe, acting (casting), and soundtrack of High School Musical was good enough to keep people hooked on the franchise and generate sufficient hype for High School Musical 2, the crown jewel of the HSM series, which I will get into next. To close out my review of the first movie, here is my bop/flop list:

High School Musical Soundtrack Ranking:
1. Breaking Free - bop, it’s iconic. come on. sing along and tell me you don’t feel it
2. Get'cha Head in the Game - i just personally relate to this one. bop
3. Stick to the Status Quo
4. We’re All in This Together
(these two kind of switch places for me sometimes, but they’re both bops imo. I mean, they’re both the social cohesion songs, but from opposite perspectives, so that’s fun)
5. Start of Something New - i meannnn, it’s a solid song, the start of it all, but not personally very memorable. if i had to say though, bop
6. Bop to the Top - this might be completely controversial, and honestly I even think that this is a fun song and I have enjoyed it on many occasions, it just doesn’t do what it used to for me.
7. What I’ve Been Looking For + Reprise - I feel completely OK about both of these. I honestly could not care less. I am completely unmoved by the artistry in either direction.
8. When There Was Me and You - actually i weirdly kind of enjoy this song, but i do think it is unfortunately objectively a flop. but we love you Gabriella

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2

Now, High School Musical 2 is when the franchise really starts to hit its stride. The second movie establishes and realizes the potential of the series by deepening relationships between the characters, adding nuance to their characterization, and creating some narrative elaboration which gives us some absolute banger musical numbers (“I Don’t Dance”, “Bet On It”, and “Go My Own Way” are some of my personal favorites).

Given that the first High School Musical was set up to be it’s own complete story, it’s unsurprising that High School Musical 2 would have to gently retcon some character development from the first movie in order to continue pushing the narrative along while retaining a consistent main cast. In this case, Sharpay is back to trying to steal Troy from Gabriella after seemingly reconciled with her at the end of the first movie. This makes sense, of course. Why would you ever want to get rid of Ashley Tisdale? So we keep Sharpay on as the pre-eminent antagonist of HSM2. Of course, we must remember that these are all just high school students, so the most evil we see is a combination of worker exploitation, gross nepotism, and some catfights.

High School Musical 2 develops many characters and relationships further than the first movie, which is one of the great strengths of the franchise. While some franchises suffer from trying to stretch fixed source material over too many movies (The Hobbit film series, cough cough), or invent completely new content which undermines the original storyline and its characters (in my opinion, all of the Evangelion rebuilds) the High School Musical series manages to avert the franchise curse completely. I think this is for a combination of a few specific reasons: one, the lack of original source material makes it easier to expand and retcon the existing plot; two, the premise of a high school coming of age story is incredibly rich with content and potential drama; three, because the first movie was somewhat oversimplified, the subsequent expansion and addition to certain characters and dynamics made them significantly more rich and nuanced, resulting in a more likable and memorable main cast.

For example, characters which barely interacted with each other in the first movie now build new relationships and learn more about each other. The premise of HSM2 is the story of their summer vacation, which they all spend together working at Sharpay’s family’s country club, thus bringing them all into close contact.

High School Musical 2 evolves Ryan’s character from somewhat of an idiot (once again, the first movie implies he can barely read) to a naive but talented and underappreciated lover of musical theater, who merely follows along with his sister’s theatrics because of his belief in their strength as a singing/acting duo. This transition, I would argue, is what sets the stage for Ryan to become a bonafide main character in the third and final movie. Ryan plays kind of a big role in HSM2, so I’ll continue:

Certain plot developments drive Ryan to break with his sister and grow closer to the other Wildcats, especially with Gabriella. The breakthrough moment for this is the amazingly queer-coded musical number for “I Don’t Dance” in which he convinces Chad and the rest of the basketball squad to try musical theater by insisting you can be both good at sports and…the performing arts. The baseball metaphor is crazy (for those unfamiliar, pitcher/catcher is classic gay slang for top/bottom in relationships) and the kind of one:one dynamic Ryan and Chad have in this song is giving some seriously flirtatious rival chemistry. Also, having Ryan, the most gay-coded character in the entire series, convincing Chad that he should just try singing and dancing, is definitely giving some kind of something. I might be losing some of you here, and that’s ok. We’re on a walk together, not stuck in the same boat.

Chad and Gabriella also receive significantly more character development than they had in the first movie; we get a chance to expand on Chad’s longtime friendship with Troy, and the conflict which arises between the two of them becomes a huge wakeup call for the latter. We see more depth in Gabriella’s character as she proves herself to be a kind, mature, and sociable team player–not just a shy studyhound or the cookie-cutter girl next door character. She develops a closer relationship with her classmates, becoming pretty good friends with Ryan along the way too. (The funny thing about this is that while Troy seems somewhat annoyed by this, he’s never explicitly jealous of or threatened by Ryan. I can only imagine that it would just seem ludicrous given Ryan’s whole vibe. Cough. Gay) I really appreciate that Gabriella’s character isn’t just about Troy. She likes him a lot, for sure, but her down-to-earth + overachiever character is much more consistent in her desire to build something together with her classmates. She’s always moved around as a kid and never gotten to really become close to her peers—it makes sense that she would be as excited about her community as her romance with Troy.

She also handles Troy’s moral struggles and general flakiness with some real grace, and I honestly think that “Gotta Go My Own Way” is, once again, a banger. FTR, Vanessa Hudgens is literally acting her ass off in this music video. She has those tear ducts on LOCK. Give my girl a raise or something.

Ok, last thing I wanna cover for HSM2 is Troy’s storyline here. I just have to say that for all the realism it lacks in other dimensions, HSM2 keeps it pretty damn real with the kinds of struggles these kids are facing.

Financial troubles and class disparity actually play a pretty central role in High School Musical 2. (What, you didn’t think so?) So, despite the fact that Troy and Gabriella live in beautiful ranch-style mansions in the suburbs of Arizona, we the audience are meant to practice a suspension of disbelief and accept the premise that Troy is in a relatively vulnerable financial position. I mean, it’s also perfectly possible that his parents have most of their value in assets rather than liquidity. Either way, Troy makes it clear from the beginning of the movie that a basketball scholarship is a financial necessity, as is a reasonably well-paying summer job. He has a lot riding on his basketball career.

Sharpay, meanwhile, is obscenely wealthy and still obsessed with Troy. I know, I know. I’ve seen what God has done for others and I wonder when it will be my turn. Just kidding…haha… Sharpay leverages her connections with the University of Arizona basketball recruiters and the country club that Troy works at to dangle immense privilege and success in front of him. The price of that is basically just to hang out with her and act like her boyfriend. At the same time, this is a dehumanizing role that requires him to set aside his wants and feelings as a person; it’s fairly clear from dialogue in High School Musical and the outro of “Fabulous” that she just wants an accessory, and considers Troy the best option available. In any case, regardless of the frivolity of her intentions, the intensity and means to back it up is certainly there, and Sharpay succeeds in completely alienating Troy from his girlfriend and his friends. The plot arc with them is kind of The Devil Wears Prada coded, except that while Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway could probably deliver an amazing Sharpay Evans and Troy Bolton, I hesitate to claim the reverse. I’m sorry for even making the comparison, Meryl.

What’s so real about this subplot is how Troy is struggles to reconcile his position of need and the ease that Sharpay’s connections offer with the feelings of betrayal and neglect he’s engendering in his friend group. The ambiguity of his own culpability, and how understandable his situation actually is, make this plotline pretty engaging, actually. A first time viewer might be on the edge of their seat waiting to see how he resolves this conflict of interests, especially a viewer who has sympathy for Troy’s particular position and the limited tools a literal high schooler has to handle such a complicated situation.

I actually found it hard to be that mad at him, at least at first. Initially, as Sharpay drags Troy into various networking opportunities or lucrative gigs, he doesn’t exactly say yes, but he doesn’t exactly say no either. He isn’t friendly or obsequious, but he doesn’t exactly push her completely away or remove himself from the situation. We should keep in mind that he’s a 17/18 year old here being offered a lot of really nice stuff. I can forgive ambivalence and confusion in young people, but where I draw the line of accountability is in his behavior towards his friends; eventually they become invisible to him along with their own feelings and struggles. He becomes so absorbed in the world that Sharpay has created around him that he begins to treat his friends like a supporting cast rather than as equals. At one point this disparity is emphasized during a dinner at the country club, where Troy is being waited upon by his own friends, and rather dismissively sends back a dish which wasn’t made correctly. He treats his childhood best friend, Chad, like a complete stranger. Eventually, our heroine Gabriella has had enough, and in “Gotta Go My Own Way” (absolute banger) very maturely and respectfully explains (through song) that while there may be a chance for rekindling things in the future, at the moment their relationship is simply not what she had hoped it would be.

Troy is of course distraught at fumbling the bag, and realizes that he has not only been untrue to himself, but has lost what really matters to him in the process: his homies and his girl. He does what any self-respecting high school boy would do and fixes it through the power of song. I’m not going to lie, when they brought Gabriella back out (who was supposed to have left the club for good—she went her own way, remember?) to finish the duet of Everyday with Troy, some waterworks came out to play. The movie ends with this duet, which includes the lyrics “Every day of our lives, wanna find you there, wanna hold on tight” which is kind of giving happily ever after vibes. It gives the franchise a great place to leave off, and works quite well as an ending to Troy and Gabriella’s love story.

So, it’s amazing to me that High School Musical 3 manages to be an even better finale to the series. But first…

High School Musical 2 soundtrack ranking:

1. Bet On It - I love the angsty songs, I’m sorry. Get me a beer and put this on the TV and I will show you one of the best performances of your life. Juilliard material.

2. I Don’t Dance - The subtext and general vibe is just so good, plus catchy af.

3. Gotta Go My Own Way - Used to hate it but now I love. It’s just so camp.

4. Everyday - It’s got kind of neo-Christian vibes but I kind of love it I’m sorry?

5. Fabulous - I mean…I don’t know. It’s just classic? It does lack soul, though.

6. What Time Is It? - Plot device. I don’t know if I ever want to listen to this song.

7. You Are The Music In Me - Sharpay Version - kind of fun??? Sharpay’s vocal ticks really bothers me sometimes though.

8. You Are The Music In Me - calm down kids it’s not that deep okay

9. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a - hate me if you want but I find this song weirdly enchanting. It is maybe kind of problematic? I can’t really tell? Open to feedback…

10. All For One - I barely remember this song. It means nothing to me. That says it all.

11. Work This Out - it just doesn’t really hit for me. Something about the rhythm. But I respect the spirit of it, we love some constructive optimism.

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR

So, HSM2 is a hard act to follow, and the last installment of the franchise is frankly all over the place. The musical numbers are incredibly hit or miss, characters change their entire personalities for seemingly no reason, random new characters are introduced, and the entire movie is oddly super meta. That being said, High School Musical 3 was the ideal ending to the series. I couldn’t image it ending any other way. I cried, no lie.

Some overall inconsistencies/my complaints:

Characterization. The entire arcs of some characters are suddenly altered or rewritten for the sake of supporting plot developments in the third movie. For the third movie in a row, Sharpay starts out being kind of heinous, eventually learns an important moral lesson, and begrudgingly becomes a genuine ally to Troy and Gabriella. I appreciate that the writers at least bother to give reasons why Sharpay’s character “resets” every movie, but it does feel a little silly to have it happen twice after such sincere character growth arcs. She also randomly gets an assistant, who is British, which feels like an unnecessary detail. I don’t really need to be dealing with all that. Mrs. Darbus, meanwhile, does a 180 from being a barely sane, spiteful and prejudiced drama teacher to being a thoughtful and wise mentor who wants the best for all her students. I mean, the new characterizations fit into the plot and all, but it just didn’t feel as convincing.

I also understand the difficulty of going from HSM1→HSM2→HSM3 character development wise, because while 1 and 3 were both set in the school and employed similar character casts, HSM2 invents its own “summer break” setting and prevents meaningful character development for school-only characters like Darbus. For that reason, it makes sense why the changes in her character felt so dramatic; while the main cast had been through extensive character development by the third movie, HSM1 exclusive minor characters like Darbus didn’t really get a chance to catch up gradually.

Soundtrack: While HSM3 has some hit songs (for me, at least) and truly impressive musical numbers (like, broadway quality, movie within a movie level performances) a lot of the songs fall flat in a way that had me straight up zoning out in the middle of them. And not just because at that point I had already been watching High School Musical for like 6? hours. It’s fine, okay. Apparently I ended up watching the extended editions of all the movies, but frankly, if I hadn’t done at least that much I wouldn’t have considered myself in any position to write this substack for you all.

For fun, here’s most of a table that Wikipedia has of the soundtrack from HSM3. The notes section is what I found really funny to read:

Some of my favorites (which will become clear in my upcoming ranking of the soundtrack) are definitely Scream and Now or Never, because, I don’t know, I guess I tend to love the high BPM angsty songs. I yam what I yam… Songs which I thought were absolute flops were The Boys are Back and Can I Have This Dance. The former had amazing “dudes rock” energy but was so musically lackluster not even the zany junkyard setting and backstreet boys-esque choreography could save it. The latter, Can I Have This Dance, featured some genuinely impressive and high-effort dancing from mostly Vanessa Hudgens, but for that reason felt like more of an audition tape than a well-contextualized music number. My issues with both songs were that 1. I just did not find them very fun to listen to and 2. they felt somewhat shoehorned into the plotline, and made the movie feel more “busy” than nuanced/substantive.

Plot devices: The entire movie is split into two parts. There is a main plot, which takes place in the universe of the franchise and mainly centers dynamics between Troy and Gabriella, and the musical microcosm of the series. The main cast all decide to take part in a final spring musical to commemorate their time as East High Wildcats, and the musical ends up being about their time at East High. Veeeery meta. The meta plot device is a double edged sword, though, because while it seems kind of silly and overly complicated in some ways, it is also what ultimately allows High School Musical 3: Senior Year to become a completely unique and showstopping finale to the franchise.

So, as far as pros go, I have a lot of good things to say about this movie. The first thing I’ll say is that the character development of a select few members of the cast gets exponentially better. Kelsie (the songwriter) unfortunately remains mostly an accessory character, but she’s still pretty well-rounded and finally gets the recognition she deserves at the conclusion of the movie - huge win for the series, frankly. Ryan continues his arc of reverse-himbofication and takes an even more central role showcasing his talent, drive, and thoughtfulness as a choreographer. Unfortunately, Sharpay is condemned to the same character arc over and over again, and this movie doesn’t provide much novelty in that department. She’s still a great character though, if only by virtue of Ashley Tisdale’s absolutely charismatic performance skills. I mentioned this already, but the musical number for I Want It All is genuinely so outsized for the quality of the song itself. Its musical-within-a-movie vibe is on par with the I Wanna Be A Producer number from The Producers (2005) by Mel Brooks (songwise, however, HSM3 can’t even compete with the soundtrack from The Producers). Sidenote, if you like musicals and haven’t seen the 2005 version of The Producers then you simply ain’t living. I feel genuinely bad for you.

Speaking of production value, the performance sequence for Scream is also pretty good, and an excellent use of the resources available for a blockbuster Disney movie. The grand finale graduation songs are also pretty awesome, and the choreography (especially the marching band drills) is so well done that Angie and I were SHOOK.

Another huge pro: Troy and Gabriella’s relationship is somehow fleshed out even more. I truly think this is the biggest win of the High School Musical franchise, and probably what sets the series apart as a genuinely awesome trilogy for me. I’m not sure if it’s a happy accident or not, but by stretching out the HSM franchise into three movies with self-contained plotlines, the Disney writers were forced to pack so much content into the Troy and Gabriella relationship that they ended up incredibly well-developed and nuanced as a couple. That being said, there is also some thoughtful writing involved. By the third movie, it becomes clear that they know each other well enough to truly internalize each others’ needs and aspirations. This deep trust and familiarity allows them to ultimately navigate obstacles which would be pretty difficult for your average high school couple, like college. (e.g. Troy supports Gabriella in pursuing her dream of going to Stanford, even though it would force them apart)

That’s right, the main antagonist of HSM3 is none other than college admissions. For all of the challenges Troy and Gabreilla faced from the social pressures of their school’s rigid caste system, high school at least provided them with a significant overlap in their daily lives. Now, they gotta go their own way; hard to maintain a consistent relationship through all that change. They manage it though, because they’re our special main couple.

So, does Troy choose theater or basketball? Does Gabriella choose Stanford or Troy? And what happens to everyone else? Ultimately, without giving too much away, I’ll just say that the series manages to resolve the tensions and challenges of the main plot better than I had expected. As a proud alumnus, I also appreciated the shoutout to UC Berkeley (Zac Efron’s character ends up attending Cal). Go Bears ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

The movie waits until pretty much the last possible moment to sort things out, resolving and creating and resolving problems within a tightly packed, highly emotional 20ish minutes of song, dance, and action. The real climax is of course the graduation of the characters, which somewhat confusingly takes place onstage within the performance of their musical. It gets really meta. I will say though, this scene really did make me cry, because there’s a part when the main cast is all graduating, and each character gets a close up on the screen, and you can tell that they’ve stopped acting. The actors themselves are graduating from High School Musical, not just their characters, and you can see the emotion and sincerity on each of their faces. As a viewer, it made me feel like I was completing this journey with them and their characters, and I couldn’t think of a better way to conclude a series about being a highscooler, growing up, and eventually moving on.

Maybe it’s because I just graduated from a life as a student myself, but when the stage curtains gave way to the big school-wide graduation scene and we got to see all the actors celebrating their journey together with such a genuine closeness (watch the scene yourself and tell me if you can’t tell they’ve stopped acting and are just celebrating as themselves!) I really felt the waterworks come on. There’s something that really gets me about the bittersweet process of reflecting on and letting go of a long journey that changed you fundamentally. Woof.

We love resilience to weather a journey and still be yourself! We love vulnerability to go through an experience and change. We love the flexibility that allows one to synthesize both into a growth that is transformative and meaningful, even if it is neither painless nor easy. Man, I really did grow up on shonen anime.

I’ll end this section with a ranking of the soundtrack, like the first two movies. Sorry if I lacked in some hard-hitting analysis; I tried to prioritize.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year song ranking:

1. Scream - 10/10 sequence, angst, very catchy and fun. I love his tormented soul

2. Now or Never - Very shonen/sports kind of determined vibe, a bop methinks

3. We’re All in This Together (Graduation Mix) - IT IS A CLASSIC

4. High School Musical - I feel sentimental enough to love this one, in context mostly.

5. Right Here, Right Now - I don’t remember this, honestly

6. Just Wanna Be With You - I also don’t remember this one.

7. Walk Away - Also can’t remember this…

8. The Boys are Back - I remember this, and I wish I didn’t.

9. A Night to Remember - Ironically enough, I absolutely do not remember this

10. Senior Year Spring Musical - I literally have no memory of this entire thing.

11. Can I Have This Dance - I remember this, and I loathed it.

Well, that concludes my review of the High School Musical series. I think we all learned a lot. I think we all lived laughed and loved even more. I hope that every day is as magical for you as the day I spent watching all three of these movies in a row with Angie. For the record, she had never seen any of them, so it was an educational journey (a kind of field trip from home, if you will) and was actually really selfless of me and also pedagogically respectable. If you ask me why I took the extra step to write this all out, uh.

If you have any thoughts you can let me know here, there, anywhere. I have to stop this now so I can get up in the morning (when this will post!) to go pick up our rental car and go on our research/ROADTRIP! I’ll try to post regular updates on here for fun and general good bookkeeping. I also really need to wrap this up because my roommate of the week, Sasha, is really valiantly trying to sleep through all my typing.

I wish you all a lovely start to a week of some beautiful spring weather. Take care! <3

-Aliza

I have been laying low for a bit while sorting through the haze of post-thesis malaise that has lingered, along with the cold weather, for the last month. In the two weeks preceding our thesis exhibition, I spent about 12 hours a day in the Pfizer building studios rushing to make enough work for a show. I forgot about (i.e. pushed aside) most other things (vague) during this time; there is something kind of fun about having an excuse to push many of your thoughts and needs aside though, if anything just because it simplifies life for a little while. After the show finally went down (I was relieved to be done explaining the work to people, to be honest) the weather also started taking a meaningful turn towards spring and I realized I had a month until my graduation, so everything about my daily life felt unfamiliar and in need of restructuring. Going into this summer, I’m rebuilding my daily life from scratch.

Finishing a big project is fun for about a day afterwards and then it gets disorienting, unless you have something way better planned immediately afterwards (like a nice vacation?) The process of grinding away on an imminent project is fun in a specific kind of masochistic way that a lot of us might have become first acquainted with in high school or college. Having something really important you have to do is an awesome kind of stress, in the sense that it gives you a borrowed sense of purpose and legitimacy for the project’s duration. I’m sorry, I’m busy, I have a really important project to work on. Fun especially if you have friends and peers going through the same thing at the same time: we bond in the trenches. Who doesn’t love a setting conducive to social cohesion? The chance to build something together and support each other? Plus, sometimes the project itself is fun: building a set, making paintings, research and analysis, whatever it is that you’re doing, hopefully it’s something you enjoy.

Even the disgruntlement and exhaustion ends up being a shared experience, and there’s a specific kind of pleasure you get out of matching complaints with someone. It helps align your experiences in a comforting way, I think? Sharing positive experiences certainly also does this, but somehow complaints feel authentic and unfiltered in a way that I’ve noticed tends to bond people more strongly than shared positive experiences. Or maybe the catharsis of complaining is a positive experience in itself, and I’m working with too narrow a dichotomy of positive vs negative here.

Anyways, I don’t mean to go on about that. I’m just writing this as a quick update to mark my return to blogging after a brief hiatus, and as a way of documenting some quick life updates. As of writing this, Passover is a day away, my dear friends have their thesis exhibition going up in a week (April 29), my finals are in two weeks, and I will graduate from my MFA program in three weeks. I was sick for the last two weeks (perpetual cold) which I deserved and brought upon myself (going out clubbing with Justin two weekends in a row :P) but now I am better and ready to do a lot of things including all the things I was supposed to have been doing all semester. Oops.

In my substack drafts I currently have 4000 words of commentary and analysis of the High School Musical franchise and I am not done writing it yet. I’m going to post it soon because I am trying not to take life too seriously. I started a new painting yesterday and I think it’s just okay but I’m going to keep working on it because I have to figure out what kind of an artist I am, again, now that my show is down. Those are two things that I have been working on, in addition to a physically unpleasant amount of applications for jobs, residencies, grants, etc. I have so many tabs open right now…

I recently read two books that I thought were pretty damn good: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Coincidentally, both plotlines feature a grappling with the impact of colonization on a community, and on an individual’s psyche in being marginalized, dominated, and erased. They’re both pretty short and fluid reads, I highly recommend. I’m also in the middle of reading Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which is fascinating, hilarious, and extraordinarily well written, but also kind of a slog. I am very excited to talk about it, though, and will probably end up writing a stupidly long essay about it sometime soon. I’m hoping to finish it soon and maybe make some friends read it? Would you read it?? Can we talk about it???

I’ve realized that I make a lot of particular rules for myself around consuming and creating media; some of them make sense for the way my brain works, and some of them are so bizarre that I’ve had to force myself to shed them over the years in order to continue functioning as an artist. For example, I used to think that once I wrote or made art about a specific idea, I could never use that idea again (or image, if I had used certain reference material). Isn’t that funny? Where did I even get that? As if ideas were uno cards or something – maybe I grew up playing too many games.

Obviously now I realize that is ridiculous and prevents me from accessing depth and familiarity with subject matter that interests me – a key element of honing your creative or intellectual practice – but arbitrary ideas about originality and freshness plague the art world like a virus, and infected me for the first 20 years of my life.
The concept of making art in a void is strangely popular, but I feel that the need to be untethered from any influence (either in our own communities or in the greater timeline of art history) just ends up leading to a lot of erasure; there is a lot of context for this in the art world, which has historically exploited the creativity of marginalized groups while denying those voices relevance in institutional spaces or the art canon. Unfortunately, it is very profitable to build a cult of personality around an individual and treat an artist as a genius or a motif rather than a complex human being. (This worship of celebrity also helps people get away with scores of crudeness and abuse).

In contrast: when we contextualize our work among its influences, it opens up potential for interdisciplinary intelligibility and makes art more accessible. Such richness! Art doesn’t persist through some kind of prokaryotic binary fission; painting doesn’t necessarily beget painting and writing doesn’t necessarily beget writing. Siloing off our interests (or individuals) and expecting that they remain separate is a kind of taxonomy which I am not such a fan of. I may be a painter (officially, according to my degree), but sometimes the best thing I can do for my work is reading a book or doing some field research (i.e. looking at stuff and pondering it).

I've said that no man is an island and I’ll say it again; we are inspired by others, as we should be. The other day while painting I had the thought that I don’t like the kind of art that I make. I don’t know if that’s true or if I was just having a rough day in the studio, but I do think it’s kind of true – a lot of the art I gravitate towards is work that I could never make, and I don’t necessarily feel the need to make it. But I know I really love it, and my life and my practice is better for knowing and loving it. I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons from this MFA program, and at some point soon I will probably write a reflection about it, but I’m very grateful for the time I’ve had at Pratt over the last two years.

As I stare a future 9-5 lifestyle in the face, I realize I’ve been a student my whole life and things are about to really change. Nothing is permanent, though, and if I have to spend some of my 20s working a day job then so be it. Right now I feel that anything can happen. I’m trying to take nothing for granted. I’m trying to have patience and keep looking at the bigger picture. I’m scared, but I’m also feeling good about things.

Anyways, I’m probably just saying a bunch of stuff everyone already knows, but heyyyyyyyyy. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t want this to be so long, so let me close out with some fun updates. I recently received a research grant from Pratt to go on a two week research trip across the Northeast, so my friend Sasha is flying out from California and we’re road tripping at the end of May. It’s gonna be so sick.

Another exciting development is that I’ve started rewatching all of the Pokemon movies. Not all of them, just the good ones. Obviously I started with the first movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back (1998) - which was awesome. Honestly, it kind of made me think of Ghost in the Shell (1995), and if anyone else has recently seen both of this movies, maybe that comparison will be as funny to you as it was to me. This is the movie where Mewtwo turns Ash to stone and Pikachu starts crying. I started sobbing real bad when Pikachu started crying, which confused and concerned Angie. To be fair, I was also kind of confused, until I got my period the next day and I realized that hormones had perhaps played a small role in my experience of Pokemon pathos.

Oh, I also saw the Judee Sill documentary with Amanda recently. It was great to learn about a super talented musician I had previously been completely unfamiliar with, even though the cheesy animations really distracted me (seriously, where do they find these people? I know so many talented animators). Angie and I also got kind of addicted to this K-Drama called Her Private Life, even though we normally don’t like K-Dramas. It’s about a high-powered curator at a fancy art museum who has to hide the fact she’s a K-Pop superfan from her boss, who is an egoistic but misunderstood art-world superstar with a difficult past. It’s pretty funny in a campy way. Lots of filters.

Other updates: I’m working on getting a job, getting a studio, and getting an apartment. There’s too much to do (in a good way) and I’m getting kind of spoiled for choice here. The unfortunate thing is that I’ve had to prolong my hiatus from gaming in order to maintain a lifestyle that is at all relevant to the world around me, but I generally believe things happen when they are meant to. Someday, Elden Ring…
At least the weather is good enough to get back into running! Which also means I get to show off the new thigh tat ;-) It’s really fucking sick, btw. It’s a dragon-beast thing.

I have a lot of other fun tidbits to share, but I kind of feel like ending this here, so I’ll write something more thoughtful and well-structured next time. Like I said, I like trying to keep the pressure for this blog kind of low.

I hope you all are taking good care of yourself and having lots of fun (or an appropriate amount for the demands of your current lifestyle?) I hope you are not being too hard on yourself, are getting enough rest, and are generally taking care of numero uno. I hope you had a great 4/20 (if you observe) and if you’re participating in protests, I’m hoping you stay safe and sending all my strength and solidarity. For all of those in a transition period (like me) I am wishing you the absolute best and sending love. As always, don’t be a stranger!

That’s it for my all over the place ramblings, for now. More soon! Maybe about High School Musical? Byeeeeeee!!!

P.S. I forgot something really important I wanted to talk about. Hopefully I can get some public opinion on this, because I’ve been having a hard time working through it on my own. The other day, Amanda and I were discussing what a DND alignment chart of different bookmarks would look like and I realized that I have used a lot of different stuff as bookmarks. Here’s the list of what I could remember off the top of my head:

-cardstock bookmark (free from the bookstore)
-a metal sewing pin
-a small (1 inch) piece of paper
-a plastic sticker sheet
-my court summons from being arrested
-a parking ticket from Boston
-a cashed check
-a napkin (tissue, toilet paper, etc. too)
-a sock
-cloth scrap (from sewing project)
-a ripped off piece of a paper container for midol
-someone’s business card
-a postcard
-a grocery receipt
-a string
-a pencil
-the cardboard top of a tissue box
-a few pages of my notes from a class, folded in half

and here are some other options that I’ve never done but which should be considered:

-a fancy bookmark (like one you buy)
-folding the corner (classic dogear)

and of course, the timeless classic:

-just remembering the page you were on

Bonus (I’ve done all of these, actually):
-writing the page # in your notes app
-checking for where you stopped underlining/highlighting
-remembering the CHAPTER you were on, and just starting at that chapter

If you had to categorize these in a standard DND alignment chart, where would you put them?? Answers accepted below and privately if you’re shy. Chart for reference:

Okay, now that’s it for real. I’m going to bed. Sleep tight!

TL;DR on some life bits: had to cancel my Miami trip, but it was for the best. Finalized my student loans (yowch). Decided to try to make ANOTHER painting before my thesis so I can send an extra piece to the show in Portland (now we are trying to fit 3 new paintings in 15 days, LFG) and I am so excited for spring break this week. I’m…gonna be in the studio every day, but luckily I’ve caught the painting bug and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I’ll still make time to enjoy the weather, and I can’t wait to sleep 500 hours every night.

Queering ecology

So, lately I’ve become fixated on a few trendy subjects: Taxonomy (identification, division, and sorting) ecology (apparently, mushrooms may have a vocabulary of up to 50 words) and narrative (myths, folklore, religion, history, etc.) Surprise surprise, the person who built their own custom comic book shelf is into stories. Anyways, I think all of these things actually overlap in salient ways.

Are you curious? Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate.

The other day I was having a discussion with my thesis advisor about the artwork I’ve been making. I had a good critique a while back and somehow stumbled upon a term I’d been keeping close to my chest: queer ecology. It’s a phrase that sounds temptingly aesthetic; phrases like “queering” can at times be over-enthusiastically applied and risk becoming boilerplate. My advisor shared an anecdote about a former student using the phrase “queer failure” in their Public Critique (apparently it ended up being a very interesting concept). But what makes queer failure different from…straight failure? What does it mean to queer ecology?

To reject the norms and categories of society is inherent to queerness as we understand it. After all, to be “queer” originally meant to be strange, or odd. The term came into use as derogatory slang for homosexuals in the 19th century, and since then we (as a community) have reclaimed and repurposed queer to be a more inclusive term for anything or anyone that is…not the norm, as far as expressions of gender and sexuality in mainstream society.

Queerness as a concept has its origins in subversion, but the inversion of typical rules and the transgression of typical boundaries are actually fundamental to scientific progress; such subversions reveal to us our existing perspective’s inability to account for all of reality. As such, there are many overlapping frameworks for trans-ness and ecology. The hybrid existences we encounter in reality subvert such expectations of naturalness or purity that we have canonized in an attempt to canonize traditional narratives about what life on earth must look like. The concept of crossing boundaries – to transgress – is predicated on the belief in the reality of those boundaries in the first place.

What I am hoping to suggest is that perhaps, the divisions which we have taken for granted can mislead us. We use stories to understand the world – stories are beautiful, and are helpful – but we cannot forget that stories are ultimately only an interpretation of things, and not truth. For example, mushrooms used to be categorized as plants. Now we understand they are not, but classification of mushrooms remains controversial, and we largely consider them to be a category of their own. What is plant versus animal? Human versus nonhuman? Where does nature end, and we begin?

What does it mean to be alive, vs inanimate?
For example, are plants objects, or creatures? VOTE NOW!

On stories

In the context of American cultural norms, our concept of humanity is grounded in a religious narrative which extols male/female binaries and subsequent hierarchies, and we consider this humanity to be the product of intelligent, divine design. So, to subvert that design would be a misalignment with human nature – a failure. To “queer” human nature, then, would be to subvert humanity and embrace monstrosity. If you’re adhering to a specific narrative of humanity, (according to whichever God or science) that is. That intersection of purity and intelligibility becomes the moral grounds for systems of taxonomy. Taxonomy offers relief from chaos. It offers the possibility of truth. Truth is reassuring, but incredibly elusive, and at the end of the day all we have are the senses we are born with and our best attempts at reason.

Good or bad, desirable or undesirable. A narrative structure (such as religion) creates a framework for sorting and choosing, just as our biological needs do. I had a discussion recently with my housemate Angie about how the performance of gender in our society often seems to be considered a moral imperative. To be a strong man or a good mother is a matter of satisfying a moral aesthetic. To paraphrase an idea from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (which I briefly mentioned in my February substack) to satisfy one’s gender role is to fit into society, become intelligible, and remain functional. I have been thinking about how to deny taxonomy feels like denying availability to institutional norms. To be unavailable can be freeing and isolating.

A society might ask: is your expression of self intelligible to us and our systems? Who does it include or alienate? Do you participate in our collective story about who we are? These questions are not good or bad. If anything, such questions are always valuable to reflect on. But the question I am most interested in is this: What stories do you tell yourself about who you are or want to be? Why do you gravitate towards those stories?

Perhaps some of my readers will recognize the feeling of going to a souvenir shop and never seeing your name on all the little keychains. Or scrolling through a list of check-box options on an application list and not finding a demographic label that is accurate to yourself. Those moments are when you realize that a “place” for you in the world is not a given, even as you exist, living and breathing, in that very moment. That’s when you realize, maybe, that to exist and to be recognized are two different things. So when we decide to remain unrecognizable, we forgo ease or convenience navigating these institutions and bureaucracies, but we also find a freedom in transgressing these boundaries, and existing beyond standardization. To be special, complex, or undefined can render one vulnerable or invisible as well.

Law is a story, too – a legal framework records the mores and culture of a specific society, and it is both conservative and aspirational. When people say that breaking the law is the evil, it may be because it “threatens society” and indeed, there is a reason law exists. I do not think the law is evil, but I do think it is subjective, and if the law is not reflecting the needs and beliefs of the people, the law should be changed. From a Lockean perspective, law is a product of reason, reason a gift of God, and the only framework which tempers the nasty impulses of human animality into the cultured harmony of a civil society. But law is composed from human reason, and reason evolves. If we neglect the necessary dialogue of law and society, a flawed nostalgia (and conservatism) leads us to prioritize a legal code over the people it is meant to describe.

So when I talk about narratives shaping our world, I mean that the stories we tell ourselves (or each other) about how the world is or should be become our map for navigating it (the world). Science and history are no exception to narrativization; everything demands to be contextualized.

What is a food chain? The apex predator is the master of the hierarchy because of its teeth and claws, even as the only certainty in nature is not predation but death. The decomposers are at the bottom, the scrap-cleaners, even as they support entire new networks of new life. To me, the organization of the food chain places a clear priority on what happens in the brief window of conscious life, but much happens in between death and birth too. If decomposition was more relevant to our narrative, we might see nature as the cycle it is rather than a top-down hierarchy (and of course, there are many scientific frameworks for this approach as well, though they are less mainstream).

On human identity

We have relied on a certain framework to define humanity: our intelligence, compassion, creativity, use of language, divine design, self-awareness, etc. My framework for expanding this project (of creating the human) relies on confronting subjectivity. We use narratives to contextualize and understand information, but it is important that we keep in mind the subjectivity of these narratives. More than just our genetic or physical differences, being human is an identity; it’s a mission.

What is the nature of that identity that makes it any different from another category of animal? To use an art metaphor, we don’t understand what makes writing different from painting until we try to communicate something similar through both mediums. Then we are more aware of the subjectivity of each language, and develop a better understanding of both what writing is and what painting is. I am curious about a re-negotiation of humanity that follows a similar framework. What are the possibilities for what it looks like to experience humanity? I wish to question some of the parameters for humanity which we have taken for granted, and maybe to better understand what it really means to be human, nonhuman, natural, or unnatural.

To be human is to become part of a hierarchy. Terms like “humanity” “inhumane” and “subhuman” all reference that hierarchy, and we use these terms in our daily lives. In popular culture, to be human is to be above animal and under God — always aspiring towards a perfection, despite humanity being somewhat synonymous with imperfection. Still, to be human affords us a certain dignity, privilege, mission. When the conditions for humanity are not satisfied, one is thrust into abjection.

In a queer context, for example, the queer and trans communities most commonly encounter accusations of being “unnatural.” (Despite frequent evidence in nature of homosexuality and gender fluidity). So, the subversion of humanity renders the queer to be less-than, an abomination. We exit the hierarchy and lose its protection; we become marginalized. This is what hierarchy threatens. To queer ecology, to me, is to flip the power dynamic. Rather than taxonomy labeling us the “queer” and marginalizing us, we must transgress the boundaries of existing taxonomy, push its limitations, and revolutionize it.

Figuring out humanity is important. What are we? Is that different from asking who are we? So many of the classifications and distinctions we make are predicated on an idea of what humanity fundamentally is and has to be (cosmic purpose?) Often, we are first a who, then a what; when the order is switched, what does that mean? As we enter personhood, hierarchy, humanity, we sacrifice the nonsensical monstrosity of creaturehood –– but what does that even mean? What do we lose? What do we gain? And who or what will be privileged by this transaction? I’m not sure about the answers to a lot of these questions, but I’m hoping this thesis can begin that exploration of what is at stake in constructing humanity.

Paper begins below:

INTRO: Kinds of the Natural

Humanity is much more than a scientific classification, or one specific type of creature: human identity somehow both moors us in and separates us from the natural. When Plato declared man a “featherless biped” and Diogenes presented him with a plucked chicken, it was a swing and a miss in the construction project of human identity. To me, the featherless biped hypothesis represents a re-negotiation of humanity’s creaturehood. It was no longer satisfactory to say we are human rather than animal, but to figure out what a human is relative to any other animal, beyond purely superficial differences.

Roots belong to people as well as trees. Despite all the differences we perceive between ourselves, as humans, and the supposedly less animate flora of the earth, we all possess elements of nature. Perhaps we don’t have physical roots, like a plant may, but we have bodies which root us to this earth. Memories which root us to our sense of self. Our shared nature is our circumstance, in being here together on Earth. Surely that must mean humanity is natural, yet, the things we make are artificial, or man-made. Perhaps then it’s only certain materials which are artificial, but materials like plastic, metal, and styrofoam are also made from what is available on Earth. So, when does nature end and something else begin? Does something cease to be natural just because it might outlast its usefulness to humans, like the mountains of plastic littering our oceans and buried in our landfills?

Nature, conceptually, is an incredibly nebulous topic. Although in contemporary, mainstream American culture the word nature might conjure images of trees and streams, the term nature seems to be more of a placeholder concept, redefined at will to serve as a foil in discussions about other similarly nebulous topics like society, identity, culture, and divinity. 

The most common perception of nature is as a foil to humanity. This nature is environmental: it includes the natural world and humanity, but excludes that which “mankind has shaped” such as art, technology, or religion. In an even broader sense, nature is the concept of totality, or cosmos: a universe which includes everything within it. This nature includes “man and man’s artifacts” and describes a world bound by natural law. The natural in this sense can then only be contrasted with the supernatural, rather than the artificial. To understand this nature requires an observation and account of things which exist in the world, an approach we commonly see in the realm of scientific study. In The Idea of Nature by R.J. Collingwood, this is one of two concepts of nature, concerned with the totality of things. It is often seen in Modern European culture. The second concept is the Pre-Socratic concept of nature as genesis, or the origin of things. In this view, nature is not that which contains things but that which constitutes things. According to Collingwood, “the word "Nature" refers to something which makes its possessor behave as it does” and therefore describes an innate, inalienable quality (or qualities).1 

Thus far we have three different constructions of nature: Nature as a set of conditions, namely the law of nature (physis), Nature as inherent characteristics or traits (genesis) and Nature as a physical space or totality (cosmos). Nature as physis frames Nature as ontological, unified in principle, and existing in substance or matter. This is in contrast to cosmos, which describes Nature as a physical space, and genesis, which views nature as descriptive or characteristic. As physis, something experiential substantiates Nature as something based in sensory experience rather than abstract existentialism.

 The way my community back home in California’s Bay Area understood it, nature was environmental: tall redwood trees, tidepools and elephant seals, fields of wildflowers. Nature was a presence which surrounded us, both competing and integrating with the sprawling suburbia of my hometown and the aggressive construction projects demanded by the growing tech industry. This is the view of nature I am most familiar with, and Silicon Valley might be the most famous example of this oppositional framing of nature and technology. There is a stark contrast between the newly-constructed office buildings which host some of the highest paying tech jobs in the nation, and the nearby redwood forests, scenic beaches, hiking trails, and fresh produce which make California such an appealing place for the rich to settle. 

So, why does it matter how we perceive nature? And additionally, when a term can mean something different to anyone who uses it, what possibility is there for meaningful discourse around that concept? From a humanist perspecive, our relationship with nature matters because constructing nature shapes how we understand our identity of humans. To that end, the appropriation of naturalness has significant consequences for how we come to know ourselves. If we were to de-center the anthropocene, however, this interrogation of the “natural” becomes a necessary condition to destabilizing existing hierarchies of domination and exploitation.

NATURALNESS AND HIERARCHY

Conceptions of the natural and humanity’s relationship to nature are incredibly diverse and varied among cultures and time periods. Now, however, globalization and late-stage capitalism have made it uniquely possible in this day and age to describe such a thing as a global norm. The activities of a relatively small percentage of companies and states enjoy profound influence over the vast majority of the globe, as the economies of some multinational corporations eclipse those of multiple countries.2 The evolution of trade and technology have undoubtedly enabled an unprecedented spread of culture and information. Even before social media, however, the aggressive exportation of the United States through our culture and military have made American norms, products, and interests globally pervasive. The USA is ubiquitous, and not as a matter of cultural unity, but as a material consequence which is felt in our overseas bases, our global markets and outsourced manufacturing, our weapons trade, our foreign aid, and our engagements in diplomacy and global leadership. 

The devaluation of nature now is a fact rather than an ideology, the impacts of which are felt most immediately by those most vulnerable to its long-term consequences. Island nations, which make up less than 0.03% of carbon emissions, are most endangered by rising sea levels.3 Industrial plants and polluters often follow the “path of least resistance” in locating their operations, which disproportionately affect working class communities and communities of color.4 Within America, the oil industry has successfully ingratiated itself with representatives and legislators to protect short-term profits over economic and environmental sustainability.5 Unsurprisingly, the United States is a leader of greenhouse gas emissions globally, coming second only to China in total emissions.6 Interestingly, however, the United States almost doubles Chinese CO2 emissions when considered per capita.78 Outside of America, industrialization has asymmetrically impacted global communities according to hierarchies of power determined in the ages of colonialism and imperialism. The original British model of industrialization has spread globally through both direct colonization (e.g. US, Taiwan, India) and the intentional incitement of competition in those countries (many of which are former subjects of imperialism, such as India) who wish to enjoy a “seat at the table”.9 The United States has intentionally incentivized the adoption of neoliberal reforms in other countries through military intervention and international policy.10 As a result, the way we as a species interact with nature is profoundly influenced by American cultural attitudes about ego, civilization, and the natural world: both our economic relationship to nature as a resource and environment, but also our pathology of consumption and entitlement in the world. This realization of American ubiquity necessitates a deeper investigation of the American identity and worldview which has so forcefully asserted itself in our global society.

One of the foundational influences of American political identity is John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government laid a clear political and ideological framework for understanding government, society, and life itself. The Constitution, the skeleton of the modern United States of America, is a piece of statecraft which forms the legal scaffolding for our entire system of law and government. Fundamental and inalienable under the fifth amendment of the Bill of Rights–except for those convicted of a crime–is an entitlement to one’s own “life, liberty, [and] property.”11 These three principles are distinctly Lockean, and grounded in Locke’s use of Christian faith to contextualize both nature and society. At a time when political philosophers were aggressively grappling with the system of monarchy, Locke asserted that the proper society is governed by the intelligent and logical reasoning of men rather than by a divine right of kings. Locke’s rejection of monarchy and embrace of representative democracy was grounded in a more progressive theology, but theology nonetheless: in his Second Treatise on Government, Locke asserts that there is no credible claim on Earth of a divine inheritance (whether through descent from Adam or other divine mandates) as all men are created equal and thus possess the same access to reason. Therefore, the only credible form of government is one founded in human reason, which Locke considers to be the singular and inalienable law of nature, and a gift of God.12 

Locke establishes an incredibly consequential dynamic between Nature, God, and Society through concepts of ownership. To Locke, humans are the “workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker - all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business” meaning that human purpose on Earth is defined by the divine will. Why is this? According to Locke, “they are his property whose workmanship they are.” Meaning, to make something is to own something, whether that includes a living being or an inanimate object. To fully understand the implication of this statement, we must define what the process of creation is – what does it mean to make something? Ownership, for Locke, is all about value, which Locke ties directly to labor. We can examine the following excerpt from his Second Treatise on Government: 

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

From this paragraph, we can make several conclusions about the relationship Locke has constructed between Humanity, Nature, and God. One, Locke is asserting a hierarchy which places various flora, fauna, and the earth itself below man, existing as a resource “common to all” and essentially, free for human beings to use. Locke has already established God above Man, and so the existing hierarchy we are left with is God>Man>Nature. 

There of course is a discrepancy in that man and nature are both the creation of God, and man is subject to natural law, so it seems difficult to place man or nature on separate rungs of a hierarchy of authority or power. What enables man to supersede nature, despite being natural himself, is the narrative significance borrowed from the theological. This reasoning consequentially highlights both the significance of narrative in defining the anthropocene and the role Christian theology plays in American political philosophy and economic praxis.

The ideological footprint of Old and New Testament narrative frameworks in American governance has prompted critical discourse around theology within the environmental movement. In 1967, Lynn White wrote an essay called The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis which claimed that the Christian orientation away from Paganism, which originates from the Jewish rejection of idolatry and polytheism, shifted human reverence away from nature and into a singular anthropomorphized deity. White goes on to argue that “by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” Although I would challenge the generality with which White claims that “our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes towards man’s relation to nature” I agree that these attitudes have profoundly impacted the application of science and technology, even among those who consider themselves post-Christian, or more broadly, post-religion. White highlights the contradiction of our collective scientific knowledge with our attitude as a species:

Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim…More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

White’s solution to the environmental crisis of Christian theology is to propose a non-hierarchical structure of life. Whether this is sourced from within Christian theology or is irrelevant, just as White considers it irrelevant whether our current dominant ideals are considered as Christian or not. The important step is that our existing set of values are replaced by a more equitable and sustainable culture. One of the many challenges of replacing our existing norms is that they continue to transmute into other ideologies. Unfortunately for White (and arguably, the rest of us) the idea of natural entitlement previously rooted in Abrahamic narrative has evolved into the comparatively secular, scientific theories of growth and modernization. We have found a new religion, as White prescribed, but it appears that we have only managed to substitute a fixation on religious and territorial conquest with the accumulation of capital and the dominance of markets. Although causal associations similar to White’s have been drawn between Christian/Jewish religion and capitalism (notably, Max Weber’s thesis on Protestant work ethic and capitalist culture) I believe the political integration of these ideologies to be equally significant from a historical perspective.

MODERNITY, CAPITALISM, AND THE NATURE/SOCIAL DICHOTOMY

Capitalism became deeply associated with Christian morality during the Cold War era, with great consequences for environmental and humanitarian concerns. President Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire Speech” framed the conflict with the Soviet Union as a clashing of Good versus Evil: specifically, the Christian values and capitalist system of the United States versus the secular communism of the Soviet Union. In his speech, Reagan claimed that death as a faithful Christian would be preferable to life in an atheist communist society. The result of the Cold War conflict did indeed take many lives: the many proxy wars between the US and Soviet Union left deep scars of war and division across the globe, including the partition of states, the upheaval of regimes, and full-scale invasions like the infamous Vietnam War. Many consequences of these conflicts, such as the partition of North and South Korea along the 38th parallel, have remained permanently influential on global and regional geopolitics. Yet, contemporaneous rhetoric legitimized this struggle for global hegemony and influence as an ideological battle rather than a primarily geopolitical struggle.By categorically associating capitalism with Christian values, this rhetoric effectively attributed a moral superiority to the economic system of capitalism.

I would argue that in the new era of globalization, the proselytization of economic theory has replaced that of religion. Just as corporations have grown to rival states as dominant actors in the global realm, a new framework of imperialism has replaced the expansion of the state with the expansion of markets and neoliberal reforms. The Cold War was a key transition point in this development. In the post-WWII era, international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) used conditional aid to reinforce a neoliberal trade regime on a global scale, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of Western institutions and the United States as a global leader. By framing a specific political or economic order as more advanced than another, we enforce a dichotomy of modernity/antiquity which establishes modern systems as superior and antiquated systems as obsolete. The rhetoric of science and technology also inform this mythos of a linear progression towards truth. If scientific discovery brings us closer to knowledge, and technological advancement brings us closer to power, then surely humanity is moving ever further from a state of nature into a state of modernity. Furthermore, by attaching a moral or ethical superiority to a specific concept of modernity, we problematize the primitive or archaic.

Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern links modernity to the construction of a new regime, an acceleration of science and human welfare in contrast to an “archaic and stable past.”What else do North and South Korea, or did East and West Berlin represent to the American world order, except the juxtaposition of a backwards antiquity with the cosmopolitan modern? The victory of capitalism and the West over socialism in the Cold War promised to accelerate the global community into modernism, into the future. Latour, however, frames the fall of the Berlin wall as a pyrrhic victory for capitalists:

The perfect symmetry between the dismantling of the wall of shame and the end of limitless Nature is invisible only to the rich Western democracies. The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty. Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve both their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it has escaped both problems and believes it has lessons for others even as it leaves the Earth and its people to die. The West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything.

Latour critiques the promises of capitalism to both liberate and modernize global societies as having failed twofold: “By seeking to reorient man's exploitation of man toward an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure…the multitudes that were supposed to be saved from death fall back into poverty by the hundreds of millions; nature, over which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global fashion, and threatens us all.” The only way to sustain a system of constant expansion, production, and consumption is to form a base of extraction. While antiquated systems relied on power hierarchies to exploit peoples through slavery and serfdom, the capitalist model simply builds a wall around external costs. It is here, too, that science undermines its own claims at objectivity. Latour claims that modernity has failed to eliminate destruction or exploitation. Therefore while White believes that science and technology alone are not enough to bring human culture into modernity, Latour is not convinced of the promise of modernity itself. And, if modernity in itself is an impossibility–a hoax–what legitimation can there be for the acts of violence and exploitation committed in pursuit of it?

We have not entered into modernity, claims Latour, because it may never have existed. Although our technological advancements and social constructions have brought us out of the nasty, brutish state of nature in Hobbes’ Leviathan, we have not fully conquered the threat of chaos. Even as humanity expands the reach of our influence to the very stars, we can barely keep threats of hunger, illness, and injury at bay down here on Earth. In Jewish theology, the act of divine creation created order from chaos. In this order there is an inherent hierarchy: the distinction of nature from man, and man’s subsequent dominion over nature.  Latour believes that the nature/society distinction is inherently flawed, and invalidates the promises of social order–the Leviathan–to liberate us from a state of nature. According to Latour, modernity is propped up by a Constitution, a codification much like any legal document which seeks to digest and organize lived experience to create a sense of order from chaos. This involves the dual processes of “purification” and “translation” which exist separately. Purification refers to the creation of two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Translation creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. Taxonomy through purification forces hybridization; the concept of monsters must be invented to account for existences which don’t fit into separated, purified forms, but exist nonetheless.

As industry and society develop, the monsters proliferate. Latour maintains that because the majority of objects we encounter are hybrids, it is impossible to continue separating these processes of purification and translation. His hypothesis is that “we are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially.” What does it mean to have monsters in your society? Despite a cultural fixation on naturalism, we must acknowledge that we are all of us mixtures and hybrids of nature and society already. Technology proliferates our daily lives, and what we consider “unnatural” technology is simply a matter of where we draw the line historically. Is the wheelbarrow any more of a departure from nature than the automobile, and if so, how? Is it the process of chemical combustion that turns the automobile engine into a deviation from nature rather than a part of it? Ultimately, the determination of natural becomes dependent on narrativization. Modernity always invokes in some way the passage of time — the “an acceleration… rupture,...revolution in time” and Latour defines modernity in contrast to “an archaic and stable past.” Construction of history assigns a narrative to time which creates winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. We view the past as something fossilized and inert, a scaffolding on which the present accelerates into modernity. The wheelbarrow is old and antiquated because it is obsolete, regardless of when it is actually made or used. The car is modern because our sense of aesthetics say it is. 

What if the past was as fluid as the present and future? What if continuity is something that is a continuous work in progress? Our ideas of what is contemporary are pretty subjective to certain cultural biases, and any moment has the power to move us backwards or forwards in time.

That was this week's installment! Next week (loosely) I will upload part TWO of my thesis. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to leave any questions or comments <3 For hatemail, you can send it directly to aekatzman@gmail.com.

Citations below:

This week I’m structuring my post less around a centralized theme or text and just sharing some random tidbits. I think part of the fun of a blog is being able to experiment with it how you’d like, and I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into a specific kind of content. For that reason, this post is a lot less curated, organized, and thoughtfully constructed than usual. Normally I love writing with you guys in mind as well as for myself, but I think I’d like to get more comfortable with just writing for myself sometimes to keep it low-stakes. Also, pretty soon I’m going to begin sharing excerpts from my thesis paper, so I want to break up the coming onslaught of citations with some random shit from my life. Enjoy this random dump, or don’t! Love ya anyways.

~Interpersonal relations corner~

Last night, scandal overtook my household as Angie and Justin informed me that I had actually been the villain in a certain situation. I learned a few things from that conversation that I should know in theory but often fail in practice. I am now going to regurgitate these ideas to you all, in a less-than-brief manner, as you may have come to know me for by now. Pardon me for being so matter-of-fact about all of this—let me know your thoughts too, even if you disagree!

things I learned from Justin and Angie last night about communicating:

1. Make people feel like you want them around if you do! Apparently, if you like someone and like spending time with them, saying something like “you can stay over if you want to, whatever is cool” is not good. I know, I was also like, but that’s totally chill? But then my housemates reframed it for me: If someone invited you to something by saying, “well, you can come to my birthday party if you want to” then maybe you would wonder if they were just being polite. Maybe you would be confused and not sure how to act. It would be better to just say “I would love it if you came to my birthday party” if you mean it. At first I thought: what, I’m just gonna tell someone to hang out with me like some fascist dictator? But actually, other people are adults and telling them you want them around is not the same as telling them what to do. I love it when people ask me to hang out, actually. Cool, cool.
   

   So, my takeaway number one is that if you are sincere about something, then you should be straightforward about it, and make the other person feel wanted. I guess that “I want you to stay over if you want to stay over” is just a shittier way of saying “I’d love for you to stay over.” People can just say no, if they are adults. No more days of obfuscation and oscillating remarks like “Well, I’m good with whatever” if you actually have an opinion, Aliza. We are in the big leagues now.
   

2. When gathering information, be open minded and ask open-ended questions. When seeking reassurance from someone else, probing questions that assume how they feel already are not as sincere: you are presenting someone with your insecurities and asking them to disprove them. Maybe instead, keep an open mind and let them tell you how they feel instead of asserting your assumptions and insecurities as fact. It’s more respectful to their autonomy and allows them to speak for themselves without immediately putting them in a position to react to a premise you’ve invented. That means: “How do you feel about how much we’re hanging out?” is a better alternative to “Am I bothering you by asking you to hang out too much?” At the core of all of this is being able to trust someone to be honest and able to advocate for themselves and their own needs. If you can’t do that, there may be other issues to resolve!
   

3. Conversely, if you are trying to tell someone how you feel, don’t open with indirect questioning. “Do you feel okay about what happened?” Is not the right way to express “I’m not feeling good about what happened.” For one thing, if someone is taking you at face value and assumes that you are checking in with them about their feelings (rather than trying to process your own feelings) you are setting yourselves up to have two different conversations with each other. They are having a conversation about their feelings while you are trying to have a conversation about your feelings. Woah woah woah there. Let’s just be upfront about what we want. Maybe that’s the theme here. I’m sorry, guys. Maybe it’s because I’m a child of divorce that I play diplomat too often? Divorce card :P
   

4. Last takeaway from my human lessons with the housemates is that trying to be a part of people’s lives is not a burden, or an aggression, or an imposition. Of course you need to respect people’s space, be courteous, use common sense. But people mingle, we take up space in each others lives. It’s what we do.
   I have to remember that passivity does not make you blameless. Perhaps I err on the side of caution and avoidance because I’m scared to be too much, but part of respecting the integrity of others means giving less credence to my own assumptions. Life is complicated, and people have all sorts of reasons which drive their behavior. Assuming an automatic cause and effect between something you did and the way someone acted can be misleading.
   
   I have a short anecdote about this. The other day someone I was hanging out with asked me what my attachment style is. Despite my shame, I tried to be honest for the sake of transparency and admitted that I was the worst kind, which is anxious avoidant. I kept thinking about it though, and upon reflection I actually do not think that is true. For a while I’ve thought of myself that way, but my friends have pointed out that this behavior only manifests in really specific situations. I realized that when I’m in a stable relationship (or friendship dynamic) I actually have a pretty secure attachment style (though I suppose sometimes I lean avoidant with conflict). Some situations just confused the hell out of me and made me really anxious. I dont want to define myself by that and assume it’s normal—going forward I want to keep in mind that if I’m becoming super anxious, that’s not “just how I am” but that something is bringing that out of me. And maybe I need to stop and reflect on the situation. Maybe it’s not a situation worth maintaining, or maybe a straightforward communication needs to happen, or maybe there are other factors at play and sometimes people just need some space to figure their own shit out. It doesn’t need to be a matter of fault.
   
   I know that entire paragraph might seem like me patting myself on the back, but I think a frequent mistake I make is not recognizing that I am sporting a host of fashionable maladaptations from my family dynamics which make it hard for me to recognize weird situations. I would like to fixate less on blame and more on solutions going forward. Rather than someone being in the wrong, perhaps a situation is just not good. The solution is to figure out how to handle the situation, not to assign blame. Cool! Yet another win. And I’m doing all of this without therapy. Go figure.

Actually, the thing about therapy that sucks is that I really want it but haven’t been able to get it. For insurance reasons (and some other tricky family stuff), it’s been really challenging to make it work. But I look forward to some day in the future that I find a therapist, and can finally win at therapy, which is surely something that a person can and should do. Is having never been in therapy a red flag? Is it over for me?

I think this substack has been a really fun journey for me, because I’ve always been told I should journal (the poor man’s therapy) and I’m absolutely terrible at it (no habit forming braincells). Somehow I’ve been able to be pretty consistent with this since starting it, though, so I’m excited to keep branching out into different types of posts. I think it helps me understand myself better, too, or at least keeping a kind of fossil record of my thoughts is fun.

So…

On family and friends

I was talking with my lovely friend Imogen recently, who is a great listener. I ended up sharing a lot about my family dynamics. Things are pretty hard with them right now (as they always have been) and the situation is unnecessarily complicated (as it always has been). My family drama is somewhat baroque in that way. After talking for a while, she told me that she understands why I care about my friendships so much. I’m not sure why that meant so much to me, but I felt so understood in that moment that I got kind of emotional.

The tough thing about family stuff is that you grew up with them, so their impact on the mentals is unfairly intense. Recognizing your various traumas and baggages is upsetting for a lot of reasons, but recently Scott and I were connecting about how our greatest frustration and regret is the way that our experiences have left us worse off than we could have been. Less able to be a good friend, a happy person, a healthy companion. So I think what is the most scary to me about my family dynamics is not the pain they cause, or energy they drain, or the practical difficulties they cause; every time I sink back into these same dynamics, I worry that I’m undoing all these years of hard work: of connecting with people who are good to me, of learning to believe in myself, of trying to adopt good behaviors and healthy mindsets. I see myself unspooling and it’s terrifying.
On the flipside, the community I have built outside of family has given me the chance to create beautiful experiences, good memories, and healthy relationships based on care, trust, and honesty. So yes, I value my friendships very much. Thank you for being such a huge part of the good that I get to see in the world.

In case she ever sees this, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my little sister Dina. She has never done anything wrong in her life, and is perfect. Love you baby sis.

She is so cute even though she texts me like this:

Anyways, I love having a 15 year old sibling.

About caring

I try to always have an extra pack of toothbrushes in the house, in case someone stays over. The other night I offered someone a toothbrush, and they said they felt bad because they hadnt been as prepared for me when i crashed at theirs the night before. But having spare toothbrushes and blankets is just a way I show my love. Sometimes I wonder if the good things about me (or the things i like about me) are the same things that make others uncertain of how to deal with me.
Angie asked me if I like me and the answer is yes! But I know that doesn’t guarantee someone else will. Maybe it’s all just not that deep though. There are a lot of reasons for someone’s behavior that aren’t necessarily a direct consequence of how I am.

About my trash

I have a huge pile of cardboard in the corner of my room (executive dysfunction) that is growing into a more and more precarious (and impressive, and unsightly) structure every day. At night sometimes gravity finally gets the better of some piece of cardboard and a sloooow collapse occurs. It is so freaky to hear the corner of your room rustling at 2am because I sleep right next to the window. So I used to think a rat had gotten into my room every time this happened but now I know it’s just the cardboard. I know it’s just the cardboard but when this happened again last night I turned on my flashlight AND my reading lamp to check. And it turned out it was actually my laundry basket slowly collapsing onto…a piece of cardboard. Anyways, I really need to clean up that cardboard. I need someone to make me clean up that cardboard. This is a cry for help?

About social media

I hate being on social media all the fucking time. I hate looking at my phone to check the news. I was always a pretty online kid, and I’ve actually had a phone since I was really young. My parents divorced when I was 2 yrs old, and they lived pretty close to each other, so my schedule was like this: Sunday-Mom, Monday-Mom, Tuesday-Dad, Wednesday-Mom, Thursday-Dad, Friday-Dad, Saturday-Dad in the morning for schul, mom afterwards.
I didn’t have to coordinate as much once I could drive myself, but even over the years if I didnt respond to my mom within minutes sometimes she would flip and start coming to some really bad conclusions. So I guess I’m used to checking my phone pretty frequently, which suuuuuuucks.

On fatigue

On the subject of fatigue to be real for a moment it’s like

it’s not like I enjoy exhausting myself like this—

theres a bunch of stuff I’d rather do than spend hours running around the streets yelling (even though that can be fun, and I love and appreciate my community, and find it energizing to show up together for a cause) or scrolling through news and disturbing images and footage of a genocide. Every day I see stuff that’s just too horrible to process fully and I want to look away and then I chastise myself (what right do I have) but I still dont have the strength to fully confront this as it is happening. I’ve felt bad that I can’t even talk about Aaron Bushnell; he reminds me so much of my brother. So, my alternative is to share what I can (how do I know what people need to see?) and be involved as much as I can and focus on anything I can do that will actually maybe help at all. But I’m going to be honest, just here, just for you, to say I fucking hate being on social media all the time. And I feel bad I missed so many protests because I was sick or tired or didn’t want to skip class. And I keep getting sick all the time even though I always wash my hands. Aughh!!!

This situation in Gaza is heartbreaking and horrifying. The point of saying this is not to emphasize how much the genocide in Gaza has affected me, but to suggest that no one could or should be able to handle this well, or normally, or without being emotionally impacted. It’s just that despite how hard it is we have to keep trying, keep having empathy for one another, keep loving, and keep fighting. It’s so hard but we have to stay paying attention.

On rest

But also I just want to rest my head on something soft and hug something for a long time. You know, the only thing I miss about having longer hair is that people could braid it more easily. and also that it looked cool.

On mitski

I saw Mitski in concert last Monday (got the date wrong on my last substack, oops). I love her. I was so excited to see her that I was smiling even through Last Words of a Shooting Star (kind of socio, right?) I have been thinking about her song Real Men a lot. My general read of the song is that it’s about how mitski (and maybe women) can do a better job of embodying the idealized traits of toxic masculinity than men (or boys) even do. And how to be a boy is a completely different thing, and how boyishness is willful and immature and incredibly alluring.

Anyways, that song really hits me somewhere deep. something about my gender…something about my toxic masculinity…something about how I am always trying to be strong and I don’t even do a good job of it. I cant even commit to fully running away, fully shoving things down, or being completely open and soft. i’m in an in between state where i want to be perfectly safe and also perfectly happy. What the hell does it mean that to be happy you have to let yourself get hurt? Sometimes I think about how if I was more committed to literally running away from my problems I would at least be getting more mileage in. For better or for worse, I think the reason I struggle with consistency with running is because I genuinely love working out. I do it for fun! Maybe I’m actually quite happy with the way I am. There’s some good stuff in there!

Some lighter tidbits!

On art

I love art and I’m so glad I’m doing it even though I’m not always exactly sure why I do any of the stuff that I do (what am I doing??) but when I think too much about purpose (in a cosmic sense) and stuff it gets weird in my head sooooo nope. My thesis show is coming up so there’s no time for existential insecurity. Only paint now!!!

Breakfast

I’m out of greek yogurt so I put soft tofu in my smoothie this morning (part of my campaign to get more fresh fruits & veggies cuz I’m kind of bad at taking care of myself but NOT anymore in 2024 baby!!!) it’s pretty good actually I’m kind of vibing with this. also it’s sooo asian diaspora coded of me.

Sinkhole

I guess I was washing my hands too vigorously this morning because I accidentally fingered that little hole in the bathroom sinks and then I was like woopss and now I feel a little bashful when I use that bathroom because we didn’t really talk about what happened so…

Anyways. Nuff said…

Fish content dump:

So for most of these I just searched “fish” in my photos and I got some fun stuff.

We all know how salmon work right?

My friend Sasha sent me this insane photo of the aftermath of a Salmon spawn the other day. THIS is what happens if you have sex, guys:

Meme corner

And finally, my pièce de résistance (thank you Jamie for sending in the discord chat):

Happy Monday, have a great week, and know that I am always here to talk, listen, and enjoy some quality time together. Stay healthy and try to make some time for yourself. I can’t wait to see how Spring looks on all of you.

See you all next week, after I get back from Miami! Peace and love <3