A Map of My Affinities
How a youthful summer habit set me up for a lifetime.
In the late 1990s, I watched a lot of movies on TV. We had an extensive package from DirecTV so that my dad could watch football games. His interest in American football, a sport that I couldn’t care less about, had the strange effect of enlivening my cultural education because it came with M2 (MTV’s indie cousin), Sundance Channel, IFC, and every variety of HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.
The last summers before I’d never have a free summer again (I started working during them at 15) were spent with insomnia—the clear result of not having my days taken up by schoolwork, even if I spent them in anxiety over my violin skills deteriorating (this wouldn’t inspire me to practice)—and during the insomniac nights, I’d watch movies uninterrupted by anyone else. I’d watch movies in peace. Party Girl was an early favorite, as well as Le journal du séducteur. When Parker Posey of the former and Melvil Poupaud of the latter were both in the movie Broken English in 2007, it felt like my tween fan fiction had come to life.
Life was like that—or, rather, taste was like that. Another movie I watched repeatedly was Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright, Benicio del Toro, Posey, and David Bowie, directed by the artist Julian Schnabel. Its depiction of Jean-Michel Basquiat is rightfully contentious (bell hooks, whose 1993 essay “Altars of Sacrifice, Re-membering Basquiat” I return to often, wrote a scathing critique, as I recall but cannot find online), but I was a kid, and the movie depicted a world I wanted to know. It’s the movie I know by heart (it and The Birdcage), and I was most taken by Michael Wincott’s portrayal of the poet, artist, and critic Rene Ricard: a writer is like this, ok. I read Ricard, know of him, because of this movie, though I have faith he would’ve found his way into my orbit otherwise.
There’s a reason that I read essays on Basquiat to remember how to write; there’s a reason I judge a critic by how they write about him.
In 2001 or thereabouts, I saw a video on M2 for a song called “Going Inside,” but I couldn’t remember the artist’s last name, which I remembered started with F and was long—this was early days of this more robust internet we now know and loathe, but I scrolled through some site on the family computer for what felt like ages to find the name. I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. Frusciante—John Frusciante. I got more information and found out he was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band I’d hated since I was a kid—something about Kiedis’s west coast masculinity repulsed me when “Under the Bridge” was a hit. (I would’ve been very small then, but my dad would’ve been 29: MTV was on the TV a lot.)
But this guy, Frusciante, I loved this song “Going Inside” and I loved the weird video. The director was Vincent Gallo, I realized on the next viewing, whose movie Buffalo ’66 was among my favorite insomnia watches. Later I’d find out Gallo was in a band, Gray, with the actual Basquiat and had a cameo in the movie.
Information didn’t flow as fast then. This was how connections were forged: over years, over mediums, through begging my mom for trips to Borders, through the spending of every dollar earned on magazines and CDs. I became deeply obsessed with and enamored of Frusciante (there was a shrine on my bedroom wall), to the point that I started to dig into the Chili Peppers oeuvre and find things to love (we can talk about this over a beer, but not in the comments). I found out Frusciante was dating Stella Schnabel, daughter of Julian, and he took the photos for the album By the Way.
In college, in 2004, Frusciante released a slew of albums; the most commercial among them was Shadows Collide With People—Ricard had painted the cover. In college, in 2005, in Spanish class, we read Reinaldo Arenas’ short story “Con ojos cerrados” and I have the same feeling as when I saw the “Going Inside” video—I need more, desperately. I find out Schnabel’s second movie was called Before Night Falls, a biopic of Arenas starring Javier Bardem.
Anyway, this isn’t an ode to Schnabel, though I have to admit that I kinda don’t know what my brain would be like had I not watched that movie on repeat at the most formative time in my young life. It is the origin point of my affinities, the things I love immediately without knowing why, the things my soul responds to before my brain is even registering a happening. “I guess I felt like the animal part of the writer is the most important part,” says Eileen Myles in this new interview in The Believer. (Basquiat opened up a world of men, but I think it also made me the person who’d love Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and Myles, who in turn opened up more worlds for me.)
I felt this way about The Metamorphosis by Kafka, like so many writers do—a soul being seen, finally, but the guy died nearly a hundred years ago, and how isn’t this magic? I felt it when I listened to Jeff Buckley’s Grace for the first time, when I listened to Gustavo Cerati’s Bocanada, when I watched Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, when I read Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon—the sense that they knew me already, that I knew them, that thank God someone else was seeing and feeling the same things. In food, I felt it when I found Lagusta’s Yearwood blog, Resistance Is Fertile, in the early 2010s: Here was the answer to questions I didn’t know I was asking.
And I don’t tire of it; I don’t tire at all, not one bit, of the feeling of excitement bubbling up in me with a new affinity for new works that spark new connections, new roads. My brain holds the map of my affinities, but I never know where it will take me.
I was inspired to write this essay by listening to Brian Dillon, author of Affinities: On Art and Fascination, which I loved, on the Fitzcarraldo podcast. Past essays of mine that that it’s in a lineage with: “On Thinking” (2021) and “On Gleaning” (2022).
There’s one more Monday in July, and I’ll send out the Desk Digest with the publication plan for August, when I’ll be off to finish the first draft of my next book. Today, the weekly paid subscriber salon will take place at 3 p.m. EST.
Last week, I announced The Desk Book Club picks for 2025. The bookstore partner for the year is Bold Fork Books in Washington, D.C.
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Writing this essay reminded me of the retrospective of Argentine artist Flavia Da Rin that I was able to see at the Museo Moderno when I was in Buenos Aires in 2019. She re-created her teenage bedroom to close the exhibit, including the large desktop on a desk pictured above—an ode to the teenage girls who were the sparks of our adult creative selves. I wrote about the exhbit back then for Nylon, if you’d like to read it. (I find it difficult to read many of my old pieces!) I felt an immediate affinity with her work!
News
If you’re free TOMORROW, Tuesday, July 23, and would like to come hang out with me and Jerusha Klemper of FoodPrint at Archestratus bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—please do! There are $5 tickets.
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.
Reading
Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet edited by Ruth Reichl
I breathed a sigh of relief at the end of this article knowing that someone else's brain also works like this. My medium is food; my mom's ubiquitous desserts, the book I read in second grade about a Japanese and American couple who shared their food traditions with one another, Martha Stewart on Sunday mornings, my first dinner party, the dobosh torte I attempted to make when I was 12 because other other cakes were too easy... the list goes on.
And I too worry that these brain imprints don't happen as frequently or as deeply in the current generation because of the speed and quantity of their digital interactions but I try to do my part. I recently had a taste-test with my 10 year old niece of four bags of chips we got from the Japanese mart. The labels were in Japanese so we just tasted them and guessed the flavor, and as the last step we used google translate to read the bags and see if we guessed any correctly. Highly recommend ;0)
I’ve been thinking about the moments a lot, especially when we think we know what made us and then a song or album is played and it turns out it’s imprinted on our DNA.