meditation on: the it-girl
We’re all familiar with the exercise where you write the note and don’t send it? Well, I didn’t, okay—I didn’t send the note. I just threatened to in my sibling group chat, and then posted it on my Instagram story, after being cautioned that people like the intended subject don’t retain feedback, don’t ingest anything other than colostrum powder and spirulina water. They can’t, with their head so far up their ass. It is, pretty tragically, the end of a specific career moment for me, that email, and this post, and that Instagram story, because with that bubble burst, a thousand cold needles rushed into the neck of any it-girl adjacent that’s seen it. In the hive, the bees whisper their disdain (I think that’s Virgil).
From my brief understanding of influencer society, you aren’t supposed to speak about, or leak anything from within, influencer culture to the general public (the first rule about Fight Club blah blah blah)—we are only supposed to warn each other of the it-girl world in shared whispers at Casetta, our Tabis tucked under our ass as we lean toward each other in our gifted sweaters, talk shit about our freelance gigs, and plot how it is we might not pay for this $118 bottle of Austrian white.
Conflict-unavoidant as I am (do you know I’ve just looked up the opposite of what conflict-avoidant is and we actually have no term for it but “volatile”) I feel the need to speak about Fight Club, with the hope that individuals in taut and manipulative media or freelance situations feel empowered to leave or speak about or reflect on their contorted situations with it-girls, the spirit guides of Dimes Square.
In mid-October, I was fired for the first time. Fired is a strong word, really, for what the conversation was, which was a sort of brutally whispered and faux-sympathetic exchange over the phone from the editor-in-chief who told me it seemed like I “couldn’t handle” the position. I spoke kindly and measuredly, and thought back to just a week ago when I confessed to my sister I really ought to quit working for this magazine, or more specifically, for the woman who ran it.
The situation was not a rare one, and actually this arrangement likely runs many of the magazines and projects you love and follow on the internet. Someone with a great deal of money, a medium amount of charisma, and a touted sense of self-importance, set out to create content. They used their industry contacts to build its profile. They reached out to a small number of influencers to initiate its content creation and improve its reach. With a few thousand followers under their belt, they set out to assemble a team of underpaid, overworked schmucks with artistic sensibilities and a spare portfolio. You are one of these—a writer looking for a place to write. They offer you far below minimum wage to create content they will ultimately write off as their own, and intentionally underemphasize the time commitment, so that it might seem feasible that you work “8-10 hours/week” for $300. They call this a “passion project.”
Let me explain something very clearly: this phrase will be the greatest red flag of your entire, bloody, freelance career. The language of passion projects is exploitative, condescending, and an excuse to underpay staff.
The time commitment quickly grows beyond its promised boundaries and its pay-grade, the communication breaks down, the Slacks and emails begin to run double, then triple, the tone shifts from requests and gratefulness to demands, and they start to ping later and later into the evenings, then into the weekend. The timelines are arbitrary and set in place as a way to control your schedule and make you feel diminished in your ability and skill. But wait! An unexpected email where she communicates her gratitude for your efficiency. Ping. When immediately afterwards, you are again feeling punished for your inability to convince small independent brands to contribute $3500 to be featured in the magazine’s holiday guide, and she expresses her disappointment—“our last partnerships lead was able to do it”—you set and reiterate your boundaries: that this is a $300/month position, that you work a full-time job, that you have been accruing freebies for her in the meanwhile. Might it be that the price tag is too high? You are met with language of being “unfit for the position.” It occurs to you that all your work serves, actually, ultimately, to advance the personal brand of this person. It has, in the end, very little to do with the mission of the magazine, which, unfortunately for you, you very much like.
Suddenly, she recommends you to a New York Magazine editor who interviews you briefly over the phone, and asks that you write up 15 examples of items that they might include in their annual holiday guide. You stress over this for days, spend far too long on it. You send it a day before the deadline. You never hear from the editor again, even after three, desperate follow-up emails.
The chokehold she has on you, and the reason you continue to break your own boundaries, is really that this is an established media person, someone who is beloved by designers and editors, who see her speaking softly and carrying an Aesther Emke; interviewing underrepresented women alongside New York Times bestselling chefs; who has a distinct capability to tell Vox Media and Conde Nast you’re “unfit for the position.” She could say anything she wants to about you, actually. She is very aware of this. Ping.
A date for the magazine’s annual, celebratory dinner is set, the partnerships are locked in. None of the staff is invited. Influencers post their place cards, captioned by their amazement at the “brave work” of the editor-in-chief. By this time, though, I’m long gone. I sent her an email weeks ago that I’d like to “end my position ahead of our anticipated date,” that “I have felt our communication since our conversation Friday has deteriorated considerably, and it's best we cut the ties a bit earlier than expected.” She responds, “That's no issue with me as long as the work is completed by then, that's all that's been asked here, haven't asked anything beyond the role.”
After I post the exit note on my Instagram story, detailing more or less what I’ve said here, several recent staff of the magazine reach out with gratefulness that I’d shared the experience—they’d had the same, they said, and felt imprisoned by the dynamics of needing her as an industry contact despite her continuous mistreatment. Their time and talent was also disrespected, they said, they also felt bullied and belittled.
My brush with influencer culture recalled to me a pattern I’d only really begun to put together, the adolescent realization that I’ve sat glumly and distrustfully adjacent to most every institution or cultural cluster in my life. I was overtly disdainful of (and then retributionally accountable for) my required attendance in high school, waitlisted at my college, was certainly no favorite of my undergraduate English department (save for those few who found it sort of entertaining to have such an emotive mole sulking in the dark tunnels of their building), slut-shamed out of a sorority for falling in love with someone’s open-relationship boyfriend, and otherwise have been continuously sidelined in displays of exclusivity and pedigree under the pantomime of “leadership,” never quite so culturally complicit as to earn invitation to things like membership in the “ribbon societies” (really what it’s called) of my alma mater. That personal history feels so relevant here, too, as I dipped my toes into our world’s newest and most prestigious circle—“content,” influencer idols, the earthly currency of likes—and found myself, again, unfit.
review of: sacred drumming
I’ve been engaging with so many strange things recently I found it hard to choose what to review here: the absurd “multimedia” event at Carnegie Hall featuring self-inflicted “bold musical storytelling” about “The Great War,” which was unmemorable except for its completely liturgical interlude for Cher Ami, the pigeon war hero of the Meuse-Argonne offensive? The Honky Tonk dance at Gottscheer Hall in Ridgewood where hundreds of completely well-adjusted Brooklyn hotties donned cowboy boots and a different personality for 3 hours in what I can only describe as a motel ballroom? A Horsegirl concert in a Presbyterian Church where not a single 19-year-old could figure out how or when to mosh? My searing opinion of Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, or befuddlement at the intention of Bottoms? No, I think, I’ll settle for the sacred drumming class I attended at a nearby Clinton Hill yoga studio, which is half-boutique, half-sunken warehouse. I’m two days out and still can’t correctly interpret how I feel about it.
The worst part of a class practice for me is always the beginning when I pass about 700 j/ms (that’s scientific for judgments per millisecond) as the rest of the class rolls out their alo mats and starts exhaling theatrically. In this instance, the instructor expressed gratitude to us for making our way to class, reminded us the hardest part is making it here, told us “this time found us.” Then she proceeded to introduce the drum—a single drum with an accompanying and very embellished stick with which I would later find she would thwack deer hide for 45 minutes while I had a chaotic and frightening interior journey. She told us this drum was “deer medicine” with little to no context for that statement except that the drum was made of deer hide. She talked about the origins of that which we were about to experience: Ra Illuminare Multidimensional healing.
Let me be clear that I think pretty much everything is true, that it actually takes a great deal for me not to believe something is spiritually significant. I trust pretty much everyone’s personal, spiritual journey and I think that’s likely informed by my sister being so fantastically the opposite way—perhaps I’m the way I am just to balance out her religiously uptight attitude. (Now we’ll know if she’s reading these or not.) Which is to say I’m very open to a drum being “deer medicine,” to the concept that I might in some way be healed by the vibrations of an animal hide. After a slightly sweaty vinyasa flow, we are invited to lay back on our Mexican blankets and “release” ourselves. She dims the lights, so the candles are the only thing illuminating the room. It has exactly the vibe of a Wednesday night Vespers service. Smoky, dim, empty atmosphere, an intentional and ritualistic feeling. The drum begins, a low tone and rhythmic booming, and I immediately feel afraid. I think of that scene in Lord of the Rings where they find that old dwarf’s journal in the Mines of Moria and Gandalf is reading the final words of the script, which are “drums…drums in the deep,” and then Pippin knocks an orc corpse into a poorly placed well and then suddenly I’m recalling everything I know from the Two Towers when our instructor interrupts my digression by singing “Ayyyyyyyyyyyy….o.”
My attention is drawn back suddenly into my awareness of my body, which is about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. I feel, for some reason, very threatened, and uneasy. Her singing continues in this same way, in minor tones so reminiscent of that same Vespers service, or any antiquated religious sound. That is: ambulating, and flat. I begin to feel a strong sensation of something breaking up inside me, like cracking ice, but in my mind it looks more like when you’re soaking an old homemade salad dressing in the sink and water is separating the cold oil into pieces. I feel the distinct breaking apart in my chest, not physically, but interiorly; I feel very aware that something has just separated. And by the time I reach the end of that feeling, and thinking about what the hell that could be, the drums have stopped. By then, I am completely flushed, effusively un-calm and perturbed by my own interior. The strangest thing about it is that my thumb, which I sliced open fairly deeply with a tomato paste can three days ago and hasn’t stopped bleeding or throbbing since, has stopped bleeding, and throbbing. I tell my siblings this and they are exhausted by it. I tell my dad this and he says, without sarcasm, “makes sense.”
Needless to say I’ll be at the next one, to further investigate my completely stilted inner self, which you can sign up for here, in case any of your thumbs (or selves) need somatic healing.
Live-action shoot of ragu blood bath
recommendations:
I’m recently completely infatuated with this band, Odezenne, whose song Au Baccara is rocking my fucking world. Very French Strokes. I’m assembling an accidentally extremely color-coordinated list of my other November favorites here.
Nepotism is in! My cousin Klea’s book Witness Mark is so extremely touching on top of being visually astounding. It’s published by a really wonderful independent publisher, Saint Lucy Books. This will be one of the only books on your coffee table you’ve actually read. Her exhibit is up at Penumbra Foundation through January 31st.
I went to Pupusas Ridgewood pre-Horsegirl concert (double rec) where I got a chicken mole pupusa I have not stopped thinking about. This past Sunday was National Pupusa Day (thank you, Nellie, for the update), and for those of you that didn’t celebrate, make it up to yourself.
In case you haven’t noticed, everyone but me is sober now, and I’ve been serving my little glowing, well-adjusted friends Aplos with a San Pellegrino or a fancy sparkling water and some ginger syrup and a lemon, or whatever their heart desires, and they’ve been lapping it up as if it were pure, hard alcohol—the kind that gets you to such a stale mental state you think sacred drumming healed your thumb.
Another recommendation is that you send me your best recipes for roasting a whole chicken, and any Irish movies you like.
this struck a chord, esp. considering at least twice in the last six months I lay awake wondering why i wasn't in a ribbon society, why I didn't (don't) make more of myself, why i am generally such a unambitious, non-comital worm! (soothing myself with the memory that, 363 days of the year, it doesn't matter to me in the least)
also if you ever visit asheville, I will take you to a sound-healing session that will gong your pre-conceived notions of self right into the atmosphere
ALSO "the secret of roane inish" and anything by irish animation studio "cartoon saloon," but WolfWalkers is particularly sweet if you want to tap into wholesome dad-daughter love (Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea are also lovely)
okay as usual LOVE! the influencer piece feels like a false god, mount olympus made out of paper-mache and you are the goo-gone making quick work of it. all this to say, it's a smart observation especially when thinking about the college reference. been thinking about it for a minute!!
in terms of irish movies, you KNOW i have thoughts!! obv "banshees of inisherin", "dancing at lughnasa" is a random meryl streep deep cut lol, "belfast" was fine, and there's always "brooklyn" LOL