Stuff That Tickles Your Brain
Warpaint is a band from Los Angeles. The first time I saw them play was at FADER party at a bar on N 9th and Roebling called K&M that was originally a pierogi factory. I think it’s a sports bar now because everything in the neighborhood once belonged to Polish people and then artists and now bros. I say this not to be salty about hipster Brooklyn, something I stopped being once I no longer had living family members who’d grown up in Williamsburg. I used to feel I had some spiritual allowance to the neighborhood, as if my bubbe who grew up in the Maujer Street projects but died when I was six months old somehow absolved me from any contributions to gentrification I may have made.
When Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she also meant we bullshit ourselves so we don’t perish from the thought of our own shortcomings, to bandage the wounds we’ve endured and inflicted. We tell ourselves stories so the experience of others makes sense with our personal preferences about history.
I was supposed to be talking about Warpaint, not demonstrating my extraordinary aptitude for free association but this is kind of what I’m talking about. Warpaint was on my mind because they cite Kendrick Lamar and OutKast as musical inspirations. I’ve been looking at how to make connections and understand historical contexts since I was, like, nine. Long before anyone paid me to do it. I’m embarrassed, but still will admit, now that I tried really hard to parse actual evidence of these rapper influences in this rock music years ago. It’s not there. Not tangibly. Not obviously. But I don’t know how inspiration manifests in the creative choices of these women or anyone else for that matter. And what good is inspiration if it’s rigid, not porous?
Recently I’ve found myself and my work triangulated with something that doesn’t necessarily fit. My boyfriend and I started watching The X-Files, a revisit for him, a brand new experience for me. Early in our viewing, I started to notice something. An image would poke at my brain and send it down a chute until an image or an idea that I needed badly presented itself to me. What I’m working on is not about aliens or monsters or the government or anything like what happens on The X-Files. The show’s ambience, with its digressive soundtrack—action film score and New Age terror and dramatic, emotional strings all in one episode—just brings alive my creative brain.
In embracing this, I’ve come to understand that, of course, OutKast and Kendrick can tickle Warpaint’s collective consciousness. Of course OutKast and Kendrick can be sources of inspiration anywhere, just take Kiese Laymon’s essay about his grandmother, “Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel)” (Oxford American) from 2015, or Marcus J. Moore’s upcoming cultural biography of Kendrick, The Butterfly Effect. Pop culture tells us things about ourselves, it can be a lens through which we think about our collective and individual experiences. It doesn’t always have to be a mirror that reflects ourselves back to us. It’s often better when it’s not.
My current work is a palimpsest of an adolescence watching Gregg Araki movies and a hunger to create my own grammar. When someone like Garth Greenwell talks about exploding hypotaxis and parataxis, I go full geek-out, freak-out. I’m a terrible cartographer, though, and no matter how hard I try to copy someone, my fingers are always going to navigate the keyboard, the pen, back to my station.
But one of the benefits of finding inspiration and influence in things that hardly reflect your own delivery is that, once you get over your inability to duplicate, you’ve parsed out how to let something you love guide you. Guide is the key word. You are doing the hard, messy, desperate-making parts. Make it yours.
Do you have any surprising influences? Have you heard stories about people with strange inspiration? Please, tell me all about it.
And now for some business. This is the last time you’ll get this newsletter from the name Difficult Fun. The name is not sticking for me. I also totally underestimated how much I’d want to write about what I’m reading alongside what I’m writing. While I am admittedly a slow reader, Difficult Fun does not seem like an appropriate name. So from here on out, this newsletter is called *prepares for eye rolls* Read You, Wrote You, which is, yes, a reference to RuPaul’s Drag Race, because I was raised by magazines and every title must be a pop culture reference. It also feels more much representative of what it is I’m actually trying to stuff into this little thing.