#dick is a film about the power of love weed and teenage girls

[epickegster]

thank you to the lovely @brunch-at-jerrys for tagging me in this!!!

1. Who are you named after? 

jacinta marto! she’s a portuguese visionary who. um saw visions of the virgin mary about a hundred years ago and my family is Very Catholic. my parents wanted something that sounded like my viet name and decided that jacinta > jessica sometime along the way and thus began the great name saga

2. Last time you cried? 

friday night while reading fic sdjgkfhdgkdj but i almost cried yesterday during hawayek/baker’s fd bc i was There and I just. i love them also almost cried out of frustration bc they were out of 150 ml titanium white oil paint in the store and i was like....Frustrated lololol

3. Do you like your handwriting? 

it changes a lot but typically i do?? when i write my name it’s cool bc it’s an interesting combo of mostly all caps with a few lowercase sprinkled in 

4. What is your favorite lunch meat? 

bologna, like straight up the stuff that’s cheap, round, and deep pink??? ugh

5. Do you have kids?

no

6. Do you use sarcasm? 

hm

7. Do you still have your tonsils? 

ye

8. Would you bungee jump? 

yes

9. What is your favorite kind of cereal? 

corn pops!!!! that or like kashi with chocolate hdfjkghd i don’t really eat cereal and i never had it with milk but corn pops straight up outta the bag are so gd delicious

10. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off?

typically not? i just kinda shove em off or die trying

11. Do you think you’re strong?

lol no, like physically, mentally, emotionally? not at all

12. What is your favorite ice cream?

(this sounds so gd bougie) mediterranean sea salt caramel gelato from paciugo along with their wedding cake and espresso, like all together? in one cup? My Death, but like i like good ol chocolate

13. What is the first thing you notice about someone?

eyes/eyebrows, that or their height relative to me if i’m walking (which is funny bc i dont Get Height so like, im basically saying i’m a normal height!! when im walking esp in front of the b school lol)

14. Football or baseball? 

beisbol

15. Your favorite sorting metrics?

uh, probably dnd dgjkdhgfdk

16. What color pants are you wearing? 

grey; they’re marled grey joggers 

17. Favorite smell? 

cheating bc i have two: green eagle oil and this musky baby perfume that my ba ngoai had a tiny roller ball of when i was a kid and i smelled like it all the time as a kid

18. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone? 

my mom

19. Favorite sport to watch on tv? 

figure skating! (it’s my fave in general! but i worked for us nationals the past few weeks with event organization and got to see it live and i almost cried a lot during ice dance bc hawayek/baker....my kids jhsgfkdgh...look the shibs I Love Them and Would Bury Myself In The Tundra For Them but like. I want to see h/b on the podium :’oc) 

20. Hair color?

black-brown, it’s like black if you look at it, but it’s dark brown 

21. Eye color? 

brown

22. Favorite food to eat? 

ok i gotta split this into savory and sweet: savory is banh bot loc which is viet food and it’s like a clear tapioca dumpling with, and my fam makes it with shrimp and pork, wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf. ugh i have some in my fridge and boyyyyy and sweet is espresso/rum cake with like. this certain consistency that’s like almost frozen idk how to describe it, it tastes like better tiramisu basically, but my auntie’s friend used to make it real well as a hobby but then she moved off to start her own bakery in cali rip but a place here makes it decent but so $$$

23. Scary or funny movies?

my favorite movie is called dick 

24. Last movie you watched? 

i think it was rodeo and juliet actually dsjkhfkjghd i thought she wanted to fuck the horse for like half the movie and juliet should’ve ended up with nan instead of uggo boy

25. What color shirt are you wearing? 

grey bc im living groutfit life

26. Favorite holiday? 

not a big holiday person, actually??? like my family celebrates so many...but i just. don’t?? i guess i like easter idk?? i like spring!! but my fam is realllll big on christmas like my dad goes ham on decor and we have six nondenominational winter ducks on our lawn they’re my beautiful boys and people call our house the duck house and it sounds like my dad’s name so he finds it funny djfghdfkgjdh but idk i like it when people are happy in general

27. Wine or beer? 

canadian ice wine

tagging: @pennslayvania / @anneshakespeare / @zimmermanns my go-tos and anyone else!! bls...

#dick is my favorite movie and so is whisper of the heart gjfhdgjshgf #anyway THANK YOU FOR THE TAG!!!! #dick is a film about the power of love weed and teenage girls #i used to have it pretty much memorized

[oneweekoneband]

I’m slightly nauseous already with knowing I’m going to say this, but what does “self-awareness”  even mean? In modern parlance, as a descriptive phrase, as a comment on art? I’m asking in earnest, like, I’ve been Googling lately, which for me is basically on par with doctoral study in terms of academic rigor. The self is king, anyway, tyrant, so where is the line of distinction between material that intentionally is nodding at some truth about the artist’s life and what’s just, like, all the rest of the regular navel-gazing bullshit. I mean, I’m all self, I am guilty here. I can’t get it out of my poems or even make it more quiet. This is the tenth time I’ve invoked “I” in the space of six sentences. Processing art has always necessitated a certain amount of grappling with the creator, but the busywork of it lately grows more and more tedious. Joy drains out of my body parsing marks left behind not just in stylistic tendencies and themes, but in literal, intentional tags like graffiti on a water tower. This feels an age old and moth-holed complaint, dull, and I am no historian, or really a serious thinker of any kind. I’ve now complained at some length about self-referential art, but didn’t I love how Martin Scorsese nodded to the famous Goodfellas Copacabana tracking shot with the opening frames of last year’s The Irishman? Didn’t I find that terribly fun and sort of sweet? So there’s distinctions. I’m only saying I don’t know with certainty what they even are. I’m unreliable, and someone smarter than me has likely already solved my quandary about why self-knowledge often transforms into overly precious self-reflexivity in such a way that the knowledge is diminished and obscured, leaving only cutesy Easter eggs behind. Postmodernism has birthed a moralizing culture where art exists to be termed either “self-aware Good” or “self-aware Bad”.  Self-referentiality in media is so commonplace, so much the standard, that what was once credited as metatextual inventiveness often feels lazy now. In 1996, Scream was revitalizing a genre. Today, two thirds of all horror movies spend half their running time making sure that you know that they know they’re a horror movie, which is fine, I guess, except sometimes you just wanna watch someone get butchered with an axe in peace. 

This is all to say that in 2020 Taylor Swift looked long and hard upon her image in the reflecting pool of her heart and has written yet another song about Gone Girl.

“mirrorball” is a very good piece of Gone Girl —feels insane to tell anyone reading a post on a blog what Gone Girl is but, you know, the extremely popular 2012 novel about a woman who pretends to have been murdered and frames her husband for it, and subsequently the 2014 film adaption where you kinda see Ben Affleck’s dick for a second—fanfiction. It would be a fine song, a good song, really, even if it weren’t that, if it were just something normal and not unhinged written by a chill person who behaves in a regular way, but we need to acknowledge the facts for what they are. When Taylor Swift watched Rosamund Pike toss her freshly self-bobbed hair out of her face and hiss, “You think you’d be happy with some nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby. I’m it!” her brain lit up like a Christmas tree, and she’s never been the same. If you Google “taylor swift gone girl” there waiting for you will be a medium sized lake’s worth of articles speculating about how Gone Girl influenced and is referenced in past Swift singles “Blank Space” and “Look What You Made Me Do”. This is not new behavior, and if anything it’s getting a bit troubling to think that it’s been this long since Taylor’s read another book. Still, while the prior offerings were a fair attempt at this particular feat of depravity, “mirrorball” has brought Taylor’s Amy Elliott Dunne deification to stunning new heights. And most importantly, Taylor has done a service to every person alive with more than six brain cells and a Internet connection by putting an end to the “Cool Girl” discourse once and for all. By the power invested in “mirrorball”, it is hereby decreed that the Cool Girl speech from Gone Girl is neither feminist or antifeminist, not ironic nor aspirational. No. It’s something much better than all that. It’s a threat. I ! Can ! Change ! Everything ! About ! Me ! To ! Fit ! In !

Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn

“mirrorball” (2020) by Taylor Swift

When the twinkly musical stylings of Jack Antonoff, a man I distinctly distrust, but for no one specific reason, whirl to life at the beginning of this song I feel instantly entranced, blurry-brained and pleasure-pickled like an infant beneath a light-up crib mobile or, I guess, myself in the old times, the outside times, three tequila sodas deep under the disco lights at The Short Stop. Under a mirrorball in my head. I know very little about music, as a craft, and I really don’t care to know more. I’m happy in a world of pure, dumb sensation. I’m not even sure what kind of instruments are making these jangly little sounds. I just like it. I am vibing. We may not ever be able to behave badly in a club again, but I can sway to my stupid Taylor Swift-and-the-brother-of-the-lady-who-makes-like-those-sweatshirts-with-little-sayings-or-like-vulvas-which-famous-white-women-wear-on-instagram-you-know-what-I-mean song, pressing up onto my tiptoes on the linoleum tile of our kitchen floor and can feel for a second or two something approaching bliss. “mirrorball” is a lush sound bath that I like a lot and then also it’s about being all things to all people, chameleoning at a second’s notice, doing Oscar worthy work on every Zoom call, performing the you who is good, performing the you who is funny, performing the you who draws a liter of your own blood and throws it around the kitchen then cleans it up badly all to get your husband sent to jail for sleeping with a college student... Too much talk about making and unmaking of the self is way too, like, 2012 Tumblr for me now, and I start hearing the word “praxis” ring threateningly in my head, but I’m not yet so evolved that I don’t feel a pull. Musings on the disorganized self—on how we are new all the time, and not just because of all the fresh skin coming up under the dead, personhood in the end so frighteningly flexible—are always going to compel me, I’m afraid, but that goes double for musings on the disorganized self which posit that Taylor Swift still thinks Amy Dunne made some points.

Because on “mirrorball” Taylor is for once not hamfistedly addressing some “hater”, in the quiet and the lack of embarrassing martyrdom it actually offers an interesting answer to the complaint that Taylor is insufficiently self-aware. This criticism emerges often in tandem with claiming to have discovered some crack in the chassis of Swift’s public self, revealing the sweetness to be insincere. My instinct is to dismiss this more or less out of hand as just a mutation of the school of thought that presumes all work by women must be autobiography. And, regardless, it is made altogether laughable by the fact that anyone actually paying attention has known since at least Speak Now, a delightful record populated by the most appalling, horrible characters imaginable, and all of them written by a twenty year old Taylor Swift, that this woman is a pure weirdo. To accuse Taylor Swift of lacking in self-awareness is a reductive misunderstanding, I think, of artifice. Being a fake bitch takes work. Which is to say, if we agree that her public self is a calculated performance—eliding the fact that all public selves are a performance to avoid getting too in the weeds yadda yadda— why, then, should it be presumed that performance is rooted in ignorance? Would it not make more sense that, in fact, someone able to contort themselves so ably into various shapes for public consumption would have a certain understanding of the basic materials they’re working with and concealing? Taylor Swift, in a decade and a half of fame, has presented herself from inside a number of distinct packages. The gangly teenager draped in long curls like climbing wisteria who wrote lyrics down her arms in glitter paint gave way to red lipstick, a Diet Coke campaign, and bad dancing at awards shows. There was the period where she was surrounded constantly by a gaggle of models, then suddenly wasn’t anymore, and that rough interlude with the bleached hair. The whole Polaroid thing. Last year she boldly revealed she’s a democrat. Now it’s the end of the world and she’s got frizzy bangs and flannels and muted little piano songs. Perhaps this endless shape-shifting contradicts or undermines, for some, the pose of tender authenticity which has remained static through each phase, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been doing it all on purpose the entire time. I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try...

In the Disney+ documentary—which, in order to watch, I had to grudgingly give the vile mouse seven dollars, because the login information that I’d begged off of my little sister didn’t work and I was too embarrassed to bring it up a second time—Taylor referred to “mirrorball” as the first time on the album where she explicitly addressed the pandemic, referring to the lyrics that start, “And they called off the circus, Burned the disco down,” and end with “I’m still on that tightrope, I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me,” which actually did made me laugh, feeling sort of warmly foolish and a little fond, because it never would have occurred to me that she was trying to be literal there. I suppose we really do all contain multitudes. Hate that.

#taylor swift #folklore